Frankie: My drugs and drink nightmare
Jennifer Wiley,
9th of September 2008[/align]
OUTRAGEOUS TV comic Frankie Boyle last night confessed to an 11-year drink and drugs binge that threatened to wreck his skyrocketing career. Mock The Week star Frankie was once crippled by shyness and turned to booze, cannabis, ecstasy and LSD for help. It will stun the BBC2 show's four million fans who only know him as the fearless joker taking on politicians, terrorists-and even the Queen's naughty bits.
Frankie, 36, admitted: "Everybody in Scotland fucking drinks and it's hard to tell when you've got a problem. By the time I was a student I was trying to get pissed five or six days a week, drinking up to ten pints a night. I knew I was an alcoholic."
And he laid into critics who blasted a shock joke he made about the Queen-broadcast by the BBC just as the furore exploded over filthy on-air phone calls by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross. In a Mock the Week segment titled 'Things the Queen would NOT say in her Christmas speech' Frankie quipped: "I've had a few medical issues this year-I am now so old that my pussy is haunted." The show was cited as another example of the Beeb's failure to restrain artists. But Frankie refused to apologise and decared: "What are we going to do, ban humour? I have two words for the people who complained-'Fuck off!' "
Below-the-belt one-liners like that have propelled the now-sober dad-of-two to fame - a skill he honed at times in his life when things weren't always so funny. At 15 ginger-haired Frankie got his first taste of booze. "I remember sneaking a bottle of vodka from my parents," he said. "I must have downed half in one day and got absolutely steaming. And from then on I realised drinking was an easy way to forget my problems-and have a good time."
Heavy boozing was the norm in Glasgow, where Frankie grew up in a tenement block with labourer dad and school dinnerlady mum. "I had a pretty grim childhood," he said. "There was nothing to do so me and my friends started drinking whenever we could." Things got more serious when Frankie went to university to do an English degree in Brighton, and teacher-training in Edinburgh. He said: "Ten pints of fizzy lager made me funny. I'd sing Gloria Gaynor's 'I Will Survive' in a French accent and scare the new students. I'd drink until I vomited or passed out somewhere.
"The most I had in one go was about 20 pints. One time I woke at a friend's in a panic because I couldn't see. I eventually realised I didn't have my glasses on. I looked everywhere until I noticed they'd fallen out the window and were in a pool of vomit from the night before. I carried on like that for years. It didn't bother my friends or family-in Scotland everyone is fucked. I was 26 when I had my last drink. I had a drinking competition with three Romanians and drank them all under the table. I knew it was time to quit. I was bored and ready to do something different. Work became my addiction."
Even though Frankie quit drinking, he still carried on using drugs for another three years. He said: "I'd do anything I could get-a lot of weed, ecstasy and acid but never cocaine. That's an idiot's drug. But it's been years now since I've done anything."
Divorcee Frankie-now with a long-term girlfriend-found fame in the mid-90s with an open mike award at the Edinburgh Fringe. Now he is the dark soul of Mock The Week, guests on 8 Out Of 10 Cats and Would I Lie To You? and his current tour, Frankie Boyle Live, which started a year ago, has so far wowed more than 100,000 fans.
Recalling the royal controversy he said: "I don't think we should worry about hurting the Queen's feelings. She's got a lot of money. Satire is talking about the people who wield power." Then Frankie turned his venom on Westminster and said: "If we were a rag-tag band of survivors do you think we'd elect Gordon Brown to lead us? He'd be like the village idiot. And if David Cameron hadn't gone to Eton College? He'd be managing a Pizza Hut. The minute I get cancer I'm killing all of Britain's politicians."
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Frankie speaking
SHOCK JOCK: His politically incorrect humour has won him a faithful following, but Frankie Boyle wants to escape stand-up comedy before the world bursts into flames.
By Paul Dalgarno
Sunday Herald
16th of November 2008[/align]
[spoil][align=left]FRANKIE BOYLE, star of the BBC's Mock The Week and arguably Scotland's funniest man, is sitting in an office, on an industrial estate in London, reading a newspaper. He is clean-shaven, wearing blue chunky cords and a khaki-coloured hoodie. He pushes his black-rimmed glasses up on his nose, turns a page, lifts an apple from a fruit bowl on the table between us. Crunch. Crunch. He is allergic to oranges, he says, and copper coins - both make his hands swell "although you get less oranges in with your change".
Crunch. Boyle is sleepy; the atmosphere is relaxed. It feels a bit like lunchtime on a building site: those private, tired moments in the Portakabin, with a joke or two here and there, before the foreman calls the squad back out again. Boyle is drinking water, having given up coffee before his ongoing, sold-out national tour. "The combination of the caffeine and the adrenaline would just be too much," he says. He is match-fit, and enjoying his day off, but the nearly non-stop touring schedule is affecting his mind. "F***ing hell man, you just go completely mad," he says. Crunch. Slaver. "Well, not completely mad. It's actually surprising how much you take it in your stride after you've done the show for a few nights."
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Certain adjustments to his act are necessary from gig to gig. "Sometimes you have to sell the show to the audience differently. Swearing less is quite a key thing. You've maybe just done a Saturday night in Edinburgh and it's Monday in Sheffield and you're still going mental. You can't really do that - you've got to present things in an alternative way." But his show is not really all that extreme, he adds. "I don't piss on anyone."
