AgProv
Doctor of Disorientation Studies, UnseenUniversity
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2014
- Messages
- 1,330
- Location
- too North to be Midlands, too south to be North
Thanks for the directions!
the reason for posting: I've just been reading the interesting autobiography of comedian Frankie Boyle, My Shit Life So Far. It's funny, laugh-out-loud funny, and marked throughout by the way Boyle will begin with a reminiscence of childhood, or school, or early career which starts out as pretty much wholly factual - then gets more and more surreal as he embellishes on it and takes it to a completely crazy over-the-top conclusion. Yuo sense he's setting the reader a deliberate challenge - not so much "sort out the fact from the fiction" as "can you spot the moment in this anecdote where the fiction begins to outweigh the fact?" and "What is reality anyway?" (He lets slip he is a devotee of Robert Anton Wilson, so I suspect he's deliberately applying Operation Mindfuck here and applying it to writing an autobiography, sending up and subverting all the conventions).
Boyle paints a picture of the British stand-up comedy scene as being fuelled by alcohol, desperation, and lots and lots of recreational chemicals. Given the caveat about this book that he starts with fact and then takes it up way past eleven, his account of the circuit of TV panel game shows , which all British comics appear to be contractually obliged to move around, is eye-opening. I'm prepared to believe that a lot of people on the circuit are no strangers to recreational drugs - maybe not to the extent Boyle cheerfully alleges when he talks about everybody associated with Mock The Week regularly performing a recorded TV show whilst in an altered state of consciousness. But it's plausible. Boyle says a lot of the stuff he comes out with on stage, or used to, he wouldn't even have thought of if he were not taking lots and lots of drugs at the time. (Hard not to agree: he realised the drugs were taking over when he came down and read back some of the truly weird sketches he'd written with a head full of MDMA and energy drinks. He reproduces a few pieces: they are just crazy, with occassional flashes of humour. He took this as a warning sign and seriously scaled back his drug use.)
Anyway, Boyle gives an account of a comedy circuit with occassional TV exposure that was populated by desperate, somewhat neurotic and needy, people who were fuelled by not enough sleep, too many drugs, too much alcohol, and painfully aware of the financial insecurity of it all. TV work comes over as a balance between not wanting to piss off the BBC too much lest this be his last TV gig, balanced against wanting to get artistic and creative freedom to do things his way. He describes BBC staffers in less than flattering terms and points out they were either dullard office-drones mindful of their careers and pensions, or else they were almost as crazy as the performers. Boyle lists a lot of occasions where he was censored or vetoed by BBC production staff terrified he was going too far, and notes all this contributed to an altered state of consciousness in which everybody was a bit paranoid for one reason or another, and conceded he only had a fingernail grasp of everyday reality. He also notes how many people in the business were fantasists and Walter Mitties prone to creating, and getting other people to beleive in, the weirdest and wildest and most outrageous stories.
It was in this state of mind that Boyle, in a late-night drink with a BBC producer known for telling outrageous fantastic stories, heard about a well-konwn BBC presenter who among other things did children's shows, who drove around the country in a converted ambulance which he then used as a base for abusing children, special needs children for preference, or else kids from children's homes.
Boyle claims he refused to believe this, taking it as being one tall tale too many, too outrageous and too ludicrous to take seriously. The BBC producer insisted this was common knowledge and a lot of people at the BBC knew about this. The anecdote appears in the autobiography, published in 2009 (two years before Savile's death and the stories beginning to emerge) with no further comment. Boyle does wonder if this was a product of his drug-addled mind, however.
Now, Frankie Boyle first started to appear on BBC Scotland conedy shows in the late 1990's. He got to move to Mock The Week, with national BBC exposure, in 2005.
