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As regular readers of Toast (all 380,000 of you) may have noticed, there has been a serious lack of activity on here recently. In truth, I just haven’t been arsed to write anything, and can only offer a wholly worthless and insincere apology. I was pondering the merits of sneakily editing the dates of a couple of older articles, just to give the impression that it hadn’t turned into some kind of virtual wasteland. However, I decided instead to cure my writer’s block by writing regular reviews of television programmes, starting with Brendan O’Carroll’s new comedy pilot, Mrs Brown’s Boys. This exercise turned out to be more of a challenge than I had anticipated…

A true child of the Internet Generation, I’ve sat stony-faced through all kinds of horrible, ‘gross-out’ viral videos, and even witnessed rare colour footage (mainly red) of the unfortunate demise of Budd Dwyer. Alas, none of this unpleasantness prepared me for the true televisual horror of Mrs Brown’s Boys, and I bailed out after less than ten minutes.

It would be unfair to review a show that I saw less than a third of. For all I know, it could have suddenly transformed into an Alan Bennett style production immediately afterwards, littered with humanity, poignancy and bleak-but-humorous dialogue. The character of Mrs Brown (played by O’Carroll) could have developed into a tragic, amiable widow, struggling to cope with her glaringly obvious gender issues.

The part I saw contained nothing more than a torrent of tedious double-entendres and dire malapropisms, most of which would have been too dated to use on an ITV sitcom in the 1970s. Much of the (frankly inexplicable) audience laughter came from Mrs Brown’s copious usage of the word ‘fuck’. It’s hard to imagine that the studio audience wasn’t either watching a different show or heavily boozed-up. But of course, I’m not being fair, as I didn’t give the show a proper chance.

It’s available to view on the RTÉ Player until February 13th, should you wish to see it for yourself. Don’t.