Frank Skinner Autobiography

by Frank Skinner

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Frank Skinner

  Copyright

  About the Author

  If I’m Considering. . .

  FRANK SKINNER

  Frank Skinner

  This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form (including any digital form) other than this in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Epub ISBN: 9781409065241

  Version 1.10

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Arrow Books in 2002

  17 19 20 18 16

  Copyright © Frank Skinner 2001

  Frank Skinner has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  First published in Great Britain in 2001 by

  Century

  Arrow Books

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099426875

  ‘Reads like one long stand-up routine’

  Heat

  ‘Frank Skinner is up there with Tristram Shandy as a brilliantly effective book . . . hilariously honest and deeply moving’

  Independent

  ‘Honest and revealing . . . rags-to-riches account of a Brummie who’s become one of the most successful entertainers on TV’

  Mirror

  ‘Funny? Yes, very.’

  Evening Standard

  ‘Funny and . . . well-crafted. [Skinner] has . . . an enormous care for words’

  Daily Telegraph

  About the Author

  Frank Skinner performed his first stand-up gig in December 1987, and four years later went on to win the prestigious Perrier Award. Frank has established himself as a major name in entertainment – both in live comedy and on television. Frank has created and starred in a succession of hit comedy shows, including The Frank Skinner Show, Fantasy Football and Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned. Frank has attained three number one hits with the iconic football anthem Three Lions alongside David Baddiel and the Lightning Seeds. He has starred in the West End in both Art and Lee Hall’s Cooking with Elvis; and his critically acclaimed first book Frank Skinner was the bestselling autobiography of 2002, spending a total of 46 weeks in the Sunday Times bestsellers’ list. In 2007 Frank Skinner returned to stand-up with another sell-out tour of the UK.

  IF I’M CONSIDERING buying a book, I always take it off the shelf and read the first paragraph. This, I think, gives you a pretty fair inkling as to whether you’ll like it or not. So, imagine the pressure I’m feeling at the moment. I suppose this has ended up in the Biography section and you are probably already eyeing up my competition: stuff like ‘My Life in Music’ by David Hasselhof or ‘Fish in my rear-view mirror’ by Teddy Kennedy. So, I know I have to work fast. I’ve never written a book before. In fact I’ve barely written a letter in the last ten years and even e-mails have become a bit irksome. I quite like text-messaging on my mobile phone, but it’s not much of a warm-up for a 120,000-word autobiography. I even had text-message sex on one occasion. It was a long-winded but ultimately rewarding experience. At one stage in the proceedings I asked my fellow texter what was under her pants. The answer took the form of a vivid portrait in words that was three parts Jackie Collins and two parts Gray’s Anatomy. I hadn’t really expected such a wealth of detailed information. In short, I could almost smell it. Her message ended: ‘What’s under YOUR pants?’ I replied, in all honesty, ‘My knees.’

  According to my own methods of purchase, if you are still with me at this stage, then the book is bought. Don’t imagine this will lead to any falling away of standards. As far as I’m concerned, your outlay has forged a bond between us and I’m going to spend the rest of these pages telling you more about myself than I’ve ever told a best friend. You see, what I really like about the text-message story is that it’s true. I really like true stuff. This is why I never read novels. I’m constantly plagued by the knowledge that they aren’t true. If a novel begins, ‘Martin lit a cigarette and considered the situation’, I’m thinking to myself, no, he didn’t. There is no Martin. So, I’m offering you the truth. The story of my life. This throws up a couple of problems.

  Firstly, and I am not inclined to false modesty, I find it hard to imagine the kind of person who would be even slightly interested in my life story. I never stood toe-to-toe with Saddam or struck a power-chord at a stadium gig. I’m a nondescript bloke from a working-class family in West Bromwich, who got lucky. I’ve always been lucky. A friend of mine used to say that if I fell off John Lewis’s roof, I’d drop into a new suit, and I know what he meant. On my thirtieth birthday, a mate’s girlfriend asked me what it was like to be thirty and ‘on the scrapheap’. Ten years later, I was doing a stand-up gig in front of five and a half thousand people, had my own chat show, and was at the core of a national phenomenon when me and two other blokes decided that football was coming home. How did all that happen?

