COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013

FIRST EDITION

© Frankie Boyle 2013

Frankie Boyle asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

This book contains material previously published elsewhere, including in Frankie Boyle’s Sun columns

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013 cover design by Lynn McGowan cover photographs © Chris McAndrew/Camera Press (portrait); Shutterstock.com (skyline).

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Source ISBN: 9780007426836

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007426867

Version: 2014-07-18

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

1 Royals

2 Politics

3 Transport

4 War on Terror

5 Europe

6 Sport

7 TV

8 Animals

9 Economy

10 Celebs

11 Press

12 Science

13 Crime

14 Education and Kids, Yo!

15 Health

16 Internet

17 Relationships

18 Scotland

19 Religion

Endgame

Also By Frankie Boyle

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

There are many reasons why an author chooses to write a book. Perhaps, like me, they’re being paid a lot of money to write it. Or perhaps . . . nope, that’s all I can think of. The good people at HarperCollins did gently hint that I should make this book more commercial, so I had to ask myself about the nature of what’s popular in our culture. What do people really want? What would we hope to be offered by a book if we were being completely honest? Which is why I started writing the book you now hold in your hands. A crime porno.

The appeal for me was simple. How hard can it be to write a thousand words of porn every day? I probably text a thousand words of porn a day. The real problem was not only writing porn and letting the whole thing descend into a kaleidoscope of mouths and limbs and cocks and mouths and cocks. Cocks. And tits.

Hence crime. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like a little vicarious contact with crime: from teenagers killing prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto as a bit of light-hearted escapism from their actual sex lives, to the talcum-powder market foaming their knickers at Daily Mail headlines. The appeal is complex but, for whatever reason, it excites us to hear about some cunt getting killed.

My teenage sexual awakening happened long before the internet. I used to hang out at my local library and scour thrillers for sex. I’d skim the sort of doorstoppers you’d find on your uncle’s bookshelf for words like ‘grasped’ and ‘thrust’. Occasionally looking up to stare slack mouthed at real women trying to borrow books, I rejected the opportunity for precocious learning and memorised reams of disjointed encounters between guilt-ridden adulterers, mercenaries and whores, and even the desperate couplings of a Southern slave plantation. Perhaps this has affected my adult life. I’ve spent this speeding disinterestedly through the bits central to the narrative, desperately looking forward to the occasional sexual episodes, which I haven’t fully understood.

So part of me imagines this book hitting the Scottish library system, and some wee Wifi-less schoolboy in Penicuik having his aching balls blown off by this filthy lightning bolt of premeditated degradation. Or some guy getting his teenage daughter it as a present, because he remembers me from Mock of the Week. Merry Christmas, love!

This will be the burning bible of teenage Britain; a suppressed memory; a limping man in a wooden mask announcing with a shriek that he is the only guest of your surprise birthday party; an uncomfortable evening at the launch of a Muslim breakfast cereal; walking into a bar where a pub quiz host’s questions about your private life are met with general laughter and the harsh metallic bleat of a deer; a sore arse; your dog returning home with a swear word shaved into its side. This book will replicate almost exactly the experience of being a guy who gets raped just after getting the all-clear from prostate cancer and, as the rapist says how tight he is, he realises the cancer’s back; it will be a jeering portal into a new dimension of Desperate Iniquity.

Well, I suppose, to be entirely accurate, I sent HarperCollins the outline of a crime porno and they told me to fuck off. Instead, they asked me to produce what you hold in your hands. I was asked to deliver a humorous topical Christmas book, the sort of thing that raises a wry eyebrow at the news. A Jeremy Clarkson-style slab of bouncy opinion that, with the right cover, might sell well in train stations.

However, they did say that the introduction wasn’t too important and I could maybe let loose a little there. Most people skip the introduction, and half the people who get a book in a train station never read the fucking thing. So for the rest of the introduction I want you to imagine that you’re reading a crime novel. A crime novel in which many of the leads the investigator pursues seem to end in almost pointlessly graphic sex scenes.

