Frankie Boyle has revealed he may turn his back on stand-up to write novels.
The comic, 50, penned his acclaimed debut thriller Meantime at home during lockdown and is already planning a second fiction book. He said he will tour in 2023 but may not perform live stand-up afterwards as he hopes to write more.
He told a Bloody Scotland audience in Stirling: “I’m doing a bit of touring next year and then I’m going to really calm it, this live work, for a very long time. I don’t know if I’ll be doing any live work after that, to be honest, other than just trying jokes out.
“But doing proper tour dates and stuff – already I’ve kind of drifted away from that. So I see my 50s basically banging out some ill-received novels.”
Boyle, who got his big break performing at The Stand comedy club before finding widespread fame on BBC panel show Mock The Week, said he had always considered himself more of a writer than a stand-up.
He said: “When I first started out doing comedy, I was doing it to try to showcase myself to write for people. That’s much further down the line so you end up having to become a stand-up but I’ve never really felt like I was a proper stand-up.”
Boyle, who has a reputation as one of Scotland’s most outspoken comedians, set his debut novel in Glasgow in 2015, in the aftermath of Scottish independence. The investigation into a murder sends his characters into a world of “radical politics, artificial intelligence, cults, secret agents, smugglers and vegan record shops”.
Having previously written three non-fiction books including an autobiography, Boyle said he started writing the novel during lockdown as a way to create “some kind of external monologue to drown out my internal monologue, which was pretty grim at the time”.
He added: “I found it really worked. It worked brilliantly. My mental hygiene at that point when I started was so poor – I was genuinely quite unhappy. I found (the mechanics of writing) really occupied a lot of my mind and I was really grateful for that.”
Boyle has already co-written a pilot for a screen adaptation with Neil Webster, a writer on the BBC series Frankie Boyle’s New World Order and executive producer on BBC Scotland’s acclaimed drama series Guilt.
He said: “Whether that would happen or not, I don’t know, but I quite enjoyed writing the pilot… we’ve kind of added in different stuff, not all the jokes are the same, some different things happen and it’s got kind of bounce to it. It doesn’t feel like we’re just adapting someone’s novel.
“It’s a six-parter but then that’s only if it happens – most of the time these things don’t happen.”
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