  This leads to the other problem. I’ve read the odd biography and I usually give up after about fifty pages because we’re on chapter four and he’s still at school. I hate all that early-life stuff. Who wants to know where his grandad was born and that his earliest memory was of staring at a stained-glass window at his auntie’s house in Sudbury? By this stage I’m shouting, ‘Hurry up and get famous, you bastard, or I’m switching to Hasselhof.’ But, as Wordsworth said, ‘The child is father to the man’, so I feel I need to stick in a bit of relevant stuff from my pre-shaving years, just not in a big lump at the front. In fact, I don’t see why the story needs to be in any particular order. We’re mates now. You’ll have to take me as you find me.

  I also like books with lots of short little sections, bite-sized to suit the busy lifestyle common to so many people in this, the twenty-first century.

  Can I just make a brief point about modesty? I really like modesty. I respect it. Modesty in others draws me to them. A lot of people would regard me as a winner but, for the first thirty years of my life, as my mate’s girlfriend instinctively recognised, I was a loser. Thirty years is a long time. I still think like a loser. I still move like one. I’m OK with that. Losers are often very nice people, well, compared to winners.

  Unfortunately, the nature of autobiography means I have to talk about myself, at length. I’ll have to say ‘I did this’ and ‘I said that’. Sorry. Worst of all, as with the text-message story, I’m going to have to quote my own jokes. Now, as much as I love hearing them quoted by others, it is impossible to quote your own gags without sounding like a tosser. What can I do? I’m stuck with it.

  The closest I’ve previously got to being ‘biographed’ was getting done by This is Your Life. It was a strange dream-like experience. I was doing a gig at the London Palladium. It had been a bit of a stormer and, as I took my bows at the end after an hour and a half of fairly tasty stand-up, I was feeling pretty good. Happily, there was a lot of really loud cheering but then, in the midst of all this, there was a sort of secondary cheer which went up, even louder than the first one. Wow, I thought, they REALLY love me! Turned out the much louder secondary cheer was for Michael Aspel, sneaking on behind me. To be honest, I was a bit startled when, out the corner of my eye, I caught s
ight of him. Michael and I exchanged pleasantries before I was dragged off to my dressing room and locked in so I didn’t accidentally bump into any surprise guests. Meanwhile, they prepared the Palladium stage for This is Your Life and, to my amazement, the crowd hung around till 1.00 a.m. to witness the event.

  It occurs to me now that this is quite a nice way to structure a biography: the comedian locked alone in his dressing room, waiting to be ‘This is Your Lifed’, and naturally he begins to reminisce until, 120,000 words later, he is awakened from his nostalgic meanderings by a knock on the door, ‘Mr Skinner, we’re ready for you now.’ And he strides out into the bright light to be greeted by a deafening roar that is less about admiration and more about love. Thus, I tell my tale like the old gal who used to be Kate Winslet does in Titanic. As I say, it’s a nice way to structure an autobiography. But . . . I don’t fancy it.

  Something struck me as I sat locked in my dressing room that night. My big surprise shouldn’t have been a surprise at all. I had had a phone message in the early hours of that morning telling me that Michael Aspel was going to be at the Palladium that night, and that I was his victim-to-be. It never occurred to me for one second that it might be true. It had, after all, been a strange week on the crazed messages front. On the previous Monday night, I did a gig in Oxford. When I left the building at around midnight, a female fan had written a lewd message in lipstick on my windscreen. It offered me ‘anal sex with no complications’ if I cared to visit her that night. There was a phone number but the woman was clearly a nutter. I mean, you should have seen the state of her lounge.

