My Shit Life So Far

by Frankie Boyle

  ‘Who do you hate most in showbusiness?’ someone piped up.

  ‘Fucking Richard Wilson!’ I growled, to everybody’s bemusement.

  That said, it’s no surprise that people sometimes choose to hire me to host a corporate awards ceremony. I’m an asset at such events with my stony face and lack of interpersonal skills. Also, I have such a huge lack of understanding of business; the people I meet might as well be telling me that they’re fairies for all I understand of what they do. Anyway, one time a prize winner was having her photo taken with me and tried to shove her finger up my arse. I suppose that doing a corporate show,

  that’s kind of where you’re taking it anyway. God, I really wish I had that photo.

  Something fairly bizarre happens at almost every one of those shows. The other night the guy who was introducing me got in a quick plea for money for his polio charity. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as an ideal introduction, but this one started with ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, I want you to cast your mind back to 1950 when polio was the AIDS of its day.’ Some of these shows are alright, but round about Christmas they all get like those parties Fred Flintstone and Barney used to show up at in their water-buffalo hats.

  The whole idea of corporate sponsorship in itself is pretty weird. I love the fact Stella Artois sponsor Film 4, ‘cos boy does Stella make you think of arthouse films. I’d like to think how some films would pan out if you added Stella. I’d like to see Brief Encounter where Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard agonise about forbidden love. Add a couple of Stellas and he’s nuts deep in her in the station toilet, she’s combing the sick out of her hair. Kramer vs. Kramer—a great analysis of a man coming to love his son before a heart-wrenching courtroom scene where he battles for custody with his ex-wife. Add a couple of Stellas—he turns up for court wearing just a towel and an electronic parrot he’s programmed to tell the judge to go fuck himself.

  For the second Live Floor Show series on BBC Scotland I started writing for Craig Hill. That was great fun and lasted for a few years; we wrote a load of his telly performances and a couple of his Fringe shows together. I’d toodle round to his flat for about ten in the morning, and then we’d gossip about celebrities for half an hour and eat doughnuts and drink coffee. I was surprised at how big a gay side I had to draw on. Craig said he’d sit and watch his shows with his friends and they’d be shocked that the campest stuff had generally been written by me. I’ve always had a slightly snobbish, judgemental side, so I could write catty. Not that any of it would have worked if it wasn’t channelled through Craig’s enthusiasm and showmanship. Craig liked to do audience putdowns, so it was fun writing cruel lines for his adoring crowds.

  ‘Hello, madam! I’ve always loved people who have the ability to do make-up in the car. Did you hit a couple of speed-bumps?’

  That kind of thing. My particular favourite, which he could sell with just the right jolly callousness was:

  ‘Don’t worry, madam. One day you’ll meet a man who’ll love you for what you are. Forty.’

  I often wondered how the world’s very first gay guy got on in caveman society.

  ‘I made a pass at Steve the other day—he wasn’t into it but luckily I managed to pass it off as a wrestling hold. I wish somebody would hurry up and invent beer.’

  It was during the second series of that show that I really got into doing topical, political stuff as it was interesting being on TV at a time of various political fuck-ups. The massive overspend on the Scottish parliament building, for example, basically confirmed the image we’d all had of Scottish politicians being corrupt or incompetent. After all, the whole idea of politicians commissioning buildings and redesigning town centres is ridiculous. Having spent a lifetime blinking through senseless meetings about towpaths, they are the most tasteless people on earth. Would you let an MSP decorate your front room? Politicians simply can’t be trusted to spend public money on anything stylish. And yet no reply to my proposal to the parliament that every candidate should be forced to have a running mate who is a flamboyant homosexual.

  Do you know what occurs to me from a few years of writing gags about the various scandals and fuck-ups? It seems that our politicians aren’t very good at organising things. Now some of us would have thought that being organised would be exactly the sort of thing a politician should be good at. That is simply naÏve. Just as you or I forget to pay a bill or are late with a tax return, a politician will consider it a good week if he has not released hundreds of rapists onto the streets or accidentally closed down a world-class medical facility. One of the great things about politicians is that they sit in their highly paid jobs always teetering on the edge of disaster. Never knowing which of their recent decisions—based entirely on ill-informed guesswork—might be about to dash their career to pieces.

