THE LUNATIC FRINGE
Berated and banned, the relentlessly outrageous Frankie Boyle is the undisputed bad boy of Scottish comedy. Yet, as the ginger menace returns to Edinburgh with another sold-out show, Siobhan Synnot discovers there’s more to the Glaswegian than simply angr
Siobhan Synnot finds there's more to Frankie Boyle than just being the bad boy of Scottish comedy
He’s one of Scotland’s most successful stand-ups, with a string of best-selling books and DVDs, as well as his own BBC 2 show, Frankie Boyle’s New World Order; and this August, he’s been at the Edinburgh Festival, playing sell-out gigs at the Playhouse. So it’s strange to reflect on the fact that just nine years ago, it looked as if Frankie Boyle had fallen on his own comedy sword.
After riding high as an acerbic scene-stealer on Mock the Week, he quit the topical panel show in 2009 and signed a deal with Channel 4. Tramadol Nights was his first starring comedy vehicle, but the bleak sketch show not only divided critics, but failed to win audiences. Then his comments about Katie Price’s disabled son were reported to Ofcom and were ruled to have contravened the broadcasting code.
As a comedy king, Boyle’s reign proved too forceful for ‘Broken Britain’. Broadcasting certainly made it clear that commissioners found Boyle’s jokes about abortion, bulimics and disabled people unamusing and Boyle beat a retreat of sorts to live stand-up. Touring is stressful, but at least he was not expected to churn out new material at the same rate as his stint on Mock the Week, where he was the show’s most competitive guest. Other panellists complained that no-one took the business of being funny quite as seriously as Boyle.
‘He put his heart and soul into it and was very intense about it all,’ recalls his Mock the Week chair Dara O’Briain. ‘He was banging out hundreds and hundreds of jokes, really going for it. He’s an intense man and he’s very competitive about getting his stuff in. Frankie needed to make the show his own. He did it well, but you have to remember it’s not as if the rest of the people around that table are shy. We might just not have needed it quite so much as Frankie.’
Before Boyle brought his two-fisted take to the current affairs quiz show, he had spent 12 years climbing the comedy pole. His steely certainty about his comic abilities was forged in the bear pits of comedy clubs, while an early brush with teacher training imbued him with an innate confidence in front of crowds.
Affectionately described as the ‘dark heart’ of Mock the Week by O’Briain, Boyle’s anger and energy resemble those of a malevolent school teacher who is prepared to bully pupils into thinking more critically about the world.
‘Sometimes people point out to me that I look like one of The Proclaimers,’ he said in one of his live sets. ‘One? They’re twins, you daft bastard.’
Like Billy Connolly, Boyle comes from a working-class Catholic background and is very much a product of Glasgow. The middle child of a builder and a school dinner lady, Francis Martin Patrick Boyle attended school in Pollokshaws.
‘It was like a zoo,’ he recalled. ‘There were 3,000 kids and we were taught in plywood huts some of the time. It was like getting through prison, all these kids with mental health issues slipping through the cracks. I joined the Latin club solely because it happened in a lockable classroom. We’d be in there having lunch and there’d be kids trying to climb in the windows to get at us.’
After briefly studying Urban Planning at Aston University, in Birmingham, Boyle switched to a degree in English Literature at Sussex University. Early employment included working in a mental health hospital, then teacher training in Edinburgh until, at the age of 23, he first tried stand-up as a drunken dare at The Stand Comedy Club in Glasgow.
He was later tracked down by the club’s owner, Tommy Shepherd, and invited to perform again. In his early gigs Boyle used to joke that his mum sewed a name tag onto his gags so
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His certainty about his comic abilities was forged in the bear pits of comedy clubs
that he didn’t lose them. Despite his drive and confidence, he was not an overnight success: one gig ended with him walking off stage amid catcalls and boos, then realising back at his guest house that some of the audience were staying at the same digs, and barricading his bedroom door.
Undeterred by his slow start, which sometimes involved playing to empty student bars, Boyle continued to improve his act and went on to win the open mic award at the Edinburgh Fringe. He abandoned teaching, moved to London and found work compering shows where free beer was a perk of the job. It was this perk, though, that brought Boyle to the brink of alcoholism at the age of 26.
With typical frankness, Boyle says he decided it was time to quit after a 20-pint bender where he out drank everyone else in the room. He woke up the next morning unable to see, until he found his glasses in a pool of vomit.
There was no AA meeting, no epiphany and no 12-step programme – he says there was merely a point where he realised that although he was a happy drunk, he was drinking too much. ‘There are people who drink to let themselves out, so that they’re a bigger, bolder version of themselves,’ he said. ‘Then there are people who drink to let someone else out, someone that they hide. I was always the first.
‘I didn’t turn into a different person but I found that saying to people “I think I’m an alcoholic” was a good way to stop them pressuring me into taking a drink.’
In his autobiography, My Shit Life So Far, Boyle was candid not only about his problems with booze but also his flirtations with LSD, ecstasy and the horse tranquilliser, ketamine. Finally he quit drugs too, aged 30, after reaching a peak when he was appearing on the BBC Scotland series Live Floor Show and writing for Muriel Gray’s panel game Caledonia McBrains.
It was a productive time, but also the first of many confrontations with programme bosses. Boyle recalls one producer asking him to remove a joke about former first minister Henry McLeish because his wife ‘quite liked’ him. After a while, he developed a strategy.
