Heugh! I’m going to be sticking up a couple of extracts from the book so you can get a bit of an idea of what you’re shoplifting. Here’s the blurb...

This is a book full of hope and jokes. A novella tells the story of a newly retired Frankie Boyle, lured back onto the panel-show circuit when people who fall under a certain level of celebrity start getting raped. Frankie pitches increasingly desperate ideas for new shows as he slides down the showbiz rankings and his arse drops ever closer to an obscure sodomising.

Interwoven with this numb hymn to show-business are chapters detailing Boyle’s worldview, an incessant fusillade of laughter and despair, the hollow clanging scream of a dying mechanical God and an honest attempt to describe the world by refusing to take it seriously.

Work! Consume! Die! is the collected wisdom of an idiot. (Nobody’s looking, just stick it under your coat and run out of the shop.)

And this bit is somewhere near the start of the first chapter of the story...

I’m in the middle of a confused dream where I’m married to a Muslim woman who won’t let me fuck her, when I hear the drill of the doorbell. I bang through to the living room and nearly fall over Paul, who for some reason is sleeping on the floor, right beside the couch. As I open the door, I look behind me and check we closed the wall, and when I look back I see two massive cops.
They’re plainclothes, CID or what have you. The older one has those watery eyes some older Scottish guys have, like he’s about to start greeting. In front of him is a man with a side-parting who looks like an enormous schoolboy.
‘Mr Francis Boyle?’ he asks, but it’s not really a question. ‘Alright if we come in?’
All the grass is through in the stateroom, I can see it in my mind’s eye. It’s on the big tarpaulin I put down so we wouldn’t get burns on the carpet. ‘Paul! We have visitors!’ I shout, and he leaps up startled. Literally springs up like he’s part of an ambush, then sits down suddenly on the couch, internalising a massive spasm of guilt.
The two cops are making a show of looking about, like explorers in a bad movie. I make them a cup of tea and we all sit down around the tiny kitchen table while Paul sits rigidly in the other room, too paranoid to leave. I expect some kind of introduction but there is none. ‘This is a fairly unusual matter,’ the younger one starts happily. ‘I believe you know the TV presenter Dom Joly?’
I try to shrug but the mug I’m holding is too full, so it comes over like a twitch. ‘Eh, not really. I met him a couple of times doing panel shows. We did a couple of panel shows together.’
‘Panel shows,’ agrees the older one mournfully, his eyes filling right up like tears are going to start rolling down his face.
‘Mr Joly was the subject of a serious sexual assault over the weekend,’ chirps the other guy. I don’t really register what he says at first. I’m aware that I’m not really saying anything and I start to feel uneasy.
‘Dom Joly?’ I ask foolishly. They don’t acknowledge this in any way, so I say, ‘sexually assaulted?’ and then there’s a long pause.
‘Dom Joly has been sexually assaulted,’ the old policeman confirms sadly. ‘Dom Joly from Trigger Happy TV.’
‘God, I’m sorry to hear that,’ I say, trying for a concerned look and tone. I actually feel nothing or – if possible – less than nothing. ‘He’s a big guy,’ I add puzzledly.
‘It’s believed Mr Joly was drugged, although we are still looking for a physically powerful attacker,’ side-parting confides excitedly.
‘That’s terrible.’ I look blankly at the digestive beside my cup that it would now be inappropriate to dunk. ‘Someone drugged his drink, or ...’
‘They somehow got the drug into food served in his dressing room,’ he explains.
‘A Chicken Kiev,’ watery eyes announces.
I feel a rising, horrified excitement. The sort you feel when somebody dies. ‘Am I a suspect?’
They both laugh.
‘No, no, no, Mr Boyle.’ They beam silently at me for a bit. ‘You are on a list of, eh, celebrities we’re contacting in case they may be in danger.’ ‘Danger? In danger of, eh ...?’
‘Of being sexually assaulted,’ the old guy nods vigorously. ‘Of being subjected to the same kind of sexual assault as Mr Joly ... there have been other incidents like this involving other, eh, celebrities.’
‘The suspicion is that this guy has been operating for several years, attacking people who have been famous but then slip below a certain level of public recognition,’ his partner explains, inexplicably ending by smacking his fist into his open palm.
I hold my tea in both hands like I’m nursing a Scotch. I try to think of a polite way of asking, then blurt out, ‘Who? Who else has he raped?’ The old boy flips open a notebook. ‘A lot of the presenters from The 11 O’Clock Show, Tony Slattery, Steve Punt, Sam Fox, Michael Greco, two ... no, all three of the ladies from Smack the Pony, Frank Sidebottom, before he died. We can’t really name people.’
‘This has been going on for a while?’
‘It seems to be getting more active. And he seems to be focusing his anger on comedy.’
‘Everybody does,’ I smile.
As I show them out, Paul gets up halfway as some sort of farewell and it ends up looking like a curtsy. They both shake my hand warmly and, as the younger cop heads out, the old guy grips me by the arm and forces something into my hand. He fixes me with the liquid eyes of a dying spaniel and leaves without a word.
Half an hour later Paul and I are still smoking a joint on the couch, passing the picture back and forth. It’s a dressing room. I reckon it’s an ITV dressing room at LWT. In the foreground you can see part of a guy lying on the floor, his trousers off and a huge arse exposed. Is this Dom Joly? Is he fucking dead? Why would they take a photo while he was still unconscious? Did the rapist take it? On the wall is the real focus of the piece. Written in blood (presumably, we agree, Dom Joly’s arseblood) is a slogan in block capitals.