• • •

The taxi pulls up by a little boxy end of terrace. After this, it’s all just countryside; after the street lamp on the corner, there’s nothing. I pay the cabbie and get out with her. She turns round as if suddenly aware of the impropriety, silhouetted with her deelie-boppers in the dusk, more like a stag at bay than a hen returning from her own hen night. There’s a long, awkward pause.

I find myself thinking that seduction is just being able to think of something to say at a moment like this. Something that isn’t a terrifying indication of how badly you want to fuck. I can’t think of anything.

I grip her firmly by the back of the neck and her mouth opens slowly under mine. She pulls my bottom lip gently between her teeth, then breaks off and walks abruptly up to the door.

‘Night, night!’ she laughs, way too loud, and I wonder if she might be drunk after all. I’ve followed her step for step and when she twists to say goodbye to me at the door I’m actually right behind her, kissing down hard on the back of her neck, her shoulder.

‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ she chides, turning in my arms to push her mouth into my chest at the open top button of my shirt. I’m holding her by her hip under her jacket and I push my fingers up inside her T-shirt to her bra, her nipple stiffening under my hand. She runs her hand down my chest till she reaches my belt, then, thank fuck, down to where my hard-on is straining through my trousers.

‘I can’t. My fiancé’s inside . . .’

Oh, fuck.

‘He’ll be waiting up for me,’ she declares in a stage whisper, looking off towards the road with a flicker of annoyance crossing her face.

Part of me knows that the moment has passed but then a wee voice in me thinks that if it had passed she’d be gone. I kiss her hard on the lips and I can see the surprise in her eyes as I lift her up with a soft thump against the door, her head bumping gently against the little square of dimpled glass at the top, and I start pushing her skirt up. I keep expecting her to tell me to stop but it doesn’t come, and I just keep pushing. She’s running her tongue along my top lip as my fingers reach the top of her knickers, I tug at her tights, and everything just slides over her little bum surprisingly easily.

A light comes on in the house. Not the hall but back in there somewhere. I’m expecting ‘We shouldn’t be doing this . . .’ at any moment, but I’ve got my cock out now and as I push up against her I suddenly have her full attention again. I’ve got my hand on my cock and I’m trying to guide it in, she’s looking out to the road anxiously, which is odd when we can hear her fiancé moving about inside, but she’s slippery to the touch, and just by pushing up from my legs I’m suddenly in her and she’s biting into my shoulder as her deelie boppers start to rattle gently against the door.

I’m slipping it in and out of her, up through the bustle of her skirt, going as slowly as I can bear. The cold on the outstroke makes me aware of how wet my dick is getting between her legs. Suddenly the light goes on in her hall and I can hear someone shouting, indistinctly, like they’re way back at the far end. Maybe her fiancé thinks she’s just pissed and trying to find her keys, or . . . fuck it, who cares, I’m sick of worrying about other people. I can hear him in there, like he’s moving towards the door, maybe just trying to work out what’s going on. He says something, he’s quite close now, but he sounds drunk and I can’t make it out, and I’m fucking busy here, to be honest.

The shouting gets louder, he sounds drunk or something, an unhappy blah blah blah. She looks back anxiously and then wraps her legs round me really tight, suddenly moving up higher. I’m just holding her now and she’s lost it, pumping her hips like a fucking jockey or something. I hear footsteps coming down the hall but it’s too late because she’s coming hard all over my dick, a gasp of warm breath steams up my glasses and her unmistakable loud moan breaks the silence of the night. This gets me right there and, as I start to shoot, I force open the letterbox awkwardly with my fingers and blast a load into their hallway.

There we are. That degeneracy should have seen everybody off. It’s just you and me now; nobody else will have managed to get to the end of that bit. I don’t think I’ve ever read it all the way through myself. Listen, while nobody’s looking I’m going to try to explain all of human relations as quickly as possible. I imagine that you’re quite young and idealistic – persevering with that porno and thinking that I’d a point to make. Well, if you could do something about what I’m about to say to you later in life, change the world, sort everything out, much appreciated. The question, obviously, is why I chose to include the sex scene. That, I think, is for the reader to work out, and then tell me.