‘When I was doing BBC Scotland shows I’d have to write two scripts a week so I’d have one in reserve when they threw the first script in the bin,’ he once said. Boyle’s thrawn relationship with broadcasters has been a feature ever since. On Mock
Saying to people “I think I’m an alcoholic” was a good way to stop them pressuring me into taking a drink
the Week he was castigated for joking that swimmer Rebecca Adlington ‘looks like someone who’s looking at themselves in the back of a spoon’, and made unprintable remarks about the Queen that was adduced as further evidence that BBC standards were plumbing new depths.
In turn, Boyle has blasted broadcasting for a loss of moxie. ‘The number one priority today is “Don’t frighten the horses”,’ he has complained. ‘It’s like we’re back in the 1970s in terms of compliance.’ He remains disdainful of terrestrial television’s instincts to play it safe, comparing current TV schedules to the entertainment programme on a cruise ship.
Is there anything Boyle won’t talk about? He tends to discourage conversation about his private life; in 1995 he was married for a year, and has since claimed to have been drunk for its entire duration from proposal to separation. He is now father to a 14-yearold daughter from a relationship with ‘a close friend’, and has a ten-year-old son with long-term partner Shereen Taylor, a visual artist. Boyle also plays down his quiet acts of charity, from donations to foodbanks, to his support for Jack Thomas, a Welsh Paralympic swimmer with intellectual disabilities, who was struck down by injuries and depression.
To be a fan of Frankie Boyle is to relish not what makes us shake with laughter, but also what makes us shudder. Drawn to the absurd, Boyle excels at immediately recognisable word- pictures: a faulty door on a train toilet sees him ‘unveiled like a prize on a quiz show’ while the bulky bespectacled deputy Labour leader Tom Watson resembles ‘a chest of drawers with a telly on top’.
What drives Boyle is a form of comic perfectionism. ‘You hear sculptors argue that, to them, the statue is inside the block of marble and they just have to get rid of the waste material,’ he once said.
‘It’s the same for me with jokes. Someone attacks Glasgow Airport and I think to myself, “there will be five definitively funny jokes within that event and I won’t rest till they come out”. The worst feeling is when you don’t have the joke on something, you just have a joke.’
Uncommonly for a stand-up, his act does not require audience affection. Boyle knows he pushes the envelope and is proud of it. ‘The only limitations are whether it’s funny and whether it’s telling people to go out and kill,’ he says. ‘If someone tells me a joke is unacceptable I say, “Well, listen to 3,000 people laughing at it – it’s clearly not unacceptable”.’ Nor is he afraid to push back: when a paper described him as
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If someone tells me a joke is unnacceptable I say “Well listen to 3,000 people laughing’
racist in 2012, he took them to court and was awarded £54,000 in damages, which he donated to the prisoner justice charity Reprieve.
He is also unashamedly Scottish. Arguably, he’s not ashamed of anything, least of all holding up his home country to ridicule.
When the government launched an education drive, he fired back: ‘you can’t get Scottish 17-year-olds to go to school. Who’s going to pick up their kids from primary?’ And on tourism: ‘The people of Falkirk have come up with a wheel 2,000 years after everyone else. What next, the Motherwell Fire?’
In conversation Boyle can be as sad, softly-spoken and thoughtful as his stage persona is harsh, brash and hard-nosed. Revived, renewed and rebooted since Mock the Week, he now references deep thinkers such as Noam Chomsky and writes columns for The Guardian.
His calling card is no longer plain old misanthropy, it is thought-provoking misanthropy, with a strong left slant that disapproves of New Labour. He is also a vocal supporter of Scottish independence, noting before the 2014 vote: ‘I’m all for it. It won’t happen. One of the reasons it won’t happen is the media is just completely against it. There’s a huge level of media bias.’
However critics point out that some of Boyle’s political arguments rely on bales of straw men, and even ardent fans have queried the meaningfulness of a sharp swipe at Israel on Radio 4 when it was followed minutes later by a routine about whether a famous sportswoman might be a lesbian.
Boyle may feel he leads a vanguard of new dark comedy, and it’s possible that he does aim to channel the anger of a latter-day Lennie Bruce or a Richard Pryor, taking pot-shots at powerful elites. However, other targets miss their mark, or fail to meet closer scrutiny. Recently he railed against the cultural tastes of the middle classes in his home nation.
‘You can’t imagine Scotland celebrating Scottish writers like Alasdair Gray, James Kelman or Alison Kennedy,’ he said. ‘Kelman is one of the biggest writers in the world, but the Scottish middle classes hate him.’ In fact, all three writers have notable champions in Scotland, above all and especially amongst the middle classes.
Is Frankie Boyle a purveyor of hilariously awful truths, or just a cussed comedian with a collection of Bill Hicks CDs? The jury is still out. Meanwhile there’s every sign that Boyle has reached a point where he enjoys his bad boy reputation for provocation.
For his two-part series Frankie Goes to Russia, the BBC sent him to investigate the myths and stereotypes surrounding the World Cup host country. Introducing his findings just as the spy poisoning scandal broke, Boyle declared that ‘relations between Britain and Russia are so bad, there’s nothing I can say or do that could possibly make them any worse’.
Being restored to prime-time television, and preaching to broadsheet readers is part of a remarkable reinvention for the 45-year-old Glaswegian, the first Scottish stand-up since Billy Connolly to make any sort of impression upon the wider British audience.
Until Boyle, there have been few from here who have the capacity to fill theatres and provoke debate, although Boyle has always contended that the public have a greater tolerance for outrage than many imagine.
‘I find British audiences broad-minded and fairly unshockable,’ he once noted. ‘Perhaps the press ought to look away. Most people know when you’re joking, and the ones that don’t, to be honest, I could impassively watch them die in a house fire.’