Typically his audiences have had a drink before performances, while Boyle remains sober as a judge. When he started out in stand-up in his early 20s (he is now 36), he took full advantage of the free bars afforded to him at low-key venues. But those bars took advantage of him. He has been teetotal for more than 10 years after a period of borderline alcoholism. "It was a problem," he admits. "I was never a wet-the-bed alcoholic, so giving up I never got the DTs. But it's very easy, in Scotland especially, to say you're an alcoholic because people will stop offering you a drink, otherwise you'll be under a lot of pressure."
One advantage of beating the booze is being able to slip quietly out of social functions, while the drinkers get steadily noisier. "I think a lot of people are bored with drinking but they just don't admit it," he says. "Culturally, it's an impossible thing in Britain to go, Actually I just don't need to drink'." Boyle took up taekwondo for a couple of years to replace alcohol, and it worked. "I was shite at martial arts, actually," he says. "But I'd still rather be doing that than doing comedy."
Boyle's downbeat demeanour comes as a surprise. He is not zany; nor is he wearing his trademark pink Ozwald Boateng suit. I had been expecting the interview equivalent of a few rounds with an on-form Joe Calzaghe, or that boy at the back of the class the teachers hate and other kids live in fear of being teased by. He has given few private press audiences during his career and is part-novice, part-painfully sincere. Which is sometimes a bit weird. He says he recently told a middle-aged journalist from a women's magazine about the first time he masturbated as a boy: while watching Tenko, the TV drama series set in a female prisoner-of-war camp. The scene when the woman bit the head off a grasshopper? This is my idea of a joke. It sucks. But Boyle was being deadly serious. "No, it was a full-frontal nudity scene," he says quietly. "In a metal bath."
Boyle, who was raised in Glasgow's Pollokshaws, is the son of Irish immigrants from Donegal. His mother, a nursery school dinner lady, is about to retire; his father was a labourer until recently. His sister raises funds for Edinburgh University; his older brother works as an economist for a bank. At least, he did. "He's potentially unemployed now," says Boyle. "Maybe he's working for fucking Greggs." It was during a teacher training course in Edinburgh, after which he planned to teach children with learning disabilities, that Boyle first tried stand-up, aged 23. "I had been working in mental health and you couldn't really get promoted," he says. "I thought if I had a teaching qualification I would have a better chance." But the classroom was a bad fit. "I find education really horrendous," he says. "That whole thing of having to move on to the next class when the bell rings, so that obedience is more important than what you're studying. The Big Bang? Hamlet? Drrinngg - off you go. I never got past that, really."
But life is currently all right. The BBC's Mock The Week has been unofficially dubbed The Frankie Boyle Show in some quarters. Boyle stands out from the other comedians who regularly appear on the show - a mixture of Whose Line Is It Anyway? and Have I Got News For You - especially when contestants have to step forward and respond to news-related prompts by the host, Dara O'Briain. Boyle is usually first; if not, he is usually the funniest. Without exception, he is always the most intense.
He writes dozens of topical gags before the show's three-hour recording session, the most offensive of which are then sieved out for the final half-hour cut. Certain tabloids took issue with his recent quip on the show about the Queen ("I'm so old my pussy is haunted") - a joke that surely weakened any likelihood that Boyle would be invited to appear on the Royal Variety Performance any time soon. "I'd never get on that anyway," he says. "And that's a good thing. I don't think I'd ever be accepted into the establishment because of the nature of what I'm like. You have to have slightly more entry possibilities than I have."
Boyle moved to London four years ago after being bumped from BBC Scotland's comedy cabaret Live Floor Show when it went national. With a second child on the way, and limited career opportunities in Glasgow, he headed south. "I felt a real sort of career spurt when my daughter was born," he says. "A real sort of dad-responsibility software kicked in." He spent a full year in London doing office pilots - literally going from office to office, performing in shows that were never commissioned. In the interim, he wrote for Jimmy Carr as part of a team of television writers.
But from those office pilots he scored a place in the short-lived Channel Four show FAQ U and then subsequently Mock The Week. Being a Scot was not necessarily to his advantage. "Not at all," he says. "I found to start with it was a really unfashionable thing to be. There's also that idea that Billy Connolly's kind of done it all. You're never going to be the most successful Scottish comedian because Billy Connolly's just done a gig on the moon."
I wonder if there has been any backlash against Boyle in Scotland over his Scottish jokes, such as this one from Mock The Week: "The east end of Glasgow is already like the Olympics. Lots of people wandering around trying to speak English wearing tracksuits." Do people accuse him, as with Connolly, of belittling his country for the sake of comedy? "Was that what people said about Billy Connolly?" he asks. "I thought it was more to do with him being a friend of the royals, that's what I always remember as a kid. He did stuff about drunks in Glasgow, I suppose, but you can't really argue with that. People think it's an easy route to do the whole slagging Scotland thing, but it's not necessarily easy to travel all the way to Aberdeen to tell them it's a shithole."
