Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights

Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights review

Channel 4 played its cards very close to its chest with Tramadol Nights; releasing not so much as a preview clip before last night's premiere, perhaps for fear of sparking tabloid outrage. And, sure enough, there was plenty to offend in Frankie Boyle's stand-up and sketch hybrid - but also plenty to enjoy for those who have no issue with his pungent humour.

Glaswegian comedian Frankie Boyle's controversial interjections on Mock The Week turned that show into must-see TV for many, and his loss made the show immediately less infamous. There's certainly a place for Boyle's brand of "shock comedy" on network television, particularly in a landscape currently dominated by family-friendly comics like Michael McIntyre, Rhod Gilbert and John Bishop. Sadly, Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights is a horrendous mess, on the evidence of its first episode.

It uses a tried-and-trusted format: stand-up comedy interspersed with sketches. What's unfortunate is that (a) Boyle's stand-up routines are taken directly from his recent tour, meaning many fans will have heard the jokes before, and (b) the sketches were idiotic attempts at shocking people that dragged on past their natural end points. The first sketch, running with the idea that David Hasselhoff's character in Knight Rider was mentally ill, was perhaps the worst offender - a target 25 years out of date, a stupid idea you'd expect from a schoolboy, producing a sketch that seemed to last forever. Other sketches included candid camera spoof "Hide Me, I've Killed A Kid", an animated "George Michael's Highway Code" (topical?) and a bizarre parody of The Green Mile where the black character's supernatural power came from... raping people?

Tramadol Nights was objectionable in a way it wasn't aiming for; a show with zero intelligence behind it. I could scarcely believe Frankie Boyle's the bearded ringmaster of this tripe, as the prospect of a Channel 4 comedy from him was a delicious prospect up until last night. Too much of its sketches were pale excuses for Boyle to visually enact jokes that work better in the minds of an audience being told them verbally. At the very least, someone should have reminded Boyle that a sketch works best if it's less than two-minutes long, not twice that.

The sole positive: you don't need to buy Frankie Boyle's DVD as a stocking filler this Christmas, because it seems likely all of its material will be served up here each week.

It's not a widely held sentiment but, occasionally, you could feel slightly sorry for Frankie Boyle, someone who's now more famous for being controversial than for actually being funny. Still, anyone who describes Jonathan Ross as "a £500 haircut on top of a pile of melting ice cream" can't be entirely bad, a fact you hope is borne out by this mix of sketches and live material.

The acerbic comedian blends stand up routines with surreal sketches in his new Channel 4 series, and while he may not be to everyone's tastes, there's plenty to savour for fans of his often-controversial material. Sadly Boyle seems to have slipped into the habit of merely regurgitating a series of punchlines deliberately designed to shock, but there are still flickers of him at his jet-black best that are well worth tuning in for. WARNING: if you're easily offended, you're going to be offended easily.

Former Mock the Week regular Frankie Boyle has repeatedly courted controversy with his near-the-knuckle jibes. This new mix of sketches and stand-up is unlikely to be to everyone's taste, but let's hope it shows there's more to Boyle's acerbic comedy than merely getting laughs by causing offence.

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Nothing is taboo in comedy, insists Frankie Boyle, who cultivated his near-the-knuckle humour because "I've actually got a really soft, high-pitched voice, which is crap for stand-up, so I had to really shout and that has given me quite an aggressive style".