Wings Over Sealand

Call me naive or innocent or gullible or whatever, but I was really looking forward to Frankie Boyle’s Tramadol Nights. The cheeky wee Glasgow scamp was more or less single-handedly responsible for making Mock The Week watchable – which I’m aware isn’t an exactly controversial view.

But what’s less commonly realised is that the reverse is also true.

On reflection, the abysmal quality and nature of Tramadol Nights (based on the two episodes screened so far) should have been easier to predict, via the simple method of watching Boyle’s latest DVD (and even, to a lesser extent and with the benefit of hindsight, his eponymous first one).

“If I Could Reach Out Through Your TV And Strangle You I Would” can’t be said to be billing itself as a family-friendly unit shifter, but even so it’s remarkable to sit through its extraordinary hostility towards an audience that’s treating Frankie Boyle very well indeed these days.

Recorded on his equally-unwelcomingly-titled “I Would Happily Punch Every One Of You In The Face” tour (supposedly his last), Frankie walks onstage to an absolutely tumultuous reception and proceeds to spend the first six minutes charmlessly abusing individual members of this adoring audience with pre-prepared lines clearly just waiting to be directed at the first slightly fat or ginger or camp-looking sap he spots in the front row.

When someone like Al Murray pulls this same lazy schtick, at least he has the excuse that he’s playing a horrible character we’re supposed to hold in mocking contempt, but Boyle just comes across as a nasty bully with a tendency to reflexively throw “homosexual” as a term of abuse at anyone who doesn’t have any more obvious characteristics to pick on.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m sure anyone who bought a ticket, especially a front-row one,  for a Frankie Boyle show knew what they were letting themselves in for, and the title doesn’t leave much room for complaining about misleading advertising. I’m just not sure why “You want to be a professional cricketer? You fucking English cunt” is supposed to be very funny.

Eventually we get to some actual jokes (many of them previously seen on TV), whereupon Frankie manages to pull off the faintly astonishing feat of making you feel slightly sorry for Jade Goody and Jordan (and viewers, you REALLY need to be going some to get that reaction out of me).

It carries on in the same vein for another hour or so, occasionally throwing in some funny and clever material amid the dull, witless insults (Susan Boyle isn’t related to him and has a penis, oh my poor sides), endless rape and paedophilia jokes and more audience abuse. (“You want to be a policeman? You fucking little cunt”, he spits at a boy of about 12 with braces on his teeth.) It’s basically a very marginally post-modern Bernard Manning show.

(Because the appeal of Manning was that he too could phrase his bigotry in funny ways. People didn’t just go to see him because he hated foreigners, he could also craft a good line. Any idiot can say “I hate Pakis”, but to get an audience  – even an audience of cretins – you have to do it in a way that makes people laugh. That’s why the BNP never win any elections: even racists listen to them and think “Jesus, I don’t want to be associated with this bunch of pigshit-thick mouth-breathers”.)

The point, though, is that it’s so relentlessly one-dimensional that the “shock” material – which is to say, the entire show – loses all its power. Boyle’s stuff works on Mock The Week because (a) the language gets slightly toned down so that it comes across more like righteous anger than gratuitous nastiness, and (b) it’s surrounded by everyone else’s milder contributions – Russell Howard going on about spaniels and rainbows, you know the sort of thing.

(It helps that on MTW Boyle usually looks a bit bashful when everyone reacts to one of his more off-colour lines, doing that cute hamsterish nose-twitch thing and coming across like a naughty but ultimately loveable schoolboy. On his own he seems to be driven more by sheer malicious spite.)

Set against MTW’s tame backdrop, it can once again seem scandalous enough to make the viewer’s jaw – and those of his fellow panellists – drop. But robbed of such a context, much of Boyle’s material is just a monotone drone of  bitterness and hate, some mouthy drunken pub bore being obnoxiously rude about soft targets like fourth-rate celebrities or hackneyed stereotypes of various social groups. And unfortunately that’s exactly what happens for the majority of Tramadol Nights.

Filmed in front of another adoring crowd, this time at home in Glasgow, the show comprises short bursts of standup (almost all of which you’ve heard before on MTW or the DVDs, right down to the specific bits of audience abuse  – with different arbitrary victims – and the ostensibly ad-libbed stuff like fingering Susan Boyle with a “bowler’s grip”) interspersed with a few sketches.

And it IS a few – in the post-Fast Show age where we’re used to gags (even in sketch shows) being machine-gunned out at a rapid rate, Tramadol Nights manages just three or four per 24-minute episode, and almost every one of them is dragged out to about five times the length it needs to be to get its joke – should there be one – across.

Episode 1, for example, kicks off with a Knight Rider sketch based on the premise that KITT wasn’t really a talking car, but that Michael Knight was just mentally ill. As a one-liner it’s a sort of funnyish idea, but the sketch drags this paper-thin gag out for almost four and a half minutes, without ever adding anything to it beyond that core thought.

The second half of the show pulls the same trick with the puerile notion “Wouldn’t it be funny if in The Green Mile, the convict John Coffey had cured people by having sex with them instead of touching them with his hands?” Get that joke? Then be ready to sit there and get it for almost five minutes, because that’s how long it gets dragged out for, parroting whole chunks of the movie verbatim but with sex instead of touching.

It’s made all the more painful by the fact that while Boyle is undoubtedly a skilled standup craftsman (albeit in a way that only works in certain controlled circumstances) he can’t act for shit. You might think you’ve seen people who can’t act before – perhaps at your child’s school pantomime, or in old episodes of Crackerjack or The Stephen K. Amos Show – but seriously, you’ve never seen anyone who can’t act this badly before.

(A particularly major weakness in Frankie’s thespian armoury is accents – as anyone who’s ever watched MTW will already know – so it’s extra-specially strange that almost every sketch in the series so far has had him playing an American, something he clearly finds particularly difficult.)

And it doesn’t help that the show’s supporting players – including Canadian comic Tom Stade and Scotland’s own excellent Rab Florence – are so much better. In fact, the only sketches that aren’t toe-curlingly embarrassing to watch are the ones Boyle himself doesn’t appear in, whether they’re the relatively snappy “Loose Women Iran” or the quite funny cartoon-based “George Michael’s Highway Code”. (Going for the hard targets again, there.)

After those another couple of minutes go on a totally incomprehensible sketch about Brokeback Mountain – showcasing yet more dodgy homosexuality material – then we’re back for another bit of brief reheated standup about disabled people and some vaguely misogynist and racist stuff about famous women Frankie doesn’t like and it’s all over. (Rinse and repeat for Episode 2.)

Basically, if you find the line “What do Japanese people call their Jap’s-eye? “My eye”?” hilarious (hello again, Mr Manning), but you haven’t seen any of the DVDs, and you’ve got a Sky+ box so you can fast-forward through all the sketches once you’ve got the joke (ie after the first 10 seconds), you’ll get two or three minutes of amusement out of an episode of Tramadol Nights. Anyone else will have more fun with some actual Tramadol.

Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll do Mock The Week again on the way down.