broadcastnow.co.uk 23 August 2019 | Broadcast | 29Continued on page 30 ➤THE BROADCAST INTERVIEW
FRANKIE BOYLE
News For You, Never Mind The
Buzzcocks or The Stand Up Show,
and that was pretty much it.
I wonder if terrestrial broadcasters
are doing enough alternative stuff
though; Sally4Ever was great, but I
was thinking, ‘Isn’t this supposed to
be on C4?’. I worry that it will get to a
point where all the interesting stuff is
assumed to be really niche, and harder
for audiences to find.What first got you into making
TV comedy? Why did you want
to explore that avenue?
I grew up watching the alternative
comedy scene on TV: Saturday Night
Live, The Comic Strip Presents...- all that kind of stuff.
A lot of people from my generation
just saw TV as the natural endpoint of
doing stand-up, which was a bit silly
of us really; I actually did a lot of
writing jobs for TV, writing lines for
panel shows and things.
As a stand-up, I wasn’t very ambi-
tious because I always imagined that
eventually I would write full time.
Then I got spots on Mock The Week
and Channel 4 show FAQ U over the
same summer. I hadn’t really done my
own show at Edinburgh or anything
like that, so I went from doing 25
minutes in clubs to suddenly selling
out theatres. It was quite a strange
time but, luckily, I managed to deal
with it all by having a series of
crippling onstage panic attacks.
How would you describe
your approach to taking on
TV work? Do you consider
yourself a broadcaster?
I try to take on only the amount of
work that I can do well. I’m not a
broadcaster, but it’s something
to aspire to, isn’t it? I’d like to have a
bunch of old-fashioned titles in my
obituary: broadcaster, laudanum
addict, tumbler and mutineer.What have been your best
and worst experiences of
the industry? What do you
like most and least about
making shows?
I’m middle-aged now, so I don’t
think I really have bad experiences.
Even if something goes wrong, I
just sort of think: “Oh, I hope this
goes so dreadfully wrong that I
get an anecdote out of it.”