EVEN the box-office notices were threatening, warning latecomers they would not be admitted, as the Frankie Boyle tirade tornado blew into town for two nights that sold out in a nervous blink last year.

Since then, the even more unreasonable voice of Scotland than Alex Salmond has gone from Mock The Week to mocking the weak, although the Down’ Syndrome material stretched to no more than three jokes, all of them obvious from a jaundiced joker frankly treading water on just another tour night in York.

Children with Down’s Syndrome are defenceless, or so the argument goes. True, but so too are those in the stalls picked on for dog’s abuse from Boyle in a tedious game of I’ve Got The Microphone And You Haven’t. Relentless insults about sexual abuse wane with repetition, alas affirming that the broiling, spoiling Boyle is best chopped up in small, edited doses in Mock The Week, the scornful panel show he says he has outgrown.

The day cannot be far away when comedy tastes outgrow Boyle, pictured, a cussed Cassandra with not an ounce of redemptive hope in his saggy body. Never as extreme as fellow stroppy Scot Jerry Sadowitz, nor as scary, Boyle is more out of love with life than Hamlet, his jokes delivered with the numbed precision of a hit man, coupled with a rattlesnake laugh more unnerving than Gordon Brown’s smile.

Unlike Boyle, you sensed Bernard Manning was playing at outrage, so too Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown, both of them far better at working a rowdy crowd.

And where was the new political analysis of the sorry mess we’re in? What a miserable, mirthless night.