Brendan O’Carroll, the Irish star of BBC One sitcom Mrs Brown’s Boys, has apologised for making a “clumsy” joke the place a “racial time period was implied” throughout rehearsals for the sequence’ upcoming Christmas particular.
The BBC quickly suspended manufacturing of the sequence and launched an investigation with the exhibits now going forward as deliberate.
O’Carroll, who can be the present’s creator, mentioned he had made a “clumsy try at a joke” throughout a read-through of the scripts, the place he was in character as Agnes Brown.
“It backfired and brought on offence which I deeply remorse and for which I’ve apologised,” he told The Mirror newspaper.
These current had been mentioned to have been “left shocked by the slur”, The Mirror mentioned, including they “flagged it with the BBC afterwards”. The company mentioned it “acted instantly”.
The episodes, filmed within the BBC’s Pacific Quay studios in Glasgow, marked the primary mini-series run since 2013.
The BBC mentioned: “While we do not touch upon people, the BBC is towards all types of racism, and we’ve got strong processes in place ought to points ever come up.”
The programme, first proven on BBC One in 2011, has had 4 sequence and has lengthy been a fixture on the BBC’s Christmas TV schedules.
It won a National TV Award last month for greatest comedy.
The slapstick present stars O’Carroll as a foul-mouthed Irish matriarch, who’s “mammy” to her surrounding household and associates, who collect for laughter and tears in her kitchen and lounge.
It has a pantomime theatricality to it, that includes photographs of the viewers and together with moments when the actors corpse – a time period used to explain breaking character and laughing – and ad-lib on stage.
Final month, on the Nationwide TV Awards, O’Carroll told The Sun: “It’s exhausting to consider this Christmas Day episode shall be our fiftieth episode.”
He added: “I feel we’re going to be doing one other mini sequence for April, however every time the BBC broadcast them.”
Talking in regards to the award, he instructed the newspaper it was “large, to get this award is our sixth”.
“It’s voted for by the viewers and viewers. That is the icing on the cake it’s superb,” he added.
Though it isn’t essentially a common hit with TV critics, the present has proved to be a permanent success with its followers.
Dick Fiddy, archive TV programmer on the BFI, instructed the BBC in 2020 he thought it “thrived within the gulf between critics and audiences… as a result of there is a sure part of the viewers that feels disenfranchised by trendy comedy; an viewers that loved the broad, double entendre comedy of On The Buses and Are You Being Served?”
O’Carroll has mentioned the success of the present has been, at the very least partly, right down to an viewers” that has felt “left behind”, as TV comedy has advanced and adjusted.