  Anyway, I barely noticed the phone-message. It never occurred to me that I might be This is Your Life material. Why would they be interested in me? (I sense you’re already getting fed-up with the modesty thing.) The words ‘scraping’ and ‘barrel’ should have come to mind but they didn’t. I discovered a few days later that the phone-call had come from a couple of former colleagues from my comedy-club days, Malcolm Hardee and Jim Tavare. Malcolm knew about my special night because he was due to be a guest on the show. He was dropped when the producer heard about the phone-call. Malcolm actually had the cheek to turn up to the after-show party, but he completely redeemed himself in my eyes by performing a commando nerve-grip on Michael Aspel, causing the much-loved broadcaster to drop helplessly to his knees. I have the greatest respect for Mr Aspel but that is what I call comedy. If This is Your Life was a live, late-night show it would be the best thing on television. Imagine a long line of ex-lovers, debtors, and discarded ex-friends coming on and haranguing the victim. Or friends and relatives cheerily striding on to talk openly of his surly manner and his various brushes with sexually transmitted disease. As it is, much wonderful stuff was lost in the final edit of my own TIYL. I can still see the incredibly professional way in which Michael Aspel smiled and nodded when Jonathan Ross and his wife, Jane, came on and thanked me for introducing them to anal sex.

  I should point out that this was a reference to a stand-up routine of mine. Neither Jonathan nor Jane were with me in the untidy lounge. For some reason, anal sex has become something of a leitmotif in my life. Many’s the time that I have eschewed the easy pleasures of the main auditorium and, instead, sought out the smaller, more challenging, and ultimately more rewarding charms of the adjoining Studio Theatre. Even if the experience is essentially the same, the mere knowledge that you are in the more exclusive smaller venue seems to make the whole thing more exciting. Many would consider this a private matter but, like the ancient mariner, I feel a strange need to tell my tale.

  In fact, I have spent so much time going on and on about the subject on stage and screen that The Guardian once described me as the ‘Billy Graham of anal sex’. That may be stretching it a bit (to the anal sex enthusiast, something of an occupational hazard) but once, during a stand-up tour, I received a postcard from a man who told me that my lengthy sermon on anal sex at a gig he had attended had triggered a conversation between him and his wife on the way home. While still on the bus, they had resolved to ‘give it a bash’ when they got back to the house and, after twenty-two years of marriage, they had anal sex for the first time. The experiment was, it seems, a tremendous success. I felt like I imagine a pop star must feel when he hears from grateful relatives that his music has aroused a loved one from a long coma. I have never quite worked out the significance, if any, but on the other side of the postcard was a very formal portrait of Major Yuri Gagarin.

  People ask me why I became a comedian. Well, I’ve been making jokes for as long as I can remember. Not necessarily good jokes but jokes nevertheless. I get endless joy from this process. Whether it’s on telly being watched by ten million viewers or small-talking to a stranger in a lift, my greatest joy is to crack a good gag and get the right response. When I still lived in Birmingham, I dated a stunningly attractive woman. I had been seeing her for about three weeks when I finally asked her where she lived. It turns out she dwelt in what was, at the time, a very rough block of flats called Bath Court. I said, in what I felt was a slightly Wildean tone, ‘The trouble with Bath Court is that the residents spend a good deal more time in the latter than they do in the former.’

  ‘Where’s “The Latter”?’ she asked. I knew then that our love could never flourish.

  On another occasion, I was wandering around Speakers’ Corner with a mate one Sunday morning and we stopped to listen to a bearded man singing the praises of the Muslim religion. Soon he switched to a pretty aggressive attack on Christianity. During this, a black man in a yellow cagoule arrived on a mountain bike. He dismounted and stayed at the rear of the crowd, leaning on the bike. Then he began heckling the Muslim speaker, correcting Biblical misquotations and challenging theological points. The Muslim kept beckoning the heckler forward but he was clearly quite comfortable where he was. Eventually, the exasperated Muslim stepped down from the stage and walked towards the heckler to continue the debate. ‘There you are,’ I said to my mate, ‘if the mountain bike won’t go to Mohammed . . .’ If a son of mine had played football for England, I don’t think I could have been more proud. My mate actually applauded.

  This is why I became a comedian. And yes, these two stories show why I love that mate more than I ever could have loved that stunningly attractive woman.

  I’m still trying to work out the best approach to this book. I thought I might try mixing the present with the past, so I can tell you what I did today and then chuck in a lump of golden memories. I was out shopping with my girlfriend, Caroline, this morning. When we got back to my flat, there was a man standing in the pouring rain with a big bunch of flowers and an even bigger camera. ‘I’d just like to congratulate you on your engagement,’ he said. She took the flowers and he started snapping. Caroline is, I think, a very beautiful twenty-three-year-old. This, generally speaking, is a very good thing in a girlfriend. However, I am forty-four, so whenever we are photographed together, I always think of those pictures of Anna-Nicole Smith and her ninety-year-old billionaire husband, J. Marshall Howard: a terrible before-and-after nightmare of what goes wrong with the human face. (Incidentally, I once did a gag about Anna-Nicole, claiming that the film Tomb Raider was her life story.) So, any picture of me with Caroline is bound to make me look a bit wrecked. And, I suppose, make her look even prettier.

  This, of course, is why prettyish girls often hang around with ugly girls. I remember seeing such a pairing in Samantha’s nightclub in Birmingham, back in the seventies. I chatted to the Mr Hyde half of the combo and, after a while, she asked me why blokes always tossed a coin before approaching them. I hadn’t got the heart to tell her. Well, not till after breakfast anyway.

  Caroline and me have been together for just over six months. She is tall and green-eyed with short blonde hair and a smile that makes me forget to do stuff, like breathe, for example. Sometimes, when she’s asleep, I lie and look at her face for ages without getting bored. But she’s not willowy, and wet like some pretty girls; she’s loud, funny and inclined
to argue, especially with me.

  By the way, I’m not engaged to Caroline, but I bought her a ring that she wears on that finger so I suppose tongues were bound to wag. Still, there we stood, saying ‘cheese’ in the pouring rain, and me with my hood up looking, in my mind’s eye, like the mummified head of Mary Magdalene I once saw in a glass case in a museum in Provence.

  I didn’t begin my comedy career until I was thirty. People had been telling me I should be a comic since I was about six but, in a way, I already was a comic. I used to perform in the classroom, then in the pub, the factory and now on telly. It’s all the same thing: showing off and endlessly pursuing that holy grail, the laugh. You don’t need a microphone or a camera. All you need is an audience. Mates, girlfriends, people on buses, anyone will do. It’s like an addiction.

  Just after my dad died, me and my two brothers had the task of clearing out his house: all his clothes and little trinkets, a lock of my mom’s hair, his rosary beads, photographs, the lot. We were being brave about it, but it was a desperately sad process, all three of us frightened we might find the thing that would, without much warning, leave us broken and sobbing. My eldest brother, Terry, was clearing out a cupboard and took out the remains of a cheap ornament that my dad had had an affection for. Originally, it was a bird perched on a branch, but it had got broken and the piece that Terry held up consisted of only the base, a branch, and a pair of bird’s feet still clinging on. No doubt, somewhere deep in the cupboard was the footless bird, both pieces put there by my dad with the intention of mending them one day. One of the thousands of loose ends left behind when somebody dies suddenly. I took the broken ornament from my brother, the little feet severed just above the ankle, if birds have ankles. He looked at me but didn’t speak. Neither did my other brother, Keith. They looked but they didn’t speak. I did. ‘Lot 16: Who killed Cock Robin?’ I said. We laughed like we used to when we were kids sharing the same bedroom.