‘SHOWBUSINESS HAS NO BOTTOM.’

Hoo Ha! A second extract from the book. Here’s the start of one of the opinion chapters…

We each of us live in our own little reality tunnel, seeing things through the prism of our own prejudice and expectations. Look at Star Trek. To us, the Federation is benign, travelling the galaxy in a quest for knowledge. Wait a minute, though. Some planets are just holiday worlds. Umm, did they choose that, or did the Federation tell them that suddenly their whole planet was going to be washing beach towels and handing out cocktails? Is that what the USS Enterprise is flying about the galaxy looking for – new sex worlds? Perhaps the formal name is ‘holiday world’, but of course they are actually sex worlds.

If we take the Enterprise as being representative of the Federation, it seems to have three approaches when it discovers new alien life. FUCK IT, STUN IT or KILL IT. And, wait a minute, that ship they fly about in seems to be pretty much a giant floating gun. That’s not good, is it? Often, they are so keen to shoot something as powerfully as possible that they divert energy from their life support systems to the gun. Yet we see them as being altruistic, floating about in the USS Peacegun, looking for places to go on holiday.

I’d imagine the Federation looks quite different if you’re living on an undiscovered world with a lot of beaches. And maybe Star Trek looks different if you live in South America and you have a history of explorers being the first stage of colonising invasions. Does that sound stupid to you? That’s because I’m from a different reality tunnel. One where I swim up and down all day thinking about the ideology of Star Trek, when I’m supposed to be writing a fucking book.

One of the things we heard during the global financial crisis was that nobody could have foreseen this. Everyone was queuing up to tell us how unexpected this was. But that’s just the view from their reality tunnel. Remember those antiglobalisation riots? Weren’t they saying that the global financial system was unsustainable? As Slavoj Žižek points out in First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, in Seattle 14,000 extra cops were drafted in to deal with the sheer number of people saying that the international financial system was unstable. That’s more troops than we sent to Iraq. So, while we are told that nobody could have foreseen the dangers, if we were trying to quantify how many people were actually predicting the collapse, it would be fair to say that there was an army of them.

Let’s not forget that with environmental disaster, profiteering on commodity prices, the risks we take with the food chain, and mobile-phone masts springing up everywhere, it’s a lot more likely that you’ll be killed by a bank or a big corporation than by Al-Qaeda. What we call Al-Qaeda set itself up as an operation that individuals would come to with terror plans and bin Laden would decide whether or not to invest. It’s interesting that if you want to create worldwide chaos and perpetrate widespread evil, the ideal model is that of a venture capital firm. It seems to me that the world financial system is now geared towards privatisation. Countries borrow money and the price for keeping the rate of interest down is to privatise stuff. Who do we borrow the money from? Hedge funds, bankers, speculators. Why do they want us to privatise? Because it opens up areas of enormous profit for them. You can choose not to drink Coca-Cola but you can’t not educate your kids. You can’t not go to the hospital when you’re sick. You can’t not drink water.

Look on the upside for a moment. The world is being destroyed by corporate interests but we’re just at that point in the horror movie before we work out how to kill the monsters. Of course things look bleak now, but ask yourself this – how do you kill a corporation? One of us will work it out! And what then? What if we win? I mean it, have you thought about what the world could be like if people took control of their own reality? We can forget about war. We can evolve, we can explore the stars and we can focus on hating the people who really deserve it – our fucking parents. Branded goods always get me. People paying to walk around like sandwich boards. I imagine that the FCUK logo started as some corporate guy making a Trading Places-style bet. ‘Bet you I can get them to wear at hat with FUCK on it. I’m a STUPID FCUK. Right there on their STUPID FCUKing head. Ahhahahhhaa!’ In a few years’ time they’ll be burning those logos onto them like they were cattle. ‘Here you go. It says I’m a stupid CNUT.’ Sizzle. Scream. Sizzle. Sizzle.

More websites than ever are selling fake designer clothes, luggage, DVDs and perfume. Let’s not forget there are real victims here. It breaks my heart to think of Mr Dolce or Mr Gabbana having to return to their hovels in Milan to tell their families that, because of copyright infringement, there’ll be no diamond sauce to go with the terrified homeless teenager they’re eating for tea tonight.

Remember, people. Pirated goods come at a price. Usually a bloody good one. I know from experience that stuff bought off the internet often turns out not to be quite as described. Still, if I turn the light out and ‘she’ wedges it right back between her thighs I can hardly tell. So, the next time a little Vietnamese man comes up to you in a motorway service station and offers you cheap DVDs, say ‘no’ and keep saying ‘no’. It’s the only way to get the price right down.

A French court has ruled that Renault can call their latest car ‘Zoe’, despite objections from the parents of Zoe Renault, who claim their daughter will be teased at school. It happened at my school to Henry Hoover. And Max Strength-Anusol nearly killed himself. Bacardi have a similar legal dispute with me. Over my plans later this year to become known in the tabloids as the Bacardi Coke Rapist. Presumably the biggest problem isn’t that you’ll be named the same as a car. It’s that you’ll be named the same as a serial killer. That’s what happened to my best friend Dennis Nilsen. Woke up one morning to find hundreds of people with the same name were angry because he’d eaten all those men. I give fair warning now that if you’re called Frankie Boyle and don’t want the stigma of being named the same as someone associated for ever with horrific crimes, you have until the next X Factor final to change your name.