Controversial comic writing a Radio 4 sitcom

Frankie Boyle is poised to return to the BBC, less than a year after its comedy chief claimed his controversial tweets would make a comeback difficult.

Boyle has co-written the pilot of a 'depraved farce' for Radio 4 with fellow stand-up and long-time collaborator Steven Dick.

He will not appear in the sitcom but has raised expectations that he will be seen on the BBC again soon, revealing today that he'd done 'a wee sketch' for iPlayer with Bob Mortimer. Boyle tweeted: 'They say never meet your heroes, but it was great.'

A read-through of the radio pilot, Blocked, takes place at the Stand comedy club in Glasgow on April 9, following a stand-up set from Boyle.

The Glaswegian, who had announced his retirement from stand-up, will be supporting Glenn Wool on tour in April, as well as Miles Jupp and Martin Mor at their Glasgow Comedy Festival shows later this month.

He also revealed on Twitter that he was going 'to do some proper hour long shows in London probably in August', adding that he would be previewing material from the shows at the Stand in June.

The BBC's Shane Allen, who championed Boyle's Tramadol Nights in his pervious job as head of Channel 4 comedy, told a Broadcasting Press Guild lunch in July that the comedian was 'not a pariah' and had been wrongly stereotyped as an 'offence machine'.

But he admitted that performers who made controversial comments on social media made it harder for the BBC to employ them.

He said: 'There's a difficulty and this goes across every talent. There's been a few examples of people who have got into trouble for their off-screen communications.

'There was stuff in Tramadol Nights that got taken out that to me was too difficult to justify. But we don't have any control and nor should we have any control over what people do in their social media life. That's caused a bit of repression in terms of what people do.'

Boyle has not appeared on the BBC since he left Mock The Week in 2009. He appeared at a Comic Relief gig last year that was televised on BBC Three, but his contribution was cut.

The 30-minute pilot of Blocked focuses on a despairing playwright-turned-small theatre owner and his family.

Burnistoun's Robert Florence and Louise Stewart, plus stand-ups Chris Forbes and Eleanor Morton will read the parts of the four characters at the Stand. But no casting decisions have been made for the recording, not least because, according to Dick: 'We're still writing it and it's more for us to see if the jokes are working'.

The comedian and magician, who wrote with Boyle for Mock The Week and Kevin Bridges on Stand Up For The Week, is one of the writers on BBC Radio Scotland's satirical spoof Wired News, which has just been given a series after a successful pilot.

– by Jay Richardson

Published: 5 Mar 2014