  Take the Iraq war, for example. The news at the time was dominated by the war and the government was being criticised for not giving soldiers more medals. To be fair it was really difficult finding enough bits left to pin them on. British forces have helped train 20,000 Iraqi troops; hopefully not too well though, as we’ll be going back to fight them in ten years’ time. According to the UN our presence in Iraq in 2009 is totally illegal, even if we are only there as a training force. The excuse ‘It’s not illegal, I’m only here teaching them English’ didn’t work for Gary Glitter, nor should it work for the military.

  If there is a lesson to be learned from Iraq, it must be this. Never invade a country where everyone has guns. These are people who take six guns to a barbeque. Iraqi Antiques Roadshow is probably an endless parade of 1970s rocketpropelled grenade launchers. ‘No, I’m not going to get it insured, Hugh. I’m going to fire it into a queue outside a police station.’

  I also started writing for Jim doing the Reverend Obadiah Steppenwolfe III. We would get really stoned and take ecstasy and write from noon till about ten at night. One particularly drugfuelled writing day led to a truly mental sketch where the Reverend presided over a wedding between a member of the audience and a sinister character we’d invented called Chauncey O’Hallorahan Junior. Chauncey was a military fantasist played by the comedian Sandy Nelson and had lines that I could barely tell anyone for laughing, delivered in a droll American monotone.

  ‘I get all the vitamins I need eating pussy. And vitamin supplements.’

  ‘I once made love to a bride on her wedding day. Felt like I came in the cake.’

  And my favourite, the inexplicable greeting he gives to the ‘bride’ who gets dragged from the audience:

  ‘When I ride you, I will be resplendent like a Griffin.’

  One night during the series, I went to lend moral support to Jim when he did a charity gig with Phil Kay. Moral support in this context means ‘roll joints’. They were doing a show for a homeless charity and it was packed out. The organiser was a bubbly little Australian who’d only just started in her job and this was the first event she’d put on. There was a lot of beer about and we managed to get her quite drunk and stoned. Phil was going through a phase where he just sang his whole act, accompanying himself on a guitar, despite not really being able to play. He did the first half by himself—it was great too, he’s still the only comedian who is genuinely just making it all up.

  ‘Is Jim going to sing too?’ asked the organiser. ‘I really think the crowd would like him to sing.’

  I came back with ‘I think the crowd would like to hear you sing!’—a proposition which she took strangely seriously. Seeing the possibility for chaos, I pressed her on it, insisting that the evening would be strangely lacking if she didn’t go on and belt out a few crowd pleasers. Jim did his show and then, as we were sitting backstage smoking, it became apparent that the lady had taken to the stage with Phil and begun a long, improvised song. We looked through the curtain to see them both sat at the edge of the stage, swaying gently as she sang about what would appear to have been quite a lonely childhood. Her boss came backstage afterwards looking shell-shocked.

  ‘That
was great, wasn’t it?’ we suggested, as he struggled to chew down a mixture of anger and confusion.

  ‘Well,’ he eventually offered, ‘I think we should have maybe had the raffle during the interval, instead of at the end.’

  Brilliant. That was clearly what had gone wrong with the evening, we all agreed.

  THIRTEEN

  At the same time as appearing on the Live Floor Show, I got a job writing for another TV programme in Scotland, a hugely misguided panel show called Caledonia McBrains. It was supposed to be like a Scottish version of Have I Got News For You, but the BBC wanted to use archive rather than current news footage. We’d kick off every week by making the panel do gags about the local news from 1973. It was truly an amazing disaster but got quite a bit of coverage, for example two pages of the Daily Record under the headline ‘The Worst Show Ever’. It was a fun job though. Every week I’d pour all my efforts into filling the script with references to classical monsters. Minotaurs, Mermen, Griffins, on a good week it was like watching Dominik Diamond read aloud from a medieval bestiary. It also meant that I’d made the move to working full time in television, which made me wonder if I might be becoming a bit of a cunt.

