Has comedian Frankie Boyle become the latest victim of the BBC’s ‘right-wing purge’? Frankie Boyle seems to think so. Following news this week that his BBC Two show, Frankie Boyle’s New World Order, has not been renewed for a seventh series, he took to Twitter, where he implied the cancellation was down to the rightward turn of the corporation: ‘Ah well, there’s to be no more New World Order on the BBC. Not surprising in the current climate, I suppose.’ In a similar vein, UK comedy bible Chortle has warned that ‘the cancellation will also fuel fears that the corporation is avoiding shows that are critical of the government’.

Now, to anyone who has actually watched the BBC recently, talk of it becoming a kind of Tory Russia Today will come as a surprise, particularly going by its comedy output. We seem lumbered with a generation of BBC comics who confuse lazy Tory bashing with political comedy. But for a few years now metropolitan liberals have at least been pretending to believe that a right-wing coup is afoot, pointing to BBC director-general Tim Davie’s widely briefed but limply fought ‘war on woke’ at the corporation and the cancellation of the Nish Kumar-led Mash Report in 2021.

You would have thought that this notion that the BBC is willing to sacrifice bankable shows and personalities for the sake of pleasing the Tories would have been put to bed by the whole Gary Lineker climbdown. But apparently not. In any case, where these instances of alleged cancel culture in BBC comedy are concerned, it is worth reminding people that TV shows are still routinely ‘cancelled’ for more prosaic reasons – such as that they are dreadful and / or people do not watch them.

That was certainly the case with The Mash Report. This Daily Show-style ‘political satire’ – if you watched it you’ll understand the need for the inverted commas – had sluggish viewing figures from the start. Remarkably, there wasn’t that big of an audience for Nish Kumar’s genius routines, such as mugging for the camera next to a graphic that reads ‘BORIS JOHNSON IS A LIAR AND A RACIST’. (Incidentally, the show has just been cancelled for a second time: this week it was announced that Late Night Mash, the show’s reincarnation on the Dave channel, will not return for a third series.)

New World Order was more watchable than The Mash Report – even if that is damning it with faint praise. Frankie Boyle remains one of the more skilled mainstream comics of his generation, with a solid knack for abrasive, nihilistic one-liners. His tightly scripted monologues, sprinkled throughout the show, were the only bits worth watching. But the rest of it was gratingly unfunny and predictable, with the comic-stuffed panel discussions almost always collapsing into student-union snark rather than proper satire.

The show has certainly courted controversy at times. Most notably in 2020, when some right-wing snowflakes got upset about a lame joke made by comedian Sophie Duker about ‘killing whitey’. The BBC received more than 1,300 complaints about the episode. But it robustly defended Duker at the time and, after an official investigation, ruled that the show hadn’t broken any BBC rules. Davie was in post during all of this.

Maybe, just maybe, New World Order was canned because its particular brand of woke hectoring just wasn’t going down well with the viewing public. Indeed, the aforementioned Chortle write-up nods to this: ‘It is also thought that New World Order’s audience has been declining in recent years to the point it was no longer seen as a valuable commission.’ Whatever the reason for cancelling the show, the Beeb is also keen to say it isn’t cutting ties with Boyle. ‘We look forward to seeing what he does next on the BBC’, read its statement.

If this is what a right-wing coup at the BBC looks like, Britain’s perma-smug, politically identikit comedians really don’t have anything to worry about.