Boyle plans to return to Glasgow soon for good, and to commute back and forth to London, a city whose intensity, and traffic jams, he hates. He bemoans the fact that London is where the work is, and complains that Scotland is at least 25 years behind the city in terms of television. "In fact, it would be hard to quantify just how far behind the times it is," he says. Particularly comedy. "It's all based on stuff I've never heard of before," he says. "People doing jokes like Aye, that's what you say when your wife's down the bingo', and you're like What? This guy's only 30'. Until recently, there were still shows on BBC Scotland with people doing two guys walked into a pub' jokes. You're like, What the f*** is this - 1970-something?' There are lots of talented people in Scotland. Why doesn't someone do a show with them? It's sickening."
Boyle's career options are limited by the fact he refuses to fly. The final straw came a couple of years ago during a flight to Kilkenny in Ireland. When the plane hit a small air pocket, Boyle screamed "Jesus f***ing Christ", to the astonishment of the other, still tranquil, passengers. "I'll never fly again," he says. "I didn't realise how much it was affecting my life. I thought I was just stressed in general but actually it was the fact that I had a flight coming up. Once you take that out of the equation, life gets much easier."
Does he not think his fear is illogical?
"It is fucking logical," he insists. "I mean, what a fucking way to go - brilliant view and then your head gets ripped off. I'm not inclined to think plummeting towards the ground at 700 miles an hour upside down is logical. It takes three minutes for you to drop from the sky going Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!'" Recently, he was offered work in America, but said he would have to get a boat: "A six-week journey and then, Hi everybody'." Would he consider hypnotherapy to try and overcome his fear? "Fuck that," he says. "To try and shut down my body's natural defence mechanism from going, This is wrong'? Nah." Boyle has an unsettling theory that his phobia makes dying in a plane crash all the more likely. "I sometimes think, what if those people in air disasters were all scared of flying? What if you're much more likely to die if you're afraid of flying?"
The mood has turned decidedly edgy, but then "edgy" is a byword for Boyle. His televised jokes on paedophilia, date rape and gang bangs cut close to the bone, although, at times, he is wonderfully surreal. "If Tim Henman had won Wimbledon it would have been so weird it would have torn a hole in our normality," he once said. "Oh, Henman's won, and here to present the trophy is Winston Churchill with the head of a bee."
His comedy approach comes across as no-holds-barred, but there are some self-imposed limits. He is not, for example, Jim Davidson ("My parents fucking hated his jokes about the Irish"). The recent Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand row is just the latest example of the pitfalls Boyle wants to avoid. "I won't say anything I think can be taken the wrong way, as racist, or homophobic," he says. "There have been a couple of times in recent years where people have been slapped on the wrist for the type of gags they've done, and they've gone, Oh, well, it just sort of slipped through'. Your job as a comedian is to make sure that it doesn't slip through, to make sure it's something you're happy saying, because you're saying it."
His comedy is "quite right-on in a way", although he acknowledges that people might not automatically get this from his act. He gives careful consideration to everything he says on stage and screen, and insists there is a philosophy underpinning his work. "I suppose my ideology is that we're all living on a dying world where we'll probably f***ing nuke each other to death before the planet gets a chance to die," he says. "We're dancing on a burning ship and we really need to do something about it." He finds it hard to get the urgency of the problem across to people. He considers government carbon reduction targets to be inadequate and is hoping for a "large-scale change of consciousness". He smiles slightly but he isn't joking. The solution, he says, may be something we haven't thought about yet, a catalyst that we don't yet recognise. For example?
"For example, people who are 25 in Glasgow these days aren't like the people who were in Glasgow when I was a teenager," he says. "My brother's mates were quite brutal. But there's a whole generation of people who took ecstasy and became very different. That's where the whole hill-walking and surfing culture in Scotland came from, the whole outdoors thing - it's down to a drug. So what else could happen in terms of technology that could change things? It's going to have to be something major but I don't think that's impossible."
One of the press clippings I have brought with me, from 1997, is headlined Glasgow Funny Man. It catches Boyle's eye. He examines the article; it's an artefact - one of few - pertaining to his early stand-up career. He is amazed to read his assertion, as a 20-something winner of the Daily Telegraph Open Mic Award, that he would love to still be doing stand-up when he's 50. "Wow," he murmurs. "I said that?" His attention is fixed on the page. "I think I'm just f***ing lying basically. I imagine as a younger guy I was saying that to please people. It doesn't sound like that's what I really thought."
In fact, Boyle plans to write just one more touring show after the current one, then retire from stand-up completely. He wants to write a TV sitcom, a novel and - to further indulge a lifelong passion - a comic book. The last of these is already in train and can be glimpsed in part on Boyle's website: it tells the story of a superhero who would save the world, but for his addiction to internet porn. "I'm certainly looking at maybe three years left as a stand-up," he says. "People are never really that great after 40. At the minute it's very good because I'm very intense about comedy and I'm working at it all the time, and it would be good to stop before that stops. Especially with kids; you've got to live a life as well. It's not that I fear becoming establishment - it's more that I don't want to become boring or stale."
