I'm Bored With Boyle's Safe Subversion

On the unbearable banality of modern ''transgressive'' humour

It seemed somehow fitting to officially inaugurate my new ‘‘Quick-Take’’ section here on the Substack by offering some commentary on a subject many people will think is beneath me: prime time, mainstream television. Don’t worry, dear reader, I did not sully myself by actually watching Frankie Boyle’s new show attacking our monarchical history. I simply read the gushing review in the Guardian and instantly knew that my prejudices were correct, as they have been so often in the past.

King (defender of all faiths) Charles III is set to have his coronation this week, and that means a national day of pomp and ceremony, tradition, and history. Naturally, then, this means our actual aristocracy — celebrities, journalists, and television personalities — get to lay siege to the event and tear down what remains of the mythos.

The Guardian describes Boyle’s new show Farewell to the Monarchy:

Today’s monarchy, Boyle suggests, is the toxic inheritance of previous kings’ and queens’ sociopathy and mental health issues. William the Conqueror? Rapacious plunderer of his new subjects to pay for his and his chums’ castles. Richard III? Putinesque narcissist. Henry VIII? Psychopathic misogynist and, Boyle argues, “the only husband to whom Johnny Depp can feel superior”. Elizabeth I? Power-crazed killer who reinvented herself as a fetishistic yet sexless Virgin Mary for like-minded Protestant perverts.

Boyle notes Queen Victoria’s obliviousness to the brutal forging of the empire in her name, and to the poverty and prostitution rife a few streets away from Buckingham Palace. The monarchy, which the 19th-century essayist Walter Bagehot hilariously called a dignified part of the constitution, has always been a fig leaf concealing barbarism, Boyle contends. Even though the world’s wealthiest empire had a female figurehead, Victorian society’s contempt for women, Boyle estimates, equalled that of Met police WhatsApp groups.

You’ll notice here that shitlib canards are stacked on top of each other and wriggle about for your attention. It’s like an AI-generated image of a dwarf orgy. Richard III is Putler, Queen Victoria wasn’t a feminist, and Elizabeth I is a fake incel trying to please Protestant simps.

A British liberal who (however unlikely) stumbles across this article will at this point smile to themselves knowingly. ‘‘We got him!’’ they’ll snicker. Meaning, that I have fallen into the role of an ‘‘Outraged from North Tyneside’’ conservative who has read too many Daily Mail articles and can’t withstand the glare of postmodernity’s laser-like analysis of our history. I have ‘‘taken the bait’’.

The problem is, there’s nothing out there except bait. It’s all bait and no real lugworm or flies. In this context, the bait is the weaponized cultural commentary that undermines and deconstructs our history and identity.

Boyle’s show would (perhaps) have been genuinely transgressive in 1920, but in 2023 it is the norm, not an outlier of sanity lampooning the dominant orthodoxy. In actual fact, deconstruction is the orthodoxy. The British liberal perceives the Royal Family as belonging to the dominant set of British values and a deeply rooted conservatism… but they destroyed those values and that conservatism decades ago. They can’t admit this to themselves or to anyone else, because that would undermine their astroturfed status as subversives “speaking truth to power”.

There was a point in time, perhaps the 90s or early 2000s, when cultural commentators and comedians would have seen the writing on the wall as the new, politically correct orthodoxy oozed its way into every institution and boardroom. The choice would have been stark: bend the knee (not for the last time) or your career is finished.

They bent the knee and then adopted the new values and convinced themselves they’d always had such values in their hearts. They could never admit to this unflattering reality, of course, so they invented and propagated a new one. In their newly minted reality, true power in Britain resided with racist, reactionary Tories and not the forces of corporate Globalism who espoused —by sheer coincidence, their own politically correct mores.

British entertainment for decades now has essentially consisted of watching the pundit class prance about, bashing at their fantastical strawman representation of what Britain is. Hundreds of thousands of English girls were being raped and groomed in the real world by immigrants, while the commentariat heroically pilloried working-class white men in the EDL for talking about it.

Safely ensconced within their well-paid fake reality bubble, they cast about looking for whatever meat is left on the bones of traditional Britain to be gnawed on. The Coronation, a once-in-a-lifetime event, offers something of a feast. They can pretend it symbolises an old, oppressive hierarchy that is ‘‘out of touch’’ with modern Britain yet somehow simultaneously hegemonic.

Outraged from Tunbridge Wells is no longer outraged, just bored. We’re all bored. We’re bored with the charade that 95% of mainstream content — backed up by laws and institutions like BlackRock and the EU — is somehow a gaggle of plucky risk-takers injecting dangerous ideas into the discourse from left field.

In medieval society, the court jester was allowed a special ‘‘Jester’s Privilege’’ which allowed him to deliver in comedic form many unpalatable truths to the king and his court. A king’s tax policy might be reducing the peasantry to ruination. If another dignitary or person of standing were to deliver that truth, it could cause political tensions. The jester, however, could let slip the bad news due to his not being taken seriously and clearly not being any threat to the king.

Our own jesters do no such thing. They run cover for power, punch only down and at artificial constructs which they know to be safe targets. The only privilege Frankie Boyle has to contend with is his uncomfortable relationship with ‘‘white privilege’’ as per his own ideological camp. There are no jesters out there in the mainstream who will look sideways at the audience while suggesting men cannot become women - that’s an uncomfortable truth which Power frowns upon. And so, in the end, the joke is on all of us and this tedious, soul-crushingly banal charade.