When Mrs. Brown has the moral high ground, something is seriously wrong. Star Bores day is here.

Dear Star Wars fans.

This one’s for you (Brentford v Hull City can wait until tomorrow). Copy, paste and edit. A bit.

I love the same film series (Jar Jar Binks and Yoda aside) as you do and one day look forward to watching these with my son. I still have a Millennium Falcon toy somewhere in that attic although sadly, no original packaging. My now four year old son is being slowly sucked into the film series and is a huge Chewbacca fan. The naughty man still scares him. I’m a bit “m’eh” about the prospect of the forthcoming Han Solo film. Being honest.

As such, I guess I’m a fan. Of sorts. Not in the same ball park as the Roger Moore era of James Bond movies but still a fan. Watching ‘For Your Eyes Only’ last night (ITV4) I was blown away by he deadpan brilliance of the exchange:
“If we could identify that someone….”
“Why don’t you try the identigraph?”

Yet sadly, every year, something happens to make me fall out of love with these films a little bit more (not Bond, for the record).

Today is Friday the fourth of May. Or, as most sane people also know it, Friday the fourth of May. Perhaps the date is best remembered as the anniversary of the Cornwall railway bridge opening, linking Devon and Cornwall. If you need to commemorate the 4/5 at least make it for a significant reason.

Instead Sci-fi geeks and lovers of crap jokery everywhere will, no doubt, be bastardising the date and infecting my social media timeline with the hilarious, wait for it……. ‘May the fourth be with you’ comment.

May the fourth. Be. With. You. It’s funny because it almost sounds like a line from a film. How we laughed.
Even now, writing those horrible, horrible words, I can feel the vomit rising. The gag reflex building. The anger simmering. Not even Mrs. Brown and her boys would stoop to this level of ‘joke’. Probably.

How could this happen?

Please – I beg of you – it’s not too late. It’s not funny, it’s not clever, its not original and using this weak, weak pun does not make you into some 21st Century Oscar Wilde or Stephen Fry. It’s the sort of ‘joke’ used by people who find The Krankies or ‘Big Mouth Billy Bass’ ( ‘Take me to the river” – don’t tempt me) the height of cultural sophistication.

So this fourth of May, don’t play into the hands of the Star Wars Marketing board. If you really want to enjoy Star Wars then stick on Return of the Jedi, perhaps fast-forwarding through any Ewok related content.

Just don’t. Make. That. Joke.

Nick Bruzon

This is one mother I never want to see again. Mrs Brown is no alternative to Brentford.

Sunday 26 March. Mother’s Day. Mothering Sunday. Not a day for Championship football or Brentford, although purely due to the ongoing Intenational fixture list that saw Gibraltar go down in Bosnia last night and England hosting Lithuania this evening. Yet with the boys from the Rock kicking off at 5pm, and no highlights to show from Griffin Park later on, there was a gap in the TV schedule last night that could only be filled by one thing. BBC1, 9.15pm and a new series featuring everybody’s (I beg to differ) favourite Irish mammy. Yes, it was time for : All Round to Mrs. Brown’s.

Mrs Brown. Tongue clearly not in cheek

Regular readers of this column will be aware of my ire when it come to Mrs Brown. And now, somehow,  (s)he had been given a prime time slot with a new twist – a chatshow / audience participation event although still keeping all the zany characters that, apparently, we know and love.

Genuinely, I don’t get it. I have tried before but, to be honest, the man dressed as a woman act died many years ago. Yet despite the baffling lack of genuine laughs, the awards keep coming Was I missing something? Had I served it a horrendous injustice in previous columns? There was only one way to find out. The answer was a categorical ‘No’.

To be fair, looking around cyberspace before hand , there was sufficient warning to watch something else. Likewise, when I shared this plan with one New Road wag his suggestion was a simple one, “Prime time to do something else.”

Warning came far and wide

But no, despite the scepticism I settled in. I wish I hadn’t. The theme tune sounding like something rejected from a 70’s sitcom as the composers of Terry and Mildred, assuming not dead, are now licking their lips at the prospect of a forthcoming royalties cheque. This, accompanied by lemming like ‘clapping along’ from an audience who must have been prozac’d up to their eyeballs to get them into the studio.

An opening ‘gag’ of crack/craic confusion brought tumbleweed to my sofa but the sycophants in Studio B lapped it up. There were definitely drugs involved  – that or  the BBC had just borrowed the laughter track (and jokes) from Last of the Summer Wine.

An old man asleep in an armchair chair (something which got its own laugh) then saw the audience in hysterics when Mrs Brown, gave him a ‘shower’; with a can of air freshener. Including, for which the audience reached its most tear screamingly manic, his groin. This, a moment not peaked until the subsequent reference to Delia Smith with a penis. All the in the first 135 seconds.

I just hope Cliff Crown washed his hands after their last boardroom encounter. Him and Delia, not Mrs Brown. (To the best of my knowledge Brendan O’Carroll’s not guested at Griffin Park before).

How about her (yes, I’ll play along) guests? Pamela Anderson and Judy Murray . The former limping through a flaccid script involving cup size (tea, of course) and David Hasselmuff that would have made Baywatch look like the complete works of Shakespeare.Before Scotland’s finest appeared, we then had a VT from obligatory Irish guest, Louis Walsh. The music mogul a man one suspects would turn up to the opening of an envelope and then provide obligatory reference to Simon Cowell.

Not even the wonderful Judy Murray was able to dignify this with any class, despite her best efforts.This is no reflection on her but more reference to a show which was the consulate example of the oft heard phrase,’You can’t polish a turd‘. Her on screen arrival being railroaded by a man dressed as a woman – this time Baywatch era Pamela

“Smiling is over rated”, said Judy at one point. Watching this, I couldn’t agree more.

Roll on next week when the return of the Championship calendar and Football League Tonight on Channel Five gives us our sanity back. And that’s a phrase I never thought I’d say.

All Round To Mrs. Brown’s is currently up on the I-player for another 29 days (should you be feeling masochistic).

Poor Judy. And Pamela. And us

Nick Bruzon