Frankie Boyle

Frankie Boyle campaigns to save Glasgow city meadow

Frankie Boyle is lending his support to a group of campaigners who are opposing plans to build flats on green space in Glasgow's West End.

Adam Hills: Comedy shouldn't aim to offend

Digital Spy caught up with Adam Hills ahead of The Last Leg's return to talk about whether the Paralympics really had a lasting legacy, his worst ever heckles, and if he finds Frankie Boyle offensive.

Frankie Boyle supports Guantanamo Brit suing MI5 & MI6

Frankie Boyle has today announced a defamation suit against MI5 and MI6 on behalf of Shaker Aamer, the last remaining British resident held in Guantanamo Bay.

When a show causes your hands to involuntarily clamp your face in a Munch-like scream of a Sunday evening, it seems careless not mention it. And so, while there was some good, honest programme-making in the schedules last week I must purge myself of Kookyville before returning to the sphere of the critically temperate.

"Welcome to a sketch show with a difference ..." purred Fenella Fielding, deployed in the Tom Baker/Little Britain role of ironic posho narrator. "These people are not actors or comedians and there's no script ... they're just real funny people."

And if you thought that some combo of comedians, acting, scripts or forethought was almost fundamental to the sketch-show format, then you obviously lack the basic contempt for human beings of the Kookyville commissioners. This, you see, was nothing less than the first example of "constructed reality comedy", in no way the kind of idea that would be farted out by an Apprentice contestant should they ever be asked to tackle TV production.

As with your basic constructed reality show, the idea was that a bunch of purportedly non-fictional people go about their purportedly non-fictional lives while excreting stilted dialogue in obviously staged set-ups. Only here, in a presumed attempt to justify that comedy billing, the dialogue came with the added stench of sub-Frankie Boyle obnoxiousness.

Not every scene was unwatchable. The one involving two Essex girls' protracted intellectual struggle at a farm was merely a failed audition piece for The Only Way is Essex, while Bradford entrepreneur Afzal safely plumped for being re-christened Ricky Meh-vais with his unofficial tribute to David Brent. More attention-grabbing, sadly, was swearword-happy pensioner Ronnie who, likely concerned about the mellow view of her generation being peddled by BBC1's Last Tango in Halifax, mimed a diarrhoea episode in her local Chinese. Before volunteering to chew Simon Cowell's balls.

So vanilla, you say? Well, then, I give you the mother-daughter pair Suzanne and Annierose, seen gawping and gasping at a dwarf before contemplating the horror of one trying to suckle Annierose's breasts. And - my favourite - the hotelier couple who joked about trying to throw a Thalidomide victim through a window, which also allowed for that old impressionist's standard routine, wholly ignored by Rory Bremner et al, the "ickle-wickle Thalidomide victim voice".

The programme was fair in one respect; the joke, such as it was, was on everyone: the short and disabled; the "real" comics, representing all those funny, uncouth sorts outside metropolitan media circles; the godforsaken viewer; and, of course, the beleaguered Channel 4, increasingly prone to trolling audiences for attention. In that respect, Kookyville succeeded, whipping up a social media gale and instant reviews along the lines of "Put this atrocity out of its misery". But the obvious point, inside the Twittersphere and out, is that exercising your right to provoke mindlessly will eventually result only in mass unfollows.

Frankie Boyle: Satirists are too close to Establishment

Frankie Boyle, the comedian, has launched an attack on satirists in Britain, who he accuses of being too close to the Establishment.

Rebecca Adlington took Frankie Boyle comments to heart

London 2012 star Rebecca Adlington has opened up to Digital Spy about Frankie Boyle's comments on her appearance, arguing that female celebrities "are criticised more than men".

Five reasons to go see Mark Watson

The comedian has previously assumed a Welsh persona and had spats with Stewart Lee and Frankie Boyle.

Kevin Bridges talks Frankie Boyle, Chad Hogan...

Kevin Bridges, who turns 26 this week, definitely loves Glasgow.

Frankie Boyle, Hammersmith Apollo - review

While his thesis made some sense, his show felt scattershot, never grasping its theme of a culture in freefall.