Last updated 14:20, Thursday, 30 October 2008

Frankie Boyle, the bespectacled Scottish comedian, is known as the ‘Dark Heart of Mock the Week’, by the BBC Two comedy show’s presenter Dara O’Briain.

Frankie Boyle

His jokes and one-liners throughout the successful satirical panel show cover subjects – death, paedophilia, murder – that other comics tend not to cover.

And it’s a reputation he’s happy to build upon as he travels the country on his first every national tour, visiting The Sands Centre for a sold out show tomorrow.

“I started off my career telling jokes about murders and serial killers. I just thought about whatever came into my head – the darker side of Scottish life and, erm, serial killers,” he says. “One causes the other.”

Glasgow-born Boyle thinks it is this heritage that has bred his love of the darker side of life.

“Glasgow, yeah. The culture there is very… I’m not regarded as a particularly sick act. Scottish comedy by nature is very dark. I think it’s a lot better than British comedy in general. It’s grim. It’s really grim,” he admits.

But he adds: “I’m actually a weirdly optimistic person. I always think the best thing is going to happen out of everything. It really helps me with my work, because I’m always going on thinking ‘this is going to be a fantastic show’. I have that weird feeling that things are always going to be good.”

So far his show, Morons I Can Heal You has certainly been well received, with a sell-out run at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. He was the fastest-selling comedy show at the Assembly Rooms in its history and eventually sold more tickets than Ricky Gervais’s show at Edinburgh Castle. Similar success in London’s West End has established Boyle as one of the rising stars of comedy.

And he’s enjoying the freedom that comes with an hour-long show, compared to the 20 minutes afforded most comics in a comedy club.

“I can talk about the horror of humanity and be honest without being punched in the face. It is quite a harsh show, but people have definitely accepted it. I quite like trying to find where the boundary is and staying just inside it. I don’t really like doing stuff that doesn’t work. I like doing stuff that works, but some people find it shocking.”

And it’s not always the audience that is shocked.

“One of things that really horrifies me is the way sometimes people won’t accept jokes about celebrities when they will accept ones about really harsh topics,” he says. “We are talking about terminal illness and then you do a joke about Michael Jackson and people go ‘ooh’. I think people now watch so much television that those people are sort of closer to them than they were 20 years ago. That is sad.”

Boyle admits to being a quiet child while he was growing up who eventually found his voice while studying English at Brighton university.

“Everyone that knows me, knows that I am really, really quiet. I have the reputation of being a very quiet person. My parents were really quiet. Their parents were even more quiet.

“I’m really glad I went to England and had university life. I read comic books, didn’t do a whole lot of work, drank a lot and started to come out of my shell a bit. Scottish comprehensive life doesn’t prepare you for a whole lot – it’s sort of heads down, don’t rock the boat.”

Drinking isn’t something that Boyle does these days. He’s been tea-total for close to nine years as a result of the alcoholic atmosphere of the comedy circuit.

“I drank quite a lot when I was about 25 or 26. And there is that thing as well when you’re touring that they give you free beer. I got to that stage in Scotland when it’s much easier to say ‘I’m an alcoholic’ and then people don’t buy you drinks. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an alcoholic or not, but it’s a good thing to say.

“I was drinking way too much. I was drinking every day. It was really bad. I think there’s a real tipping off point when you’re drinking, maybe in your late 20s or your early 30s when people suddenly go ‘boomf’ and I’ve seen it happen to people. Being a drinker, I knew loads of drinkers and you start losing folk who are a bit older than you. And you think ‘I’m going to cut down’.”

It was a wise move. His comedy career, which began in the mid-nineties, started to take off, particularly when he began appearing on cult Scottish comedy programme the Live Floor Show in 2002. “I was absolutely terrified every gig for about nine years and then I remember doing Live Floor Show in Scotland and then at the end of that going to do a gig and not feeling nervous. I’d been doing it for so long that eventually it kicked in,” he recalls.

And he loves doing telly now, having become a regular face on Mock the Week and appeared on shows including BBC’s Have I Got News For You, Would I lie to you?, The Graham Norton Show, C4’s 8 out of 10 Cats, and ITV’s News Knight with Sir Trevor McDonald among many others.

But he won’t watch himself on the box. “It’s that whole thing of, you know, mad people think that they’re on TV. And when you watch yourself on TV it’s not that far away from a mental illness.”

Mental illness is something Boyle knows about having worked for a short period of time in a hospital. “I worked in mental health for about nine months at the point when they were closing down asylums and introducing care in the community,” he recalls. “A lot of the staff had been working there for years and they were really institutionalised as well.

“You’d turn up and you’d wonder who were the patients.

“In comedy it’s about having ideas that are on the outside and mad people are the ultimate outsiders.”

Boyle admits to being unimpressed with a lot of other comedy out there. “I find it really depressing about what makes comedy. I find it really banal. Whimsy really bores the pants off me. And it’s not that difficult to do. If you’re a joke writer you know that somewhere there are people just going ‘what if Gordon Brown was a badger?’ – that’s not that difficult to extrapolate. You’ve already set up a ridiculous premise but one without any point.Some people can do it. Harry Hill I think is great at that sort of thing. Apart from that, I think ‘What? Are people in denial? We’re on a dying rock that’s falling through space while we die’.” The dark heart of Mock the Week indeed.