Frankie Boyle axed from BBC Comic Relief gig

Published on 07/03/2013 14:00

JOKES about The Queen, Kate Middleton and Oscar Pistorius led to comedian Frankie Boyle’s entire set being cut from a Comic Relief fundraiser on BBC Three last night.

Boyle performed a ten-minute set at the Wembley Arena show, dubbed ‘Russell Brand’s Give It Up For Comic Relief’. Boyle took his opportunity to rile up the 12,500-strong crowd with a series of near-the-knuckle gags.

On the Queen, Boyle said that he wished that she had died the night before the Diamond Jubilee, to see what Buckingham Palace would try to do to avoid telling the public.

Boyle said: “They wouldn’t have been able to tell us that she’d died. They would have had to hollow out her body and get that guy who plays Gollum to wear it.”

The show was broadcast ‘near-live’, with a slight delay to cover for technical and content problems. BBC producers decided to use the delay to cut Boyle’s performance from the show.

Boyle also made jokes at the expense of the Duchess of Cambridge’s pregnancy, saying that she had told him she was using contraception. He also joked that Oscar Pistorius’ name “sounded like a spell Harry Potter would say to make your legs drop off”.

Boyle, for his part, seemed unperturbed by the outrage, telling fellow comedian Sean Hughes on Twitter that the crowd were “surprisingly open-minded”.