SO Mrs Brown’s Boys is Britain’s favourite 21st-century sitcom. The result of a Radio Times poll came as a bit of a surprise this week – not just because the show starring Brendan O’Carroll as the mouthy Dublin widow ain’t my personal favourite (that’s life) but because no interviewer north of the Border asked the obvious question about the poll.

Did Scots vote Mrs Brown’s Boys into the top spot too – above Still Game, Gary Tank Commander, Kevin Bridges Live and other staples of Scottish comedy?

Listening to the Radio Times person being interviewed on Radio Scotland I was waiting to hear the answer. It would be interesting to know if Scots put oor ain stuff first or fell into line with UK trends. But the information was neither volunteered nor requested – which is strange and not really good enough. Normally anyone who wants their poll findings covered by the media will know interviewers must reality-proof the data for their own particular audience. That means finding the local angle on any topic – from the gender pay gap to the amount we pay for strawberries. Life-threatening or trivial, UK-wide polls are only half as interesting without local comparisons. And let me not downplay Scotland. We are not a “local area” but a nation with our own distinctive languages, dialects, cultural preferences, voting patterns and sense of humour.

But even though the “British” result looked out of line with Scottish tastes, and even though the funny bone is a central part of our cultural anatomy, no radio or TV presenter seemed to consider the subject worth probing.

So I called Radio Times and discovered the poll was online (and therefore fairly self-selecting). The lass I spoke to couldn’t say if it had been weighted for age, gender, occupation, ethnic origin, national background or anything else. But she did know Radio Times had offered viewers a selection of 40 top shows “capable of being seen all over the UK” and asked folk to rank them. So any show broadcast exclusively or mostly within Scotland (or indeed Wales and Northern Ireland) could not have attracted any votes – even from Scots. Nice.

To add insult to injury, the Radio Scotland interview ended with the purring observation that “you Scots made the winning show” – which is actually true. Mrs Brown’s Boys is recorded at the BBC’s Pacific Quay studios in Glasgow in front of a live audience, seen at the beginning and the end of each show. So who knows. Maybe highly tickled members of the audience would have voted in their droves to put Brendan McCarroll Top of the Scottish Comedy Pops as well. It’s certainly good news the show is keeping Scottish TV production workers in jobs too. But hang on.

This wee polling exercise, whose results have been uncritically reported across Britain, has prevented Scots (and others) from backing the comedy they actually find funniest; the shows by Scots that say meaningful, and very funny, things about themselves. You’d almost conclude that Scottish opinion only matters when we like sitcoms approved by London TV chiefs for network distribution.

I know such a prickly response epitomises the stereotype of the dour Scot and I can hear the objections already. It is only a poll – about humour. Oh, and by the way, The Thick of It came in the top 10, with Scots in prominent roles. Get over yourself. Folk in Yorkshire aren’t demanding to know how their folk voted – and there’s more of them than you Scots.

But I’m not alone in taking comedy seriously. The Sun reported “Twitter outrage” over Mrs Brown’s triumph and quoted one tweeter who said: “Use a potato peeler on my eyeballs or watch Mrs Brown’s Boys, *heads towards kitchen*,” and another: “When your future grandkids ask 'How did you let this happen?' they’re referring to when Mrs Brown’s Boys got voted sitcom of the century.”

There’s a reason folk get serious about comedy. How and why we laugh defines us. And Scots' deep cultural attachments are constantly being lost in careless generalisations about the UK.

Thus the Vicar of Dibley was voted Britain’s favourite sitcom in years past. I’ll place a small bet that this wasn't the result of the Lundin Links jury. Likewise, I’ll bet they did not vote in 2005 for Britain’s favourite painting – Turner’s Fighting Temeraire (The Battle of Trafalgar)? Or in 2009 for Britain’s favourite poem – Rudyard Kipling’s If?

I’d guess the favourite painting for many Scots might be Salvador Dali’s Christ of St John of the Cross, a picture many Glaswegians know in great detail because, unlike in many English galleries, access to public art has always been free in Scotland.

Regarding best poem, Scots might be torn between Burns’ Tam O’Shanter and MacDiarmid’s Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle; and prefer Lochhead or MacCaig, with his lines about his best poem being two fags long. I doubt Kipling would make it into a Scots Top 20.

What tickles our fancy is rarely given unambiguous top billing and big cash support at UK level. This week a fabulous musical ensemble performed a reworking of Martyn Bennett’s Grit. Seats were like gold dust, the Edinburgh Playhouse was packed to the rafters and the whooping, singing, dancing audience rewarded conductor and orchestrator Greg Lawson with three standing ovations prompting three exuberant encores. It was, as Lawson pointed out, an incredible mix of every kind of music played and composed in Scotland – but the result was a wild stallion of sound – no camel.

I appreciate that BBC Scotland did film the first Celtic Connections performance of Grit in 2015 and commissioned a powerful documentary about Martyn Bennett’s short life. Those broadcasting jewels probably accounted for this week’s sold-out gig. But they whet the appetite for much more. Could we imagine in our dreams that the powers that be who run the Proms, commission opinion polls, and decide what gets televised across the whole UK, consider broadcasting Grit in prime time to every citizen in Britain? If they did, the late Martyn Bennett’s family might not still be in debt.

I wish Mrs Brown’s Boys well. The programme’s success has certainly managed to rile just about every respectable commentator and newspaper in the UK. And that can’t be a bad thing. But I’d love to know what fellow Scots think of the content that has been made by us and for us.

And I’d love to live in a country whose broadcasting antennae are so culturally well attuned that musical geniuses like Martyn Bennett and the late Michael Marra are household names – not quirky choices by the stubborn few. And Gary Tank Commander gets a bit mair respect. Chef.