We’ve a bit of a hangover from earlier times. People think of themselves as a ‘self’, a conscious being. In our modern market-driven society the ‘self’ is no longer the ego. It’s our brand identity. Most of what we do is not to serve our ego, our own idea of ourselves, but actually to serve our status, other people’s idea of ourselves.

We’re the first completely market-oriented generation in history and it has destroyed our ability to be free and conscious. We’re not the people we pretend to be. If I invented a time machine, I’d like to think that my first trip would be to go back and kill Hitler. In reality, I’d use the first trip to kill Piers Morgan’s mother at the moment of his conception, and the second one to go back and check.

I remember even as a kid scouring those little brochures you’d get from Woolworths for my parents’ Christmas presents. Like you, I moved on to express myself through the charities I supported, the bands I was into, even the people I hung around with. Around me grew a society where people would turn up for the half hour of adverts before a film and never complain, where we tried to express our individuality through the purchase of mass-produced goods. Even my favourite comedian, Bill Hicks, was peddling that ‘individuality through smoking’ thing. That was just an angle thought up by ad men decades earlier. People started to speak of the ads being better than the TV shows, somehow believing against all the evidence that the TV shows were the principal content and the adverts incidental. Now we understand that everything is to be marketed, even art.

I read the comic-book writer Alan Moore describe art as ‘propaganda for a state of mind’. Who do we create propaganda for? Our equals? No, for the easily manipulated, for those we have contempt for. So to be an artist in the wholly marketed society is to have contempt for everyone. You propagandise for your state of mind to others – and it’s not even your state of mind. It’s the off-the-peg set of opinions you got from the part of the culture you tried to buy into, from a set of people who were propagandising to you. They’re not even your ideas. They weren’t even theirs.

Of course, this doesn’t make you happy, so you need to propagandise the chosen state of mind to yourself, through self-help literature, a term I use loosely here, to cover a whole bunch of stuff, including most religions and newspapers. What’s the drive of your little internal propaganda office? Well, it’s to sell the idea of you, to advance your status. By convincing people who you are too guarded to truly know about a bunch of ideas that you don’t fully believe. And in any case, in a world of seven billion people what’s your status, really? In truth, it doesn’t matter any more than the charge on an electron.

Orwell imagined a coercive totalitarian state but Aldous Huxley probably made a better prediction of our current reality. In Brave New World people are complicit in their own enslavement; they’re into it. I think we can go further. It’s not just that people are controlled by propaganda, or even that they enjoy being controlled. I think that people are now propaganda. People are no longer the things being controlled, they are the method of control, both of themselves and others. Of course, I’ve written this little serious passage here to advance my own status.

I’ve tried to structure this book as simply as possible since it’s supposed to have the energy and flow of a good stand-up show. Hopefully, everything is done here as I’d do it on stage – a dip for you to regroup in the middle, a closing peroration, and even this little bit where I just kind of tail off mid-sentence as I realise that I already have your money . . .

1
ROYALS

One of the great tricks the British royals have managed to pull off is to have convinced everybody of their own irrelevance. They behave much like any big company, downplaying their influence, externalising their expenses, meeting with dictators, watching themselves sexually savaging hypnotised victims in the mirrored Aviators of their bodyguards, reporting back to superiors in other dimensions who appear to them suddenly in famous paintings, bad news causing their enraged overlord’s face to seethe like a nest of startled snakes.

What’s called pageantry and tradition – public events that only serve to highlight the relative charm of North Korea and the buying up of any golden sheds/tennis rackets that got missed by Michael Jackson – is just misdirection. It’s the simple misdirection employed by a category of human being pitied by even the most denigrated monster of showbusiness, the stage magician. And that’s all the royal family are. Entertainers who’ve enjoyed the ultimate success by the most tried-and-tested route: aiming low.

