Frankie Boyle returns with his New World Order end-of-year round-up, where, with the help of his guests, he dissects the unique year that was 2020.
The show features Frankie at his satirical best with stand-up, review and discussion – all in an attempt to make sense of the last 12 months.
After the disappointment of Charlie Brooker's Death To 2020 we are pinning our hopes on Boyle nailing the year when things really went dark. Boyle himself has also just made the news due to his comments about Ricky Gervais made on the podcast interview with Louis Theroux in the series Grounded.
On the podcast Glasgow-based comedian Boyle said of Gervais: "If you’re a stand-up watching him, you feel like, oh, this is someone doing a version of this thing we do. But really, it’s more that I saw his routine about trans people and I thought it was very lazy."
Perhaps more surprisingly, Boyle revealed to Theroux that he does yoga five times a week and has been doing it on Zoom during lockdown. He started doing it because of the pains he was getting gripping the microphone so tightly onstage.
Boyle's BBC Two show features comedians Miles Jupp and Sophie Duker, who came in for criticism when she previously appeared with Boyle and joked "kill whitey" – the remark prompted over a thousand complaints but the complaints were later dismissed by the BBC.
Also appearing is Holly Walsh. I remember a terrific Edinburgh show she did about breaking her arm when she entered the Worthing Birdman Competition. But in recent years she has become established as a writer too. She has worked on shows such as Dead Boss with Sharon Horgan and, more recently, Motherland. According to Wikipedia her specialist subject on Celebrity Mastermind was badgers. She came second to Ken Bruce.
Another guest is Rob Delaney, the multi-award-winning co-creator, co-writer and co-star of hit TV show Catastrophe and his own stand-up special. Welsh comedian Kiri Pritchard-McLean also joins the line-up.
Comedian Ken Cheng makes his debut on the show. In 2017 online poker-player Cheng, who studied maths at Cambridge, won the Dave Joke of the Fringe Award for his gag: "I’m not a fan of the new pound coin, but then again, I hate all change.”
Frankie Boyle's New World Order, Friday, January 1, 10pm, BBC Two. Or watch on catch-up after broadcast here.
