Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights

Channel 4 back on form if you ask me but I am sure this won't be to everyone's taste. Part stand up, part sketch show, it is half an hour of sick comedy with plenty of swearing and a rather disturbing amount of jokes about paedophilia.

But then that's Frankie Boyle, he likes to push peoples buttons and joke about topics that other comedians wouldn't touch with a barge pole. Frank himself does the stand up, in his usual aggressive Glaswegian banter but a few other regulars are there to help him out with the sketches.

While most of the material is really out there, I love it, because it reminds me of the old days of Channel 4 when they used to do edgy and weird programs all the time. Stuff that makes you wonder if you won't be tainted just for watching it. Great!

God help Frankie's kids though...

Forget the debate about the ethics of this show, the bottom line is this: the sketches in Tramadol Nights are embarrassingly poor. I won't therefore try and defend the morality of them as frankly they aren't worth defending.

As for the stand-up, I do enjoy Boyle if I'm honest. Watching this show reminds me of watching Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle in that you wish it were just all stand-up as the stand-up is so much better than the sketches. Still, I think Boyle has gone too far with the shock factor. In any field, the more shock tactics are used the less effective they become. Boyle already seems to find himself with no more taboos to break and hence no where else to go.

This will serve as an interesting test case in the limits of TV comedy. Boyle tells what are essentially the most offensive jokes conceivable and, if Ofcom let this pass (although I have a feeling they won't), then from this point on anything goes.

I'm not quite sure whether that's a good thing or not.

I recently watched this for the first time and think it's hugely underrated. You never quite know what's coming next and there is a very clear target market.

If you like your comedy about bodily functions, sex, plus a few jokes about pedophiles, the mentally ill, AIDs, land mines, masturbation, scat, etc, then you've come to the right place.

There were a few instances where even I (practically impossible to shock) thought he had pushed a boundary (e.g. jokes about the Moors Murders, or referencing a huge black cock about 20 times in 2 minutes) but there are other instances where the shock that surrounded the show in mainstream media is put on for sensationalist purposes, for example the reference to a bunch of Pakis being blown up - which is really a joke about how our news media puts undue weight on western lives far more so than non western lives.

I thought this was up there with blue jam/day to day in terms of pushing boundaries and would like to see more of it.

Tramadol nights is more bad than good insomuch as more of the runtime is occupied by utterly dire sketches. The stand up is actually quite good and is sometimes top notch powerful, satirical stuff IMO. The sketches always strike me as very childish and unintelligent; a complete contrast really to Boyle's own witty if often crude stand up, which is nearly always amusing. The use of racist words does not offend me even though I am not white; I get that this is dark humour. In fact I think that their use often makes his satirical jokes all the more powerful.

If it was just 1/2 hour of Boyle stand up I would probably give it 8/10. (A bit like Russell Howard's show is mostly stand up, although he is not as good)

While Frankie Boyle has proved he is both inventive and creative in his stand up routines, he seems to have fallen into a draught when making this series. Basically the joke is, replace humour payoff with extremely depressing or shocking twist. This works once or twice, but an entire series based around this idea gets stale quickly. I have great admiration for much of Frankies work in the past, he was the bright spark on Mock the Week, and did a great job on Never mind the Buzzcox. Tramadol nights however, proves that when given full control and no one raining him in, the results are very poor. This series actually made me feel like I had been in an accident or watched a horror film. I much preferred his humour when it was disappeared with other comedians who lightened the tone, and producers who gave him boundaries. Many of his stand up routines follow the same pattern as TNs, and suffer for it. Hopefully, there is a future for Frankie on television, I hope as he ages he mellows as uses his creativity in a new direction.