Frankie Goes to Russia

Our Girl (BBC1)

There must have been times during Frankie Boyle’s three-week sojourn in Russia making the run-up documentary to the World Cup, Frankie Goes to Russia, that the Glaswegian comic wondered if the BBC had given him the job as a reward for cleaning up his act or if they were punishing him for past transgressions. As he trudged through the snow in sub-zero temperatures it certainly didn’t look like any sort of reward I’d like to be given.

To his great credit Boyle tackled his task with unflinching stoicism. And his patter was as sharp and acerbic as ever. It will be some time before the Russian authorities issue him with another visa, especially if Vladimir Putin has anything to do with it. Viewing footage of the Russian president in various actionman pursuits Boyle remarked that he looked like a oneman Center Parcs. Later he said that Putin was elected for another term despite “having a name like a gay porn star.”

He was equally hard on Russia’s sports authorities, claiming that they had a national doping programme. “Some people say there’s no place for drugs in sport,” he said, “but those people have never tried watching Scottish football sober.”

In the first episode he likened the twinning of Glasgow with Rostov-on-Don to “the two ugliest people in the disco pairing up”. At least his criticism is balanced.

He found a visit to a corporate box at Moscow’s leading stadium to be a soul-less affair. He would much rather have been in amongst the real fans rather than sharing salmon-filled vol au vents with a bunch of billionaire oligarchs. Boyle’s not too fond of oligarchs, saying that they expended a lot of energy shoving their rivals into wood chippers. This was very brave of him. Those oligarchs have a long reach.

He was much happier in Shatura, a town 90 miles from Moscow, where he met a young Russian who had founded his own football team and called it Celtic Shatura in honour of the Parkhead side that he fell in love with at the age of four. He has taken his green-and-white hooped team of semi-pros to the Russian third division. Boyle mused that, until now, he thought that was the division that had annexed the Crimea.

He took part in a five-a-side kickabout and his new friends voted him Man of the Match, presenting him with a Russian doll containing a bottle of vodka. To his credit he didn’t point out that he doesn’t drink. To his even greater credit he didn’t break his pledge and get wired into that firewater, especially when he found himself in a town on the edge of the Arctic Circle where the sea was frozen solid. The ice will have melted by the time the England team settle in there, but the one and only nightclub might not be quite what they are used to. It’s a bit on the dull side. Boyle considered this was no bad thing: “England perennially tend to be a bunch of inhibition-free sexual buccaneers. This should put a cork in it.”

He wound the programme up with a plea to us all to drop our perception of Russians as some sort of alien species, saying this played into the hands of Russia’s enemies and bolstered Putin’s popularity. It was a rather sombre note to end on, but I take my hat off to the man for giving us something to think about rather than going for a cheap laugh.

Our Girl, the Mills and Boonstyle take on life in the British Army, continues apace with wellmeaning Georgie (Michelle Keegan) putting her Armyissue boot in it again. In her efforts to save the schoolgirls kidnapped by the nasty rebels, she got herself and her fellow medics captured and compromised an undercover operation being run by gum-chewing machoman Bones (Oliver Rix). Georgie might be a good nurse, but she’s a bit gullible when it comes to being kidnapped. All the rebels had to do was to get one of their number to lie in the road in front of Georgie’s truck, a trick that the rest of us have seen a million times, and Georgie fell for it, hook, line and AK47.

Luckily for Georgie and her pals, the Brits just happened to have the rebel chief ’s son to use as a bargaining chip. Bones cut the wrong wire on the bombvest worn by the young woman who Georgie was hugging, but he had 10 seconds to remove the vest and throw it away, which he duly did.

Back at the base the girls all put on their party frocks and Bones attempted to extract his reward from the lovely Georgie for saving her life, but she knocked him back, designer stubble or no designer stubble. “It’s me, not you,” she told him. Later she told her girlfriend she still missed Elvis. Don’t we all?

“His patter was as sharp and acerbic as ever. It will be some time before the Russian authorities issue him with another visa, especially if Vladimir Putin has anything to do with it”