Mrs Brown's Boys star Brendan O'Carroll on TV specials: I want to make people feel good at Christmas

But as always, creator Brendan O’ Carolll has incorporated unashamedly sentimental storylines that make Miracle On 34th Street seem like a slasher horror.

The first offering sees Agnes become a little cold and Scroogey when carol singers haunt her every waking hour and Buster tries to install a new Christmas tree.

But of course the Dublin mammy, as always, ends up producing more warmth than three pairs of support tights and a heavy winter cardie.

“I want to make people feel good, but especially at Christmas,” said writer and star Brendan O’Carroll, whose mobile phone answering message is ‘Have a Disney day!’

“I love It’s a Wonderful Life. I want a sense of that, with jokes of course in my stories. And because my life has been full of incredible happenings that’s the story I want to tell continually.”

Brendan recounts some of those magical moments which began even before he was born.

“My mother’s parents were all set to elope to America in 1912 and had tickets bought for the ill-fated Titanic, only for a change of plan at the 11th hour. Now, that was a miracle.”

Brendan’s life has had its darker moments growing up in the North Dublin council estate, Finglas, the youngest of eleven kids.

But if every time a bell rings, and an angel gets his wings, every time a disaster struck, Brendan turned it into a positive.

“My life with my mother became magical for me,” he recalls.

“She taught me to believe in myself, in life. And when I became a waiter I wanted every customer’s experience in the hotel to be magical.”

When he later ended up bankrupt after the collapse of his own pub, a ‘truly magical moment’ came about when friend Gerry Browne encouraged him to try his hand at stand-up.

Brendan grew a career in entertainment, slowly, but with three children to look after, and desperate once took a job selling insurance policies, and was sent on a positive mental attitude course. It worked. He wrote a hit play The Course, about the characters he met.

More amazing moments illuminated his life and informed his writing career. Agnes Brown first arrived as a radio series.

But Brendan’s appearance as Agnes was all down to chance.

“The actress who was supposed to play Agnes was sick on the day of recording. I stepped in and somehow it worked.

“Then after I wrote the first Agnes Brown book, The Mammy, it was spotted in an airport bookshop in New York by a bored film producer looking for something to read on the plane home.”

He adds, grinning; “What are the chances?”

The result was his first movie, Agnes Browne, starring Anjelica Huston.

Yet, there have been other mystical moments. When facing bankruptcy (again) after the collapse of his Sparrow’s Trap movie ( the story of a desperate boxer, played by Brendan) the actor/writer says his late mother Maureen came to him in a vision.

“She told me to keep going. She told me I could fly,” he says. And he did. He wrote five Mrs Brown stage plays and performed them for ten years in Ireland and the UK. But the world tired of the mischievous mammy.

Just six years ago, Brendan was facing bankruptcy (yet again) and the writer, with tears in his eyes, informed his cast (his family and friends) the curtain was coming down for good.

Brendan had just £6 in his pocket at the time.

But remarkably, just days later Rab C. Nesbitt writer Ian Pattison came to see the show and recommended Mrs Brown as a sitcom idea to the BBC.

Now Brendan is worth over £60m, set to film the new Mrs Brown’s Boys movie in 2016 and tour Australia and North America.

“That is a miracle,” he said of the Rab C. man’s divine intervention.

In the second Mrs Brown Christmas special, Agnes finds herself caught up in love and romance and family to the extent you’d need a drawer full of tea-towels to soak up the emotion.

And it’s a heart-warming story because it’s about love and family.

Brendan O’Carroll clearly still wants to take his own wonderful life and transfer that story onto the screen.

“I’ve got my family and friends working and travelling with me,” he says, beaming.

“And I get to entertain people at Christmas time. Now that’s magical.”

• Mrs Brown’s Boys, Christmas Day, 9.45pm and New Year’s Day, 10.30pm.