Kate’s pregnancy really brought the nation together. It was no longer just me thinking about her vagina 24/7. And call me old fashioned, but I thought it was nice to see a pregnancy announced – for most women in this country you only know they’re with child because they’ve switched to menthol fags. Still, a lot of pressure for William. I suppose he’s just hoping that he can be as good a father as his nanny was.

The birth was announced by putting a notice on headed notepaper on a wooden easel at the gates of Buckingham Palace – it’s the royal equivalent of sticking a congratulations bed sheet on a roundabout. The law was changed because it was ‘a historical anomaly that prevents the eldest child of the monarch from becoming the head of state simply because of their gender’. Unlike the historical anomaly that makes someone the head of state simply because they are born into a particular family.

Kate was a patient at the exclusive King Edward VII’s Hospital. Aren’t the royals wonderful? Even at their roughest they refuse to be a burden on the NHS. Kate had to endure eleven hours of labour. Which is more than the combined total the rest of the family has managed in the last twenty years. Being named George, her son will join six out of the past ten kings, exhibiting the imagination you’d expect from a family who have to be trained how to wave. Why think of a name at all? You won’t get anything funkier than Prince.

Fifty armed police officers are to guard the new prince. Wow, in The Omen he only had that weird nanny with the Rottweiler. There were few volunteers. Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to employ decoys? He’s a baby – that’s pretty much the only time any lookalike has ever actually looked alike. The police will have to hand back their firearms once the baby boy becomes fully sentient, just in case a perceived slight leads him to lock their eyes with a haunting gaze, before causing them to vacantly push the barrel into their mouths and squeeze the trigger.

A Swedish magazine published eleven topless shots of the Duchess of Cambridge. It was the least erotic thing to have ever happened in Sweden. Why can’t she just sunbathe topless on the balcony of Lord Linley’s £15 million château in Provence like normal people? The British press will never publish pictures of Kate’s tits. Due to the lack of space left after printing ones of her sister’s arse.

The royal couple made a criminal complaint when the topless photos were published in a French magazine, and a French court prevented their further publication. The ban was soon extended to Italy and the rest of Europe, meaning the pictures were then only available to be seen on something called the internet. I sympathise with Kate feeling under constant surveillance. Thanks to my Catholic education I often can’t shake off the idea my dead relatives are watching me. To be honest, I only ever feel comfortable masturbating while wearing a sombrero.

Maybe we should be glad that other countries take such an interest in our royal family – even if it’s in this weirdly specialist porn way. Apparently, the Palace is so worried about Kate being papped that for the next few years she’s to be permanently blurred during daylight hours by being shaken at high frequency by ladies-in-waiting.

The Palace was furious at the paparazzi hounding her like Diana, as royal protocol dictates that they wait till Prince Philip gives the nod. Surely the quickest way to stop the demand for these pictures is for the royals to finally go nude. I know what you’re thinking. How about the etiquette of them breaking wind in public? Easy. Those dishwasher liquitabs with the dissolvable coating and detergent inside? Use them as suppositories and if it does happen it’ll just come out as bubbles. At the moment protocol forces Her Majesty to hold farts in for years, only letting them out when the RAF do a fly-past over the Palace.

The supply of bland, feigned outrage about things like this seems endless. Eamonn Holmes on This Morning accidentally broadcast a photograph of Kate in a bikini. The programme had to apologise, as obviously the image should have been obscured by a list of suspected paedophiles. In fact, This Morning should really have had to apologise for showing an unblurred image of Eamonn Holmes. Eamonn’s terrified the incident could prove yet another blow to his chance of a knighthood, a dream first dented in 2006 when the Queen accidentally pricked his casing with her sword and he whizzed about the room screeching like a punctured lilo.

In 2012 we had the disgraceful spectacle of the Diamond Jubilee. I’ve got to admit I was out on the streets cheering her on, although I’m not sure she fully appreciated my chant: ‘Sixty years since your dad died, do dah, do dah!’