His career, as it stands, revolves around writing hundreds of new jokes a year: far more than his comedy predecessors would have been expected to produce, and a tall order to achieve consistently. And consistency is important to Boyle. "It's about trying to do a good thing before you go," he says. "I've turned offers down this week for TV work because I'm focusing on my tour, and they were still going, Yeah, but it's OK, it'll be fine'. But it wouldn't be. I want things be of a certain standard because that's all there is in this for me. Ultimately, all there is to look back on is that you did things properly."[/align] [/spoil]
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Frankie's comedy cuts to the bone
November 17, 2008
JENNA RICHARDS
thisissouthdevon.co.uk[/align]
[spoil][align=left]THIS brutal brand of un-politically correct comedy left me laughing so much my face hurt, as Mock the Week star Frankie Boyle performed for a sell-out audience at the Princess Theatre. Frankie spent a fair amount of the show mocking Scots, ginger people and Scottish ginger people � like himself. Cracking jokes at his own expense gave him a free reign to poke fun at others. Sex, age, and race were all easy targets.
His brand of cynical, dark comedy laced with occasional cruelty cut a bit close to the bone at times. Frankie was happy to tell gags about the disabled or child abuse. Luckily I'm not easily offended and neither was the audience, as it was rare for a gag to fail. A few jokes from the routine left me grimacing, and prompted some 'ooohs' from the audience, as I thought, 'should I really be laughing at this'.
King of the one liners, he engaged with the audience, poking fun at one man in the front who looked like 'Someone had shaved a monkey and kicked it through Topman'. His hilarious social and political commentary mocked, among others, Gordon Brown, George Bush and Barak Obama, and the Queen. It appears too that the funnyman doesn't believe in self-censorship. The whole set was an exercise in pushing the barriers of taste and seeing just how far he could go.
I felt one of the show's more provocative parts were the lines which couldn't be shown on Mock the Week, none of which are even remotely printable here. However, there were a number of one liners I felt I'd heard before. They were still funny, but left a sense that parts of the show were old material rehashed, or Mock the Week wisecracks reused. This definitely was an adult show, but an outrageously funny one at that.[/align]
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'In comedy, there's no line that you cannot cross'
Comedian Frankie Boyle is famous for saying the unsayable. Marc Lee meets him
20/11/2008[/align]
[spoil][align=left]The morning I meet comedian Frankie Boyle, the hysteria surrounding "Manuelgate" is at its peak. Russell Brand is a few hours from resigning and Jonathan Ross a few hours from resigning himself to the loss of �1.5 million from this year's pay packet. The issue of what is acceptable in comedy is front-page news. Yet, before I am ushered in to meet Boyle, his PR minder sits me down and insists that I don't bring up the Brand/Ross affair in the interview. In other words, we should not talk about what everybody in the country is talking about. What makes this attempt to censor our conversation particularly bizarre is that Boyle's whole career is built on a reputation for saying the unsayable, for pushing the boundaries of humour. What could he possibly come up with that would be as controversial as much of his material?
Boyle is one of Britain's most daring comedians, delivering a twisted perspective with cheeky nonchalance. His edgy style has found a place in the mainstream since he became a regular panel member on the satirical BBC2 show Mock the Week, in which half a dozen stand-up comedians are invited to be rude about the events of the previous seven days. They are all naughty boys and girls, but Boyle is the naughtiest - and usually the funniest.
Because some of the jokes push the boundaries of decency and taste, Mock the Week found itself caught up in the wake of the Brand/Ross affair. Whether the programme - due to return in the spring - should survive in these sensitive times is debatable. If it is neutered, it won't be worth watching.
Boyle is adamant that there should be no limits on humour. "I think most people believe that. They might say to me, 'That was unacceptable, I didn't find that funny', or whatever, but ultimately they believe in freedom of speech - I've only had one complaint in 12 years. As long as you're not trying to solicit murder, there's no line that you can't cross." Having said that, Boyle himself is censorious of certain fellow comedians. "There's still a lot of racism in stand-up," he says, "but they [the comics] don't seem to recognise it. They just think they're doing a 'funny' Spanish accent or a 'funny' Chinese face. I find it offensive that these people haven't grown up or educated themselves. I have pointed it out to them at times."
If Boyle does have self-imposed no-go areas, he is lavishly outrageous in his opinions of anyone he regards as fair game. In his latest DVD - recorded at a show at the Hackney Empire - his targets include Amy Winehouse ("Looks like a campaign poster for neglected horses"), Ann Widdecombe, John Prescott, Jamie Oliver, and the Duchess of Cornwall.
He's adept at ridiculing his paying customers ("Looks like someone shaved a monkey and kicked it through Top Man," he tells one). There are gags, too, about the disabled, paedophilia, rape and terrorism. Most of them are unrepeatable here, and it is intriguing to watch the faces of the audience at the gig. There are shots of people in tears of laughter, but there are also a fair number of stony faces; some people are uncomfortable, others apparently appalled.
Yet the fans know what to expect before they arrive (on her way into the venue, one gleefully describes the star of the show as "obnoxious and hilarious"), and Boyle receives a rapturous welcome when he saunters on stage. Curiously, for him, it's downhill from that point. No matter how many hundreds of laughs he gets during the evening, he is never satisfied with his performance. "You could have said anything up there; the potential is limitless. You could have hit your absolute peak, but it never happens. It's always a big disappointment afterwards." So Boyle never comes to the end of a show thinking it has been brilliant? "Almost never, not for years anyway."
In the past, he frequently considered quitting. But then, one day, he had a revelation: "I said to someone, 'I can't be bothered to go on tonight.' And they said, 'You say that every night, every gig.' That's when I realised that hating [stand-up] was what made me good at it."