  I’ve always had a pretty ambivalent attitude to being on TV. It is, after all, just a shiny bauble used to distract morons while they’re having their pockets picked. I don’t actually own a telly—haven’t for maybe seven or eight years. I found it to be brutally addictive and also just a drug I’d take without making a choice. If you want to get stoned you have to admit you want to get stoned and go find some drugs. If you want to experience the numbed high of watching two celebrities compete to see who can become the best plumber, you just drift into that hell without making a conscious decision.

  A lot of people get quite conscious of their appearance because they’re on TV. I can barely even be bothered to wash my face. Natalie Cassidy has revealed she is still unhappy when she looks in a mirror despite losing four stone and having a boob job. Could it be that her mirror is still showing her her face? She said that whenever she went out to dinner she would take a bag of laxatives with her. The laxatives to help clear the food, the bag to slip over her head should she spot a bloke she fancied.

  Most television programmes underestimate our intelligence. I’d imagine that there are actually many animals in houses across Britain that are bored by Dancing on Ice. The fact that such a spectacle gets respectable viewing figures means that people take a lot more hardcore drugs than official statistics suggest. Only someone semi-conscious on a methadone and ketamine cocktail could actually enjoy seeing Ulrika Jonsson skate into some advertising hoardings. Or perhaps they’re just too blasted to work the remote. And remember that stramash about the BBC proving itself to be unreliable? They showed footage that seemed to show the Queen storming out of a photo shoot in a huff. It transpired that she had actually stormed into the photo shoot in a huff and then had an argument.

  The problem is that a lot of programming is just not quite appalling enough to be entertaining. Children in Need is the worst offender. Pudsey bear actually has two perfectly good eyes. Inside his eyepatch he keeps a photo of a little crippled boy and he looks at it all through the show and pisses himself laughing. And what is Comic Relief really achieving? Fattening some little fucker up enough that he can get eaten by a crocodile? People in Africa aren’t starving. They’re fine. The whole thing got sorted out years ago when Jamie Oliver came up with a cheap and nutritious recipe for flies. In fact, the only people that live in Africa are Billy Connolly, Lenny Henry and Westlife. They’ve turned the whole of Africa into a big waterslide park using our money. Do you know what they do once a year? They get all the blankets and toys and stuff that we’ve sent in and they have a huge bonfire!

  ‘That’s it Lenny! Throw another incubator into the bonfire! That’d be brilliant! Some nutter sat in a bath full of beans for a week to buy that…ahhahaha! Oh this is brilliant!’

  Hasn’t Richard Curtis built up enough good karma over the years? He could stop Comic Relief now and still comfortably be in credit with the universe. In fact he could rape a special-needs basketball team. It would certainly be a lot more entertaining than watching French and Saunders parody The Sixth Sense. It’s not that I’m totally against donating to Comic Relief. For example, I’ll donate a million pounds if the whole cast touch the roof of their mouths with a loaded shotgun while riding on a rollercoaster. But people sitting in a bathful of beans for starving Africans? Send them the fucking beans!

  Celebrities appear on these things to get exposure. Great, climb towards that money pot on the backs of dying children you sick, sick fucks. I’m appalled by telethons but I’d hate you to think that I don’t do my bit. I give a lot of money to the Third World. Indirectly, through my investments in landmines and diamorphine. I’ve made more money out of Africa than Paul Simon.

  There are a lot of shows out there that are boring or halfwitted, but you feel that if they just lowered their standards a couple of notches it could all become genuinely fun. Here are a few examples of what I’d like to see.

  THE 2050 HOUSE

  A modern British family are set the task of living as they would in the year 2050. Dad doesn’t go to work each day, he simply plugs a cable into his head and enters a virtual work world. This leaves him more time for his hobbies of tennis and golf, which he plays by plugging cables into his back and neck. Just as we feel we are getting to know the Jones family, they are all killed by the government for going outside without their Identity Hats.

  CELEBRITIES ON ACID ON ICE

  Just like Dancing on Ice, but with an opening sequence where Graham Norton hoses the celebrities down with liquid LSD. Imagine the entertainment to be had in seeing Emma Bunton skate erratically across screen believing she is being pursued by a fourth-dimensional entity. Then as she collapses to the ice, her face turns to camera and we see her howl her growing knowledge into a melting world.

