Opinion Filed 9 Sep 2026 · 15:41
Mrs Brown’s Boys won its sixth NTA because it toured first
Amanda Holden sang at Alan Carr and he cried
Amanda Holden and Paloma Faith sang I Know Him So Well while Alan Carr collected his Special Recognition award at The O2, Chortle reported. Holden is Carr’s friend and co-presenter on property renovation shows. On the same night, in the category Carr was actually nominated in, the comedy prize went to a show whose 70-year-old creator was at home recovering from surgery on a fractured jaw. Carr had seen it coming and said so on the way in.
Mrs Brown’s Boys wins every year, why am I even here?
That’s Alan Carr, speaking to the BBC before the ceremony, as reported by Chortle. His semi-autobiographical ITV comedy Changing Ends was up for the same award. It’s a good line and it got a laugh. It is also the single most common opinion in British comedy: the National Television Awards comedy category is a joke. The public can’t be trusted with it, so the result tells you nothing. I think that’s the wrong read, and the argument for it sits in the show’s own back catalogue, years before anyone at the BBC had heard of it.
Who won Best Comedy at the National Television Awards 2026?
Mrs Brown’s Boys won Best Comedy at the National Television Awards on 8 September 2026, at The O2 in London. RTÉ reported it beat Amandaland, Changing Ends, Last One Laughing and Not Going Out. Chortle’s write-up puts it plainly. “It is the sixth time Brendan O’Carroll’s sitcom has won the award, which is voted for by the viewing public.”
O’Carroll wasn’t there. He is recovering from surgery to fix a fractured jaw. The same injury has knocked out this year’s two Christmas specials and a live panto. On the live side, the shows are postponed rather than binned. RTÉ named MCD Productions as the promoter rescheduling the D’Panto? dates at 3Arena in Dublin and the Gleneagle Arena in Killarney for 2027. A BBC spokeswoman said the corporation is “working with him on plans for Mrs Brown’s Boys in 2027”. If you’re holding tickets, that’s the position: rescheduled dates rather than refunds, with nothing new announced yet. Anyone sitting on a D’Panto? confirmation email should file it somewhere they’ll still be able to find it in fourteen months.
O’Carroll’s own statement, via RTÉ, opens: “It is with sincere regret I must announce that due to an unexpected medical issue I will have to cancel the recordings of the 2026 Mrs Brown’s Boys Christmas and New Year’s Specials.” Chortle carried the follow-up line, which is the one a promoter would recognise: “To say I am heartbroken is an absolute understatement.”
Before the BBC there were the plays, and there were a lot of them
The annual eye-roll tends to start in 2011, which is about nineteen years late. The radio play version appeared on RTÉ 2fm in 1992. There were books, then a 1999 film adaptation of The Mammy called Agnes Browne with Anjelica Huston in the lead. Then O’Carroll made a run of straight-to-DVD films, adapted into rotating stage plays performed across Ireland and the UK. Three of them make up the Mrs Brown Trilogy: Mrs Brown’s Last Wedding, Good Mourning Mrs Brown and Mrs Brown Rides Again. A fourth play, For the Love of Mrs Brown, premiered in 2007. A fifth, How Now Mrs Brown Cow, toured in 2010.
The television deal came late and it came because of the touring. BBC Scotland producer Stephen McCrum approached O’Carroll in early 2009, a pilot aired that November, and the BBC commissioned a full series inside three weeks. The first series went out on Irish television on 1 January 2011 and on UK screens on 21 February 2011. That is nineteen years after the RTÉ 2fm radio play. The Pavilion Theatre in Glasgow gets specifically credited in the show’s own history. That is the kind of detail that never makes it into a think piece about why the country is broken.
So when six public votes keep landing on the same show, what they’re landing on is a constituency assembled in theatre foyers, one interval ice cream at a time, across two decades, and then handed a telly slot on the strength of it.
