FRANKIE BOYLE is not one to hold back. Anyone who expected otherwise should have stayed away from this gig.

After a week in which he was condemned for a joke he made two years ago about the Queen, Boyle marched on to the stage and let rip at anything and everything that moved.

Nothing, it seems, is off-limits for the Scot and nobody was spared from his piercing scorn – not the disabled, nor the disadvantaged, nor even the dead.

From start to finish, Boyle was merciless, quick, punchy and very, very, very dark. Even an audience expecting depravity were left wincing and gasping at times, never more than so than when he joked about Madeleine McCann and Shannon Matthews.

To complain that Boyle was too dark, however, would be like saying a horror film was too scary. It misses the point of his show and persona.

No, if there were a real cause for complaint it lay instead in the fact so much of his material was old. Viewers of Mock The Week recognised much of his routine word for word. One heckler said as much, and while Boyle pointed out they were his own jokes, it didn’t change the fact many had heard them before.

The delivery throughout was excellent, despite some incessant heckling from a handful of Glaswegians, and he worked the audience well at times. And some of the fresh material was tremendous. But after a lightning start, the performance ground to walking pace late on.

Frankie Boyle is undoubtedly exceptionally funny and talented. This performance, however, wasn’t what it might have been.