Review of the new sitcom from some of the Mrs Brown's Boys team

News of a new sitcom from some of those culpable for Mrs Brown’s Boys was never going to be greeted with unalloyed joy by comedy cognoscenti.

The good news is that as a lower-key single-camera sitcom, Shedites is a lot easier to like than brash Agnes and her brood. The bad news is that it’s still not especially funny.

A one-off clearly intended as a pilot, this has been penned by Paddy Houlihan, who co-wrote recent episodes of Mrs Brown – in which he plays Dermot – with Brendan O’Carroll. And they both star here as Paddy the Liar and Jimmy, two regulars at a shed-based project where men make themselves useful building and repairing things. Keeping things in the family, as usual, O'Carroll's real-life son – Buster in Mrs Brown’s Boys – plays Cheesy.

That this comedy’s setting offers a place of community and friendship for men who are never going to open up emotionally may have been designed to have a relevance as male mental health and isolation rise up the national agenda. But in reality we are in Last Of The Summer Wine territory, where useless older men enable each others oddities and idiosyncrasies.

The plot here is that they must build a new bike from recycled parts to try to win the local Santa Spin race. However, that is really a backdrop for the characters to exchange banter: the sort of phrases that kind of sound witty – and probably once were – but are now so well-worn, they’re just conversational lubricant. 

So we have unoriginal insult lines, ‘If you had brains you’d be dangerous,’ or ‘seriously… it’s like watching evolution in reverse’ –probably exactly the sort of sentences men like this would say to each other in real life – although is it too much to expect a scripted sitcom to set its ambitions higher?

And the jokes are often blighted by the same slapdash disregard for logic as Mrs Brown’s Boys. ’This isn’t recycling, this is biological warfare!’ says O’Carroll’s Jimmy as they knock their bike into shape.That might have worked had there been any chemicals involved in the scene, but he was just annoyed by the hammering. Did he mean ‘psychological warfare?’ It wouldn’t be much funnier but it would at least make sense. Not that logic particularly worries a story where it’s the local councillor (Deirdre O’Kane as the token woman) can choose who gets to be the postman. 

Predictably enough, the fellas get confused by a character who goes by the pronouns they/them, while the local milkman elevates his job title to ‘bovine liquidity distributor’, a typically formulaic idea.

That the characters are gently likeable, if not specially distinctive, is down to performances rather than script. But whether you’d really want to spend a full series locked in a shed with them is moot.

» Shedites is on iPlayer now

Review date: 2 Jan 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett