Charity boss's call

A charity chief is calling on police to prosecute Frankie Boyle under the Obscene Publications Act.

Brendan McConville wants to bring the case over Boyle’s latest book, Work! Consume! Die!, which contains jokes about the deaths of Gordon Brown and David Cameron’s children.

It also carries imagined passages about Kate Middleton dying in a car crash and about the Queen being gang raped.

Mr McConville is chairman of the Buddy Bear Trust which works with youngsters with cerebral palsy – and has called on Strathclyde Police in Glasgow to investigate.

He told the Sunday Express, which has been campaigning against Boyle’s book: ‘As someone who works with children with cerebral palsy... I thought his book was in exceptionally bad taste and hurtful and distressing.

‘In my opinion it could be considered obscene and offensive and I will be putting my complaint in writing to Strathclyde Police.’

The act makes it an offence to publish material that tends to ‘deprave or corrupt’ – although securing a conviction is unlikely.

There have been few attempts to bring cases under the act since the Seventies, although two years ago, civil servant Darryn Walker was charged over a short online story which graphically described the kidnap, torture, mutilation and murder of Girls Aloud. He was acquitted.

Other famous cases include the 1960 Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial, in which publisher Penguin was found not guilty, and the 1971 Schoolgirls in Oz case, which the editors lost – but the ruling was overturned on appeal.

• Frankie Boyle has branded Stewart Lee ‘irrelevant and flabby’ in a newspaper interview. In The Guardian, he said Lee’s comedy wasn’t as political as he claimed, and said jokes about fellow comedians’ work simply served to promote Lee as a different comedy brand, making a comparison with washing powder ads.

Published: 27 Nov 2011