Yet, for all the darkness in his soul (he is introduced at the start of his show as "the blackest man in showbusiness"), Boyle also lets in a little sunshine occasionally. Since becoming a father, he has included a few cute-kid gags, ending his routine by recounting a breakfast-time conversation with his four-year-old daughter in which he tells her she's the best thing in the world, only to learn that, for her, the best thing in the world is sausages. And, if he really is racked by anxiety and self-doubt as the show comes to an end, the beaming look of delight on his face as the crowd roars its approval tells a different story.[/align][/spoil]
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Cruel to be kind of funny
The heir to Billy Connolly�s throne says he has no intention of letting the complainers blunt his comedy scalpel
Allan Brown
28th December 2008[/align]
[spoil][align=left]Beyond debate, this has been the year that�s seen Frankie Boyle installed as the comic laureate of broken Britain � or at any rate the Britain that finds abortion, paedophilia, bulimics and the disabled funny. It�s curious to realise it, but the 36-year-old Glaswegian is the first Scottish stand-up since Billy Connolly to make any sort of dent upon the wider British audience. Until Boyle, there have been few from here with the capacity to replicate the Big Yin�s broad appeal. Connolly has cast a shadow three decades long.
But times change. Look at a Boyle audience today and probably to the bulk of them Connolly is no more than a pensioner with a purple beard, a tame, back-slapping adjunct of Parky and Tarby. Connolly�s comic universe was a sepia-toned realm of shipyards, tenements and bike-shed innuendo. Boyle, on the other hand, gives us news we can use, suggesting with a certain joyful malice the keys that will unlock the cant and doublethink of our mediated modern landscapes. The spice in his act lies in sifting the horrible truths from the childish morbidity. To paraphrase the humorist PJ O�Rourke, many people share Boyle�s world view, especially after a few drinks.
The dividend for Boyle has been acceptance into a gilded academy of comics who, like Ricky Gervais, Paul Merton, Ross Noble and Jack Dee, leave behind the club circuit for television panel shows, theatre tours and live DVDs released for Christmas. He has just concluded his first large national tour, a three-month odyssey through the heartland of middle England, from Carlisle to Leamington Spa: �Sometimes I sit in the dressing room before a show thinking someone in the next room is watching a football match really loudly,� he says. �They aren�t � it�s just the noise 2,000 people make filing into the hall.�
The jump-lead for Boyle�s career has been a regular slot on the BBC2 panel show Mock the Week, an ideal forum for his two-fisted take on current affairs. Before that, though, was a 12-year clamber up the comedy pole, much of it spent within the thankless corridors of BBC Scotland, peddlers of what Boyle dubs the �the gonny-no-flush-my-budgie-doon-the-cludgie school of comedy�. He recalls one producer there asking him to remove a joke about former first minister Henry McLeish because his wife �quite liked� him: �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.�
For all the national recognition this year has brought, though, Boyle seems sanguine. He has a steely certainty about his comic abilities and, thanks to an early brush with teacher-training, an innate confidence in front of crowds. Uncommonly for a stand-up, he can live without audience affection. In conversation he is as sad and thoughtful as his stage persona is harsh and hard. You get the sense that comedy is a rather academic subject to Boyle, a science to be perfected rather than the conduit between himself and a public.
Performing was a means to an end initially, a way of demonstrating he could create material to compete with Connolly and Jerry Seinfeld. He anticipates the day he can retire from the stage and devote himself solely to writing. �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 says. �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.�
By his own admission �the blackest man in showbusiness�, Boyle flirts with sickness for its own sake.�Why do so many paedophiles have beards and glasses?� goes one routine. �What is it about that look children find so sexy?� His stand-up show is a charnel house of contemporary dysfunction, from sexual issues (�Viagra takes half-an-hour to have any effect; I often find in that time the woman has managed to wriggle free�) and gay adoption (�great idea � the dads already know where all the best parks are�), to terrorism and Michael Jackson, performed in front of audiences he believes resemble �a holding pen for the Jeremy Kyle show�.
There�s little light relief in a Boyle show, just the rather bleak sense that outside, the world is morphing into one huge Daily Mail headline. You could see him as a kind of Roy Chubby Brown for people who�ve been through further education. Boyle, meanwhile, positions himself as a kind of malevolent schoolteacher, bullying his subjects to think more critically about the world confronting them: �Sometimes people point out to me that I look like one of The Proclaimers,� as he says in his act. �One? They�re twins, you daft bastard.�
None of this, however, prevented Boyle being dragged into the recent Ross-Brand controversy when a rather poor joke about the Queen he�d made on Mock the Week was adduced as further evidence that BBC standards were plumbing new depths. �When you think about all the extreme stuff I do,� he counters, �I�ve had one complaint to my face in 12 years. That whole Queen joke thing left me quite disappointed by things like Newsnight and John Humphrys. They�re supposed to be the guardians of a public agenda, but then they jump on this thing I said. �These are jokes, they�re not pledges in a manifesto; they shouldn�t have to be justified. The only limitations are whether it�s funny and whether it�s telling people to go out and kill. If someone tells me a joke is unacceptable I say, well, listen to 3,000 people laughing at it � it�s clearly not unacceptable.�
What success means most for Boyle, he says, is the end of his decade-long struggle to achieve it. The completion of the mission means he will be moving back in the new year to live in Glasgow, where his partner, the artist Shireen Taylor, is based with their two children. As of February, Boyle will join the ranks of the weekly BA commuters, shifting to London briefly for blocks of work, then returning. One of Boyle�s children has an uncommon name, which Boyle would prefer not to see in print lest it leads to their being identified as a showbusiness scion at school. Fittingly, there�s a strong streak of playground cruelty through Boyle�s comedy, a sense of the thrill contained within the questionable anatomical nouns, of statements made to provoke sharp intakes of breath.