What we have here is a reference to Jimmy Savile, in a book published two years before the stories began to emerge, as a recollection of a conversation with a BBC insider from the early 2000's. It can't be something Boyle invented as part of an unreliable tale - it fits horribly with what later became known. You could take this as a sort of proof that many, many, people knew within the BBC?
the reason for posting: I've just been reading the interesting autobiography of comedian Frankie Boyle, My Shit Life So Far. It's funny, laugh-out-loud funny, and marked throughout by the way Boyle will begin with a reminiscence of childhood, or school, or early career which starts out as pretty much wholly factual - then gets more and more surreal as he embellishes on it and takes it to a completely crazy over-the-top conclusion. Yuo sense he's setting the reader a deliberate challenge - not so much "sort out the fact from the fiction" as "can you spot the moment in this anecdote where the fiction begins to outweigh the fact?" and "What is reality anyway?" (He lets slip he is a devotee of Robert Anton Wilson, so I suspect he's deliberately applying Operation Mindfuck here and applying it to writing an autobiography, sending up and subverting all the conventions).
Boyle paints a picture of the British stand-up comedy scene as being fuelled by alcohol, desperation, and lots and lots of recreational chemicals. Given the caveat about this book that he starts with fact and then takes it up way past eleven, his account of the circuit of TV panel game shows , which all British comics appear to be contractually obliged to move around, is eye-opening. I'm prepared to believe that a lot of people on the circuit are no strangers to recreational drugs - maybe not to the extent Boyle cheerfully alleges when he talks about everybody associated with Mock The Week regularly performing a recorded TV show whilst in an altered state of consciousness. But it's plausible. Boyle says a lot of the stuff he comes out with on stage, or used to, he wouldn't even have thought of if he were not taking lots and lots of drugs at the time. (Hard not to agree: he realised the drugs were taking over when he came down and read back some of the truly weird sketches he'd written with a head full of MDMA and energy drinks. He reproduces a few pieces: they are just crazy, with occassional flashes of humour. He took this as a warning sign and seriously scaled back his drug use.)
Anyway, Boyle gives an account of a comedy circuit with occassional TV exposure that was populated by desperate, somewhat neurotic and needy, people who were fuelled by not enough sleep, too many drugs, too much alcohol, and painfully aware of the financial insecurity of it all. TV work comes over as a balance between not wanting to piss off the BBC too much lest this be his last TV gig, balanced against wanting to get artistic and creative freedom to do things his way. He describes BBC staffers in less than flattering terms and points out they were either dullard office-drones mindful of their careers and pensions, or else they were almost as crazy as the performers. Boyle lists a lot of occasions where he was censored or vetoed by BBC production staff terrified he was going too far, and notes all this contributed to an altered state of consciousness in which everybody was a bit paranoid for one reason or another, and conceded he only had a fingernail grasp of everyday reality. He also notes how many people in the business were fantasists and Walter Mitties prone to creating, and getting other people to beleive in, the weirdest and wildest and most outrageous stories.
It was in this state of mind that Boyle, in a late-night drink with a BBC producer known for telling outrageous fantastic stories, heard about a well-konwn BBC presenter who among other things did children's shows, who drove around the country in a converted ambulance which he then used as a base for abusing children, special needs children for preference, or else kids from children's homes.
Boyle claims he refused to believe this, taking it as being one tall tale too many, too outrageous and too ludicrous to take seriously. The BBC producer insisted this was common knowledge and a lot of people at the BBC knew about this. The anecdote appears in the autobiography, published in 2009 (two years before Savile's death and the stories beginning to emerge) with no further comment. Boyle does wonder if this was a product of his drug-addled mind, however.
Now, Frankie Boyle first started to appear on BBC Scotland conedy shows in the late 1990's. He got to move to Mock The Week, with national BBC exposure, in 2005.
What we have here is a reference to Jimmy Savile, in a book published two years before the stories began to emerge, as a recollection of a conversation with a BBC insider from the early 2000's. It can't be something Boyle invented as part of an unreliable tale - it fits horribly with what later became known. You could take this as a sort of proof that many, many, people knew within the BBC?