The case for calling it a fan-club stitch-up
Let me put the other argument at full strength, because it’s a decent one. The NTA public vote is self-selecting and online. It measures how many people could be bothered to click, which is a different question from how many people watched. That rewards the show with the most organised, most devoted following and the highest brand recall. Stick a thing on BBC One every Christmas for years and recall does the rest. On that reading it’s a mailing-list contest, and a mailing-list contest tells a booker nothing they didn’t already know about loyal fans existing.
The critical record backs the mood, too. Wikipedia’s reception section quotes Bruce Dessau in the Guardian, calling it a “predictable, vulgar vehicle for Irish comedian Brendan O’Carroll”. He added that “No amount of ‘fecks’ are going to make Mrs Brown’s Boys a classic like Father Ted”. Paul English in the Daily Record went with “lazy, end-of-pier trash rooted in the 1970s”. Grace Dent, in the Independent, wrote that “To love Mrs Brown, one must be thrilled by a man in a hairnet and dinner lady tabard saying the F-word roughly once every ten minutes”. Nobody is pretending the reviews are close.
The objection doesn’t win, though. “An organised following that turns out when asked” is the entire product in the live comedy business. It is the thing every agent, every promoter and every act with a Wednesday to fill is trying to build. Dismissing a measurement because it captures loyalty rather than craft is like a landlord dismissing a full till because the beer isn’t very nice. And for what it’s worth, the panels haven’t been immune either: the same show took the BAFTA for Best Situation Comedy in 2012.
Two arenas in December, cancelled by one jaw
Look at the scale of what fell over when O’Carroll’s jaw did: an arena panto in Dublin and another in Killarney, in December, handled by MCD, with a broadcaster’s Christmas schedule attached to the same performer. That’s about as much weight as a comedy brand carries in these islands, and MCD aren’t holding 2027 arena dates for someone on a hunch. It was built by a man who spent the nineties and noughties doing Mrs Brown plays in regional theatres, while the critics were elsewhere.
Set that against the numbers the rest of the circuit is living on. UK comedians earned an average of £21,143 in 2025, down £5,635 on the year before. Working comics are down to about 2.5 gigs a week while the big autumn tours all launch on top of each other. In that market, an act with a self-renewing audience that will book December two years out is what everyone else on the circuit is trying to become, ideally before the 2.5 becomes a 2.
The peer-voted awards make the contrast sharper rather than softer. The Comedians’ Choice Awards paid Kate Dolan in PR rather than cash this year. A vote by the people who buy the tickets and a vote by the people who share the bill are measuring different things, and the press package doesn’t cover a support act’s train fare.
Six wins, and the lesson isn’t “buy a wig”
I’m not arguing that anyone should copy the show. Nobody needs a second Agnes Brown, and an act who tries to reverse-engineer one will end up with a costume and no audience. The transferable bit is the sequencing. The live crowd came first, the broadcaster came ninth or tenth, and the broadcaster came because of the live crowd. That order is now unusual. Most of what gets pitched round the industry runs the other way, with a clip, a commission, then a hurried tour to convert the numbers.
You can see the better version of the old order happening anyway. Jamali Maddix has the run of Hackney Empire’s 1,275 seats. That’s a room you get given on the strength of people turning up for you. Meanwhile SNL UK is handing out audience seats via a Microsoft Forms ballot. That is a perfectly sensible way to fill a studio and an absolutely useless way to find out whether anyone would pay to be there.
O’Carroll has been asked about the reviews often enough to have a settled answer. He told the BBC, via Radio Times, “First of all, I’m well aware that comedy is very subjective. What some people like, other people just detest. So I don’t take it too serious.” He also said that letters from families of autistic children who laugh at the show matter more to him: “So when you get a letter like that, I don’t care what the critics say. That’ll do me.”
My position, then, stated so you can throw it back at me. The sixth win reads to me as a receipt for nineteen years of touring. Comics and bookers who treat the NTA comedy result as a punchline are laughing at a headcount of people who bothered to turn out and vote, drawn from the same population their rent comes from. The show’s next arena date is provisionally 2027 and its star is currently eating through a straw. It’ll still probably win the seventh.
