Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights

Too outrageous for Mock The Week, Frankie Boyle has got his own show now. It's on Channel 4 so he's free from the BBC's post-Sachsgate compliance rules and can be even more offensive and even funnier, yes? Presumably that's the concept of Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights. I wasn't offended by any of the jokes in the opener; I just didn't find them very funny. Rules can be daft but they can force a comedian to work harder and be more clever. No need here.

"How ya doin', ya big f****n' Loyalist terrorist suspect?" These were Boyle's first words, aimed at a formidable, shaven-headed man in the audience. He also called the delighted victim a "big gun-running bisexual". Then Catholics got it, then all religious groups. Then gay people (they got it a lot), then John Leslie, George Michael, Ryanair, the Japanese and the mentally ill before finally Boyle cracked a joke I can repeat in a family newspaper, where he lamented the somewhat one-dimensional nature of The Jeremy Kyle Show: "He rounds up his audiences by firing tranquiliser darts into Farmfoods. There's never an edition called I Wanted To Go To Tuscany, You Swine!"

The stage routine was interspersed with filmed sketches which showed up his limitations as a comic actor. I say stage, but the set was a rooftop in the style of a classic movie. As Frankie got more and more enraged, I thought he was going to do a Jimmy Cagney and, in a nod to White Heat, blow himself up. Maybe next time.

In [Frankie Boyle's] new series Tramadol Nights, the notoriously abrasive comedian, who rose to fame on BBC Two's Mock The Week, demonstrated that he can make mincemeat of anyone, with a mere one-liner.

"You look like a child's drawing of a dead baby," he told one member of the (presumably masochistic) front row, but that's practically a compliment from Boyle, who has found himself in hot water before for making fun of people with Down's syndrome, and comparing Olympic swimmer Rebecca Adlington to "somebody looking at themselves in the back of a spoon".

Boyle's modus operandi - a mixture of stand-up and pre-recorded sketches - is to say the unsayable. It works best when he is having a pop at something monolithic enough to take, or indeed deserve it, so the best of the sketches were those that satirised the bland inanity of TV culture. In a dark send-up of the hidden-camera reality show format, a man has to convince his friend that he has accidentally killed someone.

I'm less comfortable with the jokes about mental illness - in this episode more or less restricted to crude impressions conflating religion and autism. Here it's not at all clear who or what Boyle is targeting - is it political correctness, or our own prejudices? Whatever his intention, the net result feels too much like an unenlightening mocking of difference.

Boyle's one-liners are, in fact, his strong suit, the vitriol often counterbalanced by sheer verbal flair. But on the whole there's something very brittle about the laughter. The world seems a meaner place after listening to Boyle.

Tramadol Nights is like a really crap version of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, in that it's a mixture of stand-up and sketches. It's a shame to have to mention both them in the same sentence but it demonstrates that celebrity and not talent gets things commissioned, seeing as Lee waited a decade to get a series while Boyle does it without breaking a sweat. Still, the latter did have to lower himself to jokes about Jeremy Kyle, and sketches about hidden camera shows and The Green Mile. Yep, it's 2010 people in case you've forgotten.

As Mr Boyle spreads himself quite thinly, and was a regular on a panel show where the guests consistently use their stand-up routines under the guise of spontaneous improvisation, a lot of this material has been seen on telly before. Even the audience member putdowns is the same stuff he always does when faced with his usual aggressive interaction.

That's not to say that in the right circumstances he can't be funny but Frankie Boyle has to understand that he's not Jerry Sadowitz, and his fans (the idiots who are blind to see that Mock The Week has steadily improved since he left, now the other panelists can get a word in) need to realise that he's just not that good.

Frankie Boyle has a reputation for being outrageous, and his new C4 show, Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights, certainly didn't disappoint. No sooner had the comic bounded on to the stage than he was ridiculing an audience member for looking like "a dead baby drawn by a child" and describing the Pope and Susan Boyle as "two people who look unconvincing in a dress". Running themes included paedophilia, anal sex, masturbation, mental illness and drug abuse.

The show is a mix of stand up, sketches and an animation called George Michael's Highway Code in which we see the celebrated singer not paying due care and attention to the road as he indulges in various practices I feel are best left to your imagination.

Boyle's stand-up is characteristically assured and hard hitting, peppered with astute and acerbic observations. He is also disarmingly likeable.