Michael Gove suggested celebrating the Jubilee by building a royal yacht. To be honest, I was just going to get her bath bombs or a book token but it was typical of Gove to try to show me up. I hate him, the unctuous, wet-lipped, Dickensian freak. If you asked a football stadium full of people if they’d like to see him kicked to death by a minotaur wearing plimsoles – so it would last longer – you wouldn’t find a single person who wouldn’t masturbate while it was happening.

I suppose a boat would be immune from a below-the-waterline al-Qaeda attack, as it’s nearly impossible to get a watertight seal on your mask with a big, bushy beard. That’s why the kids in Atlantis never get Christmas presents . . . but they don’t cry about it. It’s under the sea, so crying would be pointless.

A barge is totally in keeping with the royal tradition as typified by Liz and Phil. Engineering and shipping – you can’t get much more German and Greek than those. And nothing says recession solidarity more than waving from a throne atop a golden barge. It looked like something Liberace would have rented if he’d taken a break on the Norfolk Broads. The whole thing was car-crash television, which made it strangely apt for a royal occasion.

Actually, I didn’t go to see the flotilla as I failed to find a pair of clear-plastic water-skis to add a ghostly ‘walk-on-water’ quality to my Princess Diana outfit. Still, congratulations, Ma’am, on sixty years of feigning interest in an assortment of bland hats while a sycophantic media faithfully recount your occasional nondescript remarks as witticisms. Hers is an inspirational story. The meteoric rise of a girl born simply the daughter of a humble king. And let’s not forget her role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, a position that I’ve always thought must piss God off quite a bit. A little boy gave her some Werther’s Originals to pass on to Philip. I understand that he prefers to receive jelly babies, as when the bag’s destroyed by Special Branch in a controlled explosion there’s less chance of the corgis getting shrapnel wounds.

All the royals were there – Princess Anne, the Duke of York, the Duke of Hazzard, Prince Harry, the artist formerly known as Prince, Lord and Lady Gaga, the Duchess of Cambridge, Duchy Originals Sausages, Viscount Biscuit and Sir, would you please put your trousers back on, the other diners are getting upset? We had a street party with jelly and ice cream and games for all the local children. It wasn’t to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee – we were trying to flush out a paedophile.

Unemployed jobseekers were forced to sleep under London Bridge and work unpaid on the Jubilee river pageant. It wasn’t all bad as they did get to watch the world’s richest family sail by them in a golden barge. Sleeping under a bridge? That’s Victorian, medieval even . . . what place could it possibly have at a royal event?

In honour of the Jubilee, Madame Tussauds unveiled their new waxwork of Her Majesty. Apparently, to re-create the effects of aging they just moved the old one next to the radiator for a couple of hours. I’m definitely going to take a look. Especially after the success of my trip to see the Prince Philip last Christmas, when I managed to land a couple of darts right in his chest. The Queen’s waxwork has had its own special alarm ever since 2004, when the head was stolen and used to forge loads of big stamps.

God, the Queen must’ve been in a lot of photos – all the official ones, obviously, and she also loves to jump in the back of tourists’ pictures for a laugh. We’ve all got our favourite memories of the Queen – mine was when she played Superintendent Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect. But she’s great for tourism. Mainly because the sort of people dumb enough to want to see her are also the ones dumb enough to pay £5 for a warm Tango and a mechanically recovered meat hotdog, and £45 to watch roller-skating cats banging out the hits of Bucks Fizz.

By way of a gift for her Jubilee, the Queen was given 169,000 square miles of Antarctica, which she accepted with her trademark gracious scowl. Barack Obama said that while many presidents and prime ministers had come and gone, the Queen had endured. Barack, that’s because you can vote for them, you prick.

Much is made of the Queen ‘not being able to answer back’. As if a multi-millionaire with access to harems of devoted apemen and to drugs that let her taste chamber music really aches to be involved in a Twitter spat. The royals actually wield a lot of power. The Queen demanded to know why hate cleric Abu Hamza couldn’t be deported. The police had been trying to arrest Abu Hamza for years but for some reason he just kept slipping out of the handcuffs.