  CELEBRITY CELEBRITY BIG BROTHER

  Instead of all the nobodies who do Celebrity Big Brother, we get some real celebrities. Clint Eastwood has a bitter argument with Bruce Willis over teabags. Will Smith becomes favourite as Madonna and Angelina Jolie fall out over who gets to adopt him. Tom Cruise is trodden on and later finished off by a cat.

  COME ON OSAMA, PUT THE FUCKING WEST OUT OF ITS MISERY

  A new show where foetuses are made to sing pop ballads as they compete for the right to exist. Each week a winner is chosen at random, while Patrick Kielty’s grinning, idiotic face is projected onto the moon.

  The success of programmes like The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den has been painted by some as showing the public’s interest in the world of business. Actually, we just like seeing idiots being told that they are idiots. I wouldn’t be surprised to see someone on Dragons’ Den with an FM radio that doubles up as a tampon (meaning that it only picks up Chris Moyles) or an all-in-one heroin users’ kit that never sells because it keeps getting shoplifted.

  My only brush with awards is that I was once at the Scottish BAFTAs. We were nominated for Live Floor Show. Just imagine the ordinary BAFTAs but with a room full of people you don’t recognise. It’s full of the most unglamorous-looking people you’ve ever seen. It’s like they’re filming a large bus stop with a free buffet. Jim had given an incredible series of performances and had been nominated as Best Newcomer. He was beaten by the guy off the Scott’s Porridge Oats advert.

  The actual BAFTAs might well have been created by our Lizard Masters to power some kind of Horror Battery at the centre of the earth. An annual event where we take the fakest people in our society and honour them with the award of a golden mask. Would we really be any poorer as a society if everyone in that room died? It would certainly make things more entertaining if they could work it into the ceremony. I’d enjoy watching Stephen Merchant trying to collect his award from a panther. The runnersup would be picked off by a chimp that’s been taught to use a sniper rifle. Paul O’Grady would die without ever knowing that
the headshot which killed him was a result not of hatred, but of the belief that it would earn his killer a piece of fruit.

  It seems that performers nowadays appear on more awards shows than episodes of the thing that they’re getting the awards for. Ricky Gervais has been given so many awards he keeps his house inside his trophy room. It would be good to at least see performers make honest acceptance speeches: ‘I’d like to thank my mother for her coldness and making me compete for her love.’

  Can you imagine if the rest of society was wiped out and just the people at the BAFTAs survived? There’s no way they could form even a rudimentary society. The future of humanity would be to live as slaves of the insect world. Every year they would hold a ceremony to honour whoever had collected the most pollen. Nobody was surprised by the recent voting scandals surrounding awards. At the last British Comedy Awards Robert Mugabe got best newcomer. The only difference between Mugabe and other comedians is that his syphilis has driven him insane.

  And the Oscars go on for so long now that at the end they play a memorial show reel of everyone who died during the ceremony. The fact that people manage to stay awake at all is tribute to how, at that level of fame, the cocaine is amazing. If I won an Oscar I’d simply say, ‘As an incredibly rich man I shall now read a list of people who can go screw themselves.’ A lot of these celebrities cry when getting an Oscar. I think it’s simply relief, just knowing their place on the Scientology space ark is secure.

  Caledonia McBrains was swiftly cancelled and, during a break from working on LFS, Jim Muir and Sandy Nelson and I went to Rothesay to do a gig. It’s a wee holiday town on the Isle of Bute, near Glasgow. There’s a unique nostalgic, Victorian feel to the place, mixed with the kind of gentility and decrepitude that you find in any seaside town. We’d been hired by this little middleaged English bloke called Malcolm, who looked and acted like a gay Dr Who. He and his wife had moved to Rothesay on the strength of a visit they’d made to the place on one of its rare sunny days. It had rained pretty solidly since and they were both clearly suffering and homesick. We knocked around town for the afternoon, then sat in a beer garden somewhere that had barbed wire along the walls.