★★☆☆☆
Even in the fetid and feral media atmosphere of the early 2000s — that unmourned age of tabloid witch-hunts, rabidly judgmental celebrity magazines and Big Brother racism scandals — the comedian Frankie Boyle was distinguished for his cruelty.
Rebecca Adlington, he sneered, resembled “someone who’s looking at themselves in the back of a spoon”. The model Katie Price dated muscular men because she needed someone to stop her disabled son Harvey from sexually assaulting her. Jimmy Savile did charity work so he could go to heaven to rape Madeleine McCann.
I know that the line that separates gratuitously horrible comedy from the kind that usefully prods the boundaries of the sayable is blurry, indistinct, arbitrary, contested, porous etc, etc … but Boyle’s stuff never struck me as clever or curious, merely as grimly attention-seeking opportunism.
Now Boyle, scenting a change in the cultural wind, has rather implausibly reinvented himself as a righteous critic of social injustice. For anyone who last tuned into his career when he was in court defending himself from the charge of racism after using the n-word in a comedy show, it is somewhat bewildering to discover Boyle piously reprimanding Ricky Gervais for making jokes about trans people. Boyle’s own comedy has pivoted to safer targets: the government, wicked billionaires, the iniquities of capitalism and so on.
All of this is a long way of saying that I was not disposed to enjoy Boyle’s new podcast, Here Comes the Guillotine, which he presents with the comedians Susie McCabe and Christopher MacArthur Boyd. But it is good to stretch one’s critical impartiality every so often. In an ideal world, all the people we liked and approved of would be sparklingly witty and all the people we thought were hypocritical rotters would be leaden, unfunny bores.
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But the universe does not shake out along such satisfying lines. Boyle is capable of being funny. The devilishly banterous podcast persona is preferable to the bombastic style of his stand-up and panel show appearances. And some of his comic riffs are irresistible. He has a good off-the-cuff rant about why Voldemort keeps returning to Hogwarts. Shouldn’t he have bigger targets than his old school? What does he want? To restructure the curriculum? Less enjoyable is the bad-taste sniggering over how “hot” Jackie Kennedy looked in her pink dress with her dead husband’s brains all over it. The other “controversial” subjects feel dreary and inevitable: Savile, Nazis, crack addicts.
• Frankie Boyle fears backlash to offensive jokes
It is when the podcast shades into political commentary that it becomes properly dubious. If Here Comes the Guillotine is not outright conspiracist in tone then it is at least badly informed and unhelpfully suspicious-minded. The difference between edgy joke and sincerely held weird theory is not always clear. The prevalence of Hollywood zombie films, Boyle says, is an expression of elite fears about being attacked by hordes of the common people. When McCabe says “the Muslims have been the fall guy for the West ever since their wealth has started to overtake the West”, I don’t think she comes over as progressive as she intends. Millions of the poorest people in the world are Muslims and it seems a bit strange to lump the experience of two billion people together so blithely. Then there is the chat about establishment paedophiles (including a reference to the debunked idea that Ted Heath abused children) and some vague stuff about how the education system prevents critical thinking.
This sort of poorly thought-out speculation and nonsense would never have been broadcast in the old media world of pedantic producers and broadcasting standards. One of the downsides of the age of podcasting is that it now flows into the mainstream unchecked. I don’t think it’s just my allergy to Boyle that makes me find that a bit depressing.
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