The child of a labourer and a school dinner lady, Boyle attended a Roman Catholic school in Glasgow southside: �It was like a zoo,� he laughs. �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.� Boyle went on to study English at Sussex University, did care work with mental health patients then teacher-training in Edinburgh. He first tried stand-up as a drunken dare at The Stand comedy club in Glasgow and was later tracked down by its owner, Tommy Shepherd, and invited to perform again. After abandoning teaching, Boyle won an open-mic event at the Edinburgh Fringe. Two years ago he made the move to London.
In between was more than a decade as a dedicated comedy aspirant, albeit one suffocated by his previous, alcoholic lifestyle: �I don�t really believe in the AA view of alcoholism,� he says. �The idea that I�m a recovering alcoholic is unacceptable to me. I hate the idea of imprinting people with the notion that they are addictive personalities and will always have a problem. I believe that you are what you�re doing at the time. It just crushes people�s confidence and makes them more likely to relapse. Studies prove that there�s less recidivism among drinkers who take up tennis than those who join AA.�
One thing is certain: a career advertising Kaliber low-alcohol lager, � la Connolly, was the act of a different Scottish comedy generation altogether.[/align][/spoil]
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A conversation with Frankie Boyle
Stand up comedian, Frankie Boyle, star of comedy panel shows such as Mock the Week, Have I Got News For You, and 8 out of 10 Cats talks to Arts Hub's resident budding comic Sam Stone at the side of a busy roundabout about grief sex, fatherhood and writing jokes.
By Sam Stone
February 20, 2009[/align]
[spoil][align=left]"I Reckon I Could Kill a Labrador" is the unsentimental title of the email that Frankie Boyle sends out inviting me to attend his new material night at Islington's Hen and Chickens theatre. I enjoy the show despite having to stare at the floor. Boyle had asked me not to sit near the front because he would find it "distracting" to get eye contact from someone he knew while delivering a punchline. As a new act comic I find this admission of nervousness from such an accomplished entertainer comforting and disturbing in equal measure. Unfortunately, when I arrive there is only one seat left... second row from the front, hence the staring at the floor.
Our conversation took place after the show on January 21st, a date which has become known as "Blue Monday" because some statisticians have calculated it to be the most depressing day of the year. It is not a day for killing Labradors... it's a day for killing yourself. "I tell you what is depressing," says Frankie, surprisingly softly spoken and wearing a woolly hat that renders him almost unrecognisable, "nominal determinism... that's depressing." Nominal determinism is the notion that your destiny is linked to your name, or the sound of your name. "Payne" for a doctor for example or "Tinkle" for a piano teacher. As Frankie is a "Boyle", this could be interesting but we don�t get the chance to pursue it... as we sit outside Weatherspoons on Highbury roundabout, a very loud roadsweeper passes and the moment is lost as we wait for the noise to diminish, leaving me to ponder the possibility that the machine is operated by a Mr Annoying Bastard.
Pointing out that he has a great name I ask if he has any interesting anagrams for it. I had promised I would not ask the "same old, same old" questions that he must have heard and I reckon he cannot have been asked that before. His reply is typically dismissive, "I cannot think of anything more boring. All the porn in the world would have to dry up and then perhaps my legs fall off and I might get around to working that out."
I laugh because he�s funny. He laughs too, an almost girlish trill of a laugh that rises at the end. Few comedians are as funny in conversation as they are on stage but Boyle is an exception and I am overwhelmed by self-consciousness at how uncomfortable it will be to listen to my own garrulous laughter when I transcribe the taped interview. I begin scribbling the letters of his name on a sheet of paper whilst declaring my intention to complete an anagram by the end of the conversation. Boyle might think I�m square but anything has to be better than being the goofy idiot who laughs at everything he says.
The gig itself was intimate and full of fans delighted to be involved in the process of helping Boyle develop new material in a safe environment. There�s a lot of polite laughter. I�m not suggesting that the jokes weren�t worthy of laughter, but I wonder if having such a supportive gathering of fans is going to provide a realistic verdict for the new jokes. Other than myself, there were no journalists to write critical reviews of material that didn�t quite cut it. Like the rape joke.
Shock-jock comics all over the country commonly perform jokes about rape and similar controversial topics in the hope that breaking taboos will get them noticed. But as they invariably fail to provide sufficient comedic purpose for the inclusion of such material, the only response they get is the embarrassed laughter of audiences keen to prove their understanding that everything is fair game these days. Boyle is in a class of his own, however, when it comes to that kind of joke though and often unleashes stuff that would have other comics booed off the stage. He readily admits that one of his rape jokes did not work tonight and that he�ll have to ditch it. Wanting to offer a more hopeful view, I put it to him that occasionally material doesn�t work because structurally there needs to be something that cushions the blow and that he should not necessarily write it off entirely.