However, the sketches are less consistent, undermined in no small part by the star's inability to act his way out of a paper bag. Pastiches of The Green Mile and Knight Rider went on far too long, taking their initially amusing comic concepts to the very edge of tedium.

On the whole, however, this is a very funny show. Was I offended by the material? Not really - Boyle really must try harder.

Frankie Boyle needs barring. I'd hope we'd seen the last of this unpleasant comic when he left the BBC's Mock The Week but, no, up he popped this week on Channel 4 with Frankie Boyle's ­Tramadol Nights, a new show mixing stand-up with sketches. It was awful. Boyle's big idea is to be as nasty as possible to as many people as possible.

Wow, Frankie, that's never been done before. American comedian Bill Hicks founded that particular style back in the late Eighties. But he was slightly different to Boyle - he was occasionally funny.

Boyle, however, mistakes outrage for humour and just ends up coming across like an attention-seeking ­simpleton. An attention-seeking ­simpleton with a silly ginger beard. Does that offend you, Frankie?

Frankie Boyle's return to TV: what did you make of it?

The controversial comic is now free of the BBC straitjacket - but has Channel 4 just given him enough rope to hang himself?

Bad luck Daily Mail. We hate to be the bearer of bad news but its favourite new hate figure, Frankie Boyle, had 1.3 million viewers tune into his new Channel 4 show Tramadol Nights last night but only drew, wait for it, 10 complaints. Better get looking at the messageboards instead chaps.

There's been no good reason to watch Mock the Week since Frankie Boyle upped sticks, so I'd been looking forward to reviewing Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights. Unfortunately Channel 4 said there were no previews available, which is usually PR speak for "We don't think it's much good and we want to avoid it getting a kicking." Brian Logan has reviewed Tramadol Nights for us this morning to see if our fears were justified, though if Channel 4's decision to promote The Morgana Show, another new comedy series, instead is anything to go by then Frankie is dead in the water.

Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights is a mix of stand-up and sketches. The stand up was Boyle's usual stuff - literally, in fact, as most of the material was taken from his recent tour and DVD. That said, it was mostly good, if you enjoy his brand of controversial vitriol. Where the programme really fell apart was the sketches. What started as a nice idea for a quick sketch about Knight Rider's Michael Knight hearing KITTs voice in his head turned into an epic which went on and on long after the joke had worn thin. A sketch about decade-old film The Green Mile fell flat and another, about Brokeback Mountain veered dangerously close to entirely relying on homosexuality being a hilarious concept of itself, without any subtext or point.

And that's the main problem with Tramadol Nights, there doesn't appear to be any point to any of the sketches, save for one about the Iranian version of Loose Women, with the burka-wearing presenters being hanged, which was astonishingly jarring next to the puerile humour of the rest of the show. I'm all for more comedy on television that pushes the edges of taste and decency, but Boyle needs to be more careful with his targets. Controversy for the sake of controversy does not work but there seems very little more to Tramadol Nights than an attempt to shock. The best "shocking" comedy, whether it's South Park's biting satire or Jerry Sadowitz's challenging stand-up, has so much more depth than what was seen here. It is a disappointment, because Boyle at his best can be a whirlwind of energy and caustic wit. It seems this format isn't the right vehicle for him. Perhaps Mock the Week was.

Frankie Boyle is the only comedian currently working who has the ability to delight and offend in such equal measure and he more than met expectations tonight with this new blend of stand-up and sketches.

Cantering gleefully - but never gratuitously - past the boundaries of taste and decency, Frankie brought us such gems as George Michael's Highway Code and Loose Women Iran.

His acting isn't necessarily up to much, but his comic timing is perfect and the script displayed flashes of brilliance.

Boyle did, however, perform a disappointingly weak sketch parodying The Green Mile, but his take on Knight Rider more than made up for it.

The episode's standout piece was undoubtedly his attack on the BBC's perceived penchant for political correctness, in a sketch about a bland TV show called Untitled Street. 'I've got that thing you asked for,' says one faceless character. 'Adjective, adjective, verb,' replies the other.

His live material was also excellent - despite not sitting too naturally amongst the sketches - and his interaction with the audience provided ad-libbing worthy of its own dedicated show.

And with some fantastically acerbic rants about religious people and the mentally ill (they are of course much of a muchness, according to Boyle), it was clear to see that the comedian felt free to insult and incite in his quest for humour.

Naturally, the mood of the programme was unsettling, but actually, the most disturbing thing about the show was the rare sight of Boyle smiling so much. Always in character, of course.