I think it’s great that the Queen’s showing an interest in the sort of evil people who shouldn’t be in this country instead of having them over for lunch, like she did with Robert Mugabe, Mswati III, Idi Amin, Hamad Al-Khalifa and President Assad. The journo who revealed the Queen’s annoyance apologised for his breach of royal protocol, adding, ‘From now on any pillow talk stays in the bedroom . . . Oh, no, you’re not going to print that, are you?’

The royals have been unwell recently. The Duke of Kent had a mild stroke. He said he wanted to be back at work as soon as possible. It must have been more serious than we first thought, otherwise he would have remembered that he’s never worked a day in his fucking life.

Meanwhile, Prince Philip was told he can no longer hunt as it may dislodge his heart, presumably knocking it into a place where it can receive its long-dead messages of love. There’s a small metal tube that is holding his heart together. That would be a spectacular death, though, as he rips his own heart out to desperately load it into his shotgun.

I wonder if he got the NHS treatment we all get? I can’t help thinking there’s a twenty-year-old rugby player coming to in a field somewhere, his chest stitched like a 1950s football, barely able to get to his knees with his new nonagenarian heart.

I’m being unfair – the royals do pretend to do their bit for the community. Prince Andrew abseiled down the Shard for charity. He didn’t raise as much money as everyone had hoped, as he made it down alive. He had to quit as Trade Envoy due to his links with a convicted paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. A member of the royal family shouldn’t be making us look stupid overseas. That’s clearly the job of the SAS, the MOD and Jordan. The Sun referred to Epstein as the ‘Paedophile Billionaire’, which reminds me of the old children’s rhyme: ‘The grand old Duke of York, he had ten thousand friends. Not one of them what you might consider babysitting material.’ Perhaps all paedophiles should be forced to have celebrity friends. It’d be an end to them being able to loiter anonymously around school gates. ‘Get in the car, kids, quick! I don’t like the look of that man playing conkers with Bono!’

Fergie took £15,000 pounds from Epstein. How many people would turn down fifteen grand, no strings attached, because it came from a child abuser? I mean, many people give more than that every year to clothing companies who tie six-year-olds to sewing machines. Fergie said, ‘I would throw myself under a bus for Andrew.’ He’d be very touched, if he knew what a bus was.

• • •

Prince Harry fought in Afghanistan. They kept that pretty quiet, didn’t they? It’s good that he went. If you want a flag waver for democracy it makes sense to send a prince. I say hats off to him. It’s about time we had a few more positive role models for downtrodden ginger people. It might finally inspire them to turn their back on witchcraft.

Harry admitted that he’s killed people, which should put an end to the question of whether he’s really a member of the royal family. Saying that he’s killed members of the Taliban hasn’t made him a target; it’s made all the gingers in the army who aren’t surrounded by personal bodyguards twenty-four hours a day targets. It shows how sensible he’s been, though. Nobody can get near you with a bomb belt if they have to be naked to get into your hotel room.

Prince Harry underwent hostage training in preparation for Afghanistan. It can’t be easy having a royal hostage. You’re supposed to cut off bits that serve no useful purpose and post them back. Where would you start? I hope he never gets killed on active duty. I hate to think of someone saying they need to inform his next of kin, then all the generals just looking awkwardly at the floor.

Harry was in the US to attend the Warrior Games. If he wanted to watch injured servicemen fight among themselves he should just nip down to any soup kitchen in the UK and throw a slice of bread on the ground. I’ve a fascination with watching disabled people play sports that has developed naturally from years attending Scottish Premier League football matches.

Cheryl Cole revealed she had a dream about marrying Harry. Something that in real life would surely end in a car crash bigger than her solo career. Cheryl doesn’t seem like she’d fit in with the royals, but who knows, maybe the Queen also has a barbed-wire thigh tattoo. In most of my dreams I’m a princess as well – although I then unfurl into a half-horse, half-Gok Wan centaur who plays just behind the front two for Spurs, so I don’t know what to think.

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