�To be honest,� he says, �I have such a high turnaround of jokes that if I'm doing a new one-hour show every year, that's 120 new jokes. I could go �I need a lighter way into the rape stuff here� and I could purposefully do that, but most of my jokes are a by-product of topical material from TV shows. So there's no time for structure. It's a collection of gags. You try to sort them as best you can.� Some comedians don�t like to talk about the �process of comedy� but Boyle is generous enough to tell me how he writes his material. �If I�m touring, I�m often I'm in the car for five hours and I can't work while I'm driving, so it can be frustrating but I'll take stuff I've pre-prepared. I've got a notebook for different stages of ideas,�
He pulls a slightly dog-eared notebook from his bag and thumbs through it as he talks. �There's a notebook that I'll write ideas down in and they will eventually get upgraded to a 'potentials' notebook. I'll take 'potentials' on the road with me and think about them and try to put three or four potential jokes a night into a tour show. Some of the tour shows have twelve hundred people in the audience so it's hard to force yourself to do those new bits.� Very brave indeed I would say. No wonder a small gathering of friendly Islington folk holds so much appeal.
I first met Boyle backstage at one of my own gigs at The Stand in Edinburgh. Recalling what it was like walking down the street with him as strangers stopped to shake his hand and pat him on the back, I wonder if being a recognisable figure has influenced the nature of the material he writes? �Sort of... there needs to be 'something else' though. I think audiences want a mixture. If I was just doing material about Tony Blair or Gordon Brown for an hour the audience would go nuts.�
At the side of the busy roundabout there is a lot of noise, it�s late and he probably wants to go home. Boyle is still and upright in his woolly hat and I am continuously shuffling about to find a good place to rest the dictaphone or scribble anagrams. He has granted me this interview because beneath that seemingly cynical Glaswegian exterior - that hails from an almost clich�d background of poverty and alcoholism, he is a warm and deceptively optimistic person. If you don�t get that about him, then you�ll be offended by his rape joke. And his wife beating joke. Oh... and his paedophile joke.
It would be too easy to forget how well informed and politically sensitive he is if you just focussed on the fact that much of what he does challenges through its apparent tastelessness. But he is a man of superior intelligence who wipes the floor with other comics with classy topical writing and delivery to match. During the Iraq war which he was strongly opposed to, he tells me that he believes he once had the plug intentionally pulled from his microphone during the �Live Floor Show� from where he was summarily sacked. I asked him why.
�Because they were fucking idiots.�
Before Boyle turned to comedy, he worked in a mental asylum. The work and, consequently, his life, comprised two days on and three days off. He used the lengthy spells away from work to get plastered: �it was fucking amazing... I got to see how an Asylum runs. It was a very good experience. I had no qualifications so I couldn't have got promoted. I would probably still be there if I wasn't doing comedy.�
He gave up drinking ten years ago. He became a different person to the one his wife had met and that took its toll on their marriage. They hardly had any money and once he had taken drink out of the equation, �things just stopped being fun. Nobody can drink that much without getting fucked up... I never got to the wetting-the-bed stage but I was definitely an alcoholic. There's a lot of undiagnosed alcoholics in Britain who drink at that level. There seems to be this almost Viking idiom of drinking, war, sex... it�s weird.�
He shifts easily between the sharp one-liners and matter-of-fact coarseness to the more quietly philosophical observations. When he remarks on his interaction with one of tonight�s audience who had revealed their very low self esteem, he is surprisingly tender, �I must remember to be more positive with people like that.� I suggest this wouldn�t suit him. He agrees, �Yeah it�d be fucking terrible.�
Boyle recently became a father for the second time and I ask him how it feels to bring new life into a dying world. He is unperturbed by my flippancy. �At least with each species that dies out, there will be less to teach your children". He mimes a child pointing, "What's that Daddy?" He shrugs, "Probably a dog, son". "The world is dying", he says, "People are in denial.� I tell him that I find it curious that people are willing to admit this but remain happy to continue having children. �Why wouldn't you?� he insists, � My kids will be ok. Their kids won't be, but mine'll be ok. I think my kids'll live a kind of Mad Max lifestyle. We're definitely supposed to have kids - we're equipped to have them. Why wouldn't you have kids?�
He is asking me this question directly. I simply hold his gaze and remind him that I'm the one asking the questions. I recall a joke from the end of his show about "grief sex" and mention that he's coined a brilliant phrase. He corrects me... the phrase already exists. �I always make sure I throw in a bit of material that I really love right at the end of a show.� He repeats the line, not even a joke yet: " 'There must be some people who are in it just for the grief sex'. ' There's something funny about that, but I don't think there's anywhere to go with it.' I disagree, I think there is. He pauses for thought, then adds "The grief sex is probably what the police go into the job for." Boyle continues, �women do become very aroused around death. They've got this thing about creating life to balance it out.�
Sex and death, I suggest. �It's not about sex and death. It's about sex and life. We're fucking to create life but we forget that because a lot of the time we're not! That can be the title of this piece if you like - Frankie Boyle: Fucking to create life." I suggest it should be the title for his new Edinburgh show. Boyle smiles broadly. �I was thinking about a title for that and was considering, �I Would Quite Happily Punch Every One Of You In The Face.�� But he swiftly returns to his more serious point, �we are fucking to create life. That's what we are doing. We are procreating. We're educated out of it because of the whole fucking love thing. It's very hard to have kids and not love 'em. The forces that rule the planet want us to atomise and like to keep us working. It's very difficult to come to work when you've got a baby. There are some days when all I want to do is stay at home and talk to the baby. Why wouldn't you have kids?�
Again, the question sounds rhetorical but he is asking me directly, so I give him my reply: I cannot think of anything more boring. All the porn in the world would have to dry up and possibly my legs fall off and then I might consider it. I ask him if he thinks he really could kill a Labrador, �I reckon I could, yeah. It would clearly be an effort but I reckon I could. A pit bull, that'd be harder.� I realise that while I am asking whether he could kill a Labrador from a compassionate stance, he is commenting merely on whether he could kill one from a practical one. Unaware of my misgivings, he continues unabashed and takes at face value my observation that he could easily kill a Labrador as they are "soppy as fuck".
