Mrs Brown’s Boys Gets The Backing Of Ben Elton

The Blackadder and Young Ones writer speaks about the show and his views on sitcoms

Ben Elton, the writer behind the classic shows Blackadder and The Young Ones and hugely successful comedian and author in his own right, has given his views on Mrs Brown’s Boys and live sitcom.

Speaking at the Ronnie Barker Comedy Lecture, Elton delivered a passionate talk defending the genre and Mrs Brown’s Boys, calling it ‘quality comedy’.

He also took a swipe at people who treat the show with “thoughtless contempt” and “snobbery” and that people were too quick to moan about canned laughter without realising the the laughter track is from a live audience, ‘a corrosive myth’ as he said.

“The principal objection to these comedies is that people are laughing. Why is that? I think it’s because we’re British,” Elton argued. “The laughter is evidence of effort. The terrible British sin of ‘going for laughs’. Laughs which are clear evidence of the greatest comedic crime of all, the crime of ‘trying to be funny’.”

Speaking on Mrs Brown’s Boys, he also argued that the show ‘is not a tired and cheesy format at all’.

“Mrs Brown is quality comedy, not to everyone’s taste of course, but what work of art of any value could possibly be to everyone’s taste?

“It’s an exuberant, superbly executed celebration of what, for want of a better word, you might call big comedy. The comedy of the perfect theatrical double take.

He went on to suggest that sitcoms being criticised in this way could lead to TV decision makers thinking that the shows are not worth the paying out for saying: “an expense that frankly is easy to duck if you’re just going to get slagged off for doing it anyway.”

“While there’s nothing we can do about shrinking budgets, fractured audiences and TV companies turning their precious facilities into prime real estate, it might help if commentator, critic and columnist alike stopped treating studio sitcoms with such thoughtless contempt.”

Elton continued to say his own show from the 80s, The Young Ones, would not “survive in today’s critical environment … had Rick, Vyvyan, Neil and Mike arrived in a world of instant opinions, formed and tweeted while a show is actually still on air I don’t think they’d have been given the grace to grow on people as they did.”

To end, he went on to point out classic sitcoms such as Dad’s Army, Fawlty Towers and Only Fools & Horses and argued that “we are in danger of losing something of real value in our culture”.

The Ronnie Barker Comedy Lecture aired on Friday night on BBC1 and can be found on BBC iPlayer.