�You wait 'til I start gouging it's eyes out,� he counters, �it could turn!�
I finish scribbling, �I�ve got an anagram for you Frankie Boyle.� He leans over and I show it to him - "Real Knife Yob". His face registers something between unease and disappointment. I realise it�s not the nicest of anagrams, - �I can do another one for you if you like.� �No. Please don't.�
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Frankie Boyle
Nihilistic Scot Frankie Boyle loves to stir things up a bit. We caught up with the shock Jock and found him in surprisingly thoughtful mood.
9 December 2008
davetv.co.uk[/align]
[spoil][align=left]Do you find it strange that your dark comedy is a huge hit?
Yeah, it is pretty weird. But, clearly, people are more broad-minded than they're given credit for.
So what inspired you to become a comedian?
The local library. There was nothing to do in the part of Glasgow I came from so I'd go to the library and get comedy records out. That was a big thing for me. All the Monty Python albums, all the Goon Show albums. And I started reading PG Wodehouse so the biggest influences on me have been English, which is quite weird.
Why weird?
Because I think my humour has a very Scottish voice � Scottish humour is a negative, dark thing. Billy Connolly is really unusual � and he's always got a mixed reception in Scotland because of that. He talks about how great and brilliant stuff is. That's not something you hear a lot in Scotland, you know what I mean?
So your dark gags are in the blood?
Well, I've come up through that sort of attitude but I'd like to be doing more political material. It's hard to do loads of that in the live show at the moment because people come to see me with certain expectations. I've got jokes that don't really fit at the moment about Israel and Palestine and weapons being transported through Britain and that kind of stuff. I think that's more the direction for the next tour.
Mock the Week is much sharper than other topical panel shows - you want to take things further?
Absolutely. It's hard to talk about certain things in that show. We did a show when the main news story was Iraq but we lead on John Prescott retiring and you think � for f**k's sake, it really looks like we're going out of our way to talk about the news. In a lot of these shows � I wouldn't say Mock the Week is the worst offender � they have big stories they don't particularly want you to talk about. Also, Mock The Week goes out in the summer and f**k all happens in the summer. We literally start just as parliament closes and then stop as the party conference season begins. This summer we talked about the Olympics for five weeks. We talked about it before the coverage started and carried on after the coverage had finished.
Is that frustrating?
I've always had a political consciousness � they don't use that phrase any more do they? I remember as a kid seeing Ghandi and the bit when he gets thrown off the train... the fact that stuff like that went on really angered me. I must have been 10. I was pretty much a socialist growing up. I joined the labour party when I was 16 but it disillusioned me pretty quickly so I drifted out within a year. I'm anti party politics, but I've always been quite a political person.
Didn't you start your career at The Stand?
Yes, I went down and said "can I do a spot?" and the owner Tommy said "no". I promised to bring 12 mates down to watch and he went "alright then". In 1996 I won a comedy award, which put me on a national student tour. My early stuff was darker than what I do now.
Darker than jokes like "Camilla looks like Diana if she'd survived the crash?"
Yes. It was more about death and murder. I'm trying to think if there were any light bits in it� not really. It was quite Scottish.
You've got a new DVD out, but it's actually taken from your current tour�?
Yeah, I'm still on the road. It finishes in late December. The only problem with the DVD coming out is that I'm still using some of the jokes � so I'm hoping no one will watch it 'til Xmas.
Only some of the jokes?
The live show now is less than half the stuff on the DVD. I'm changing it all the time. If I said all the same words every night I'd go nuts. Absolutely nuts.
How do you decide what to keep and what to drop?
It's when you mess about with material that some really interesting things happen or you finally get the courage to do that new line you weren't sure about. You don't always have perfect judgement - it's a bit trial and error. Like last night I stuck a line on the end of a joke on the DVD about Macy Gray being spit roasted by two guys � I had this idea, a line that says � Macy Gray spit roasted? No wonder she tries to walk away and then stumbles. I did it just through boredom and it went down a storm.
There's a lot of teasing the audience too. Guess that changes every night?
I try to keep the jokes coming fast with no break. The audience chat is really the pause for me. The thing about being on the road for three months is that the chats start to get quite bleak. I just went round the whole gig the other night telling people to kill themselves. You work in what? Kill yourself.[/align][/spoil]
