Those of you not familiar with the old song, ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’, will just have to trust me on this one. I always think footnotes are a bit grand.
Anyway, though I feel I have always been a comic, I didn’t actually make my stage debut till I was thirty. So, after putting it off for so long, what gave me the kick up the arse that finally made me do it?
If I’m not mistaken, that was this book’s second rhetorical question and I’m not sure I enjoyed either of them. They’ve given the whole piece an ‘Anglican sermon’ feeling, that I don’t much care for. Those of you who enjoy a rhetorical question would be well-advised to make the most of that one. It could be the last. Nevertheless, I’m going to answer it.
It suddenly occurred to me one day that it would be a terrible thing to be a seventy-year-old man and wonder if I could have made it as a comic. To have tried and failed would be bearable, but to have not tried. To lie there, pondering what it would have been like, and to know that the chance had gone forever. Horrible! After having these thoughts, I had no choice but to give it a go. Ever since that day, I do a lot of my decision-making with the help of the ‘looking back when I’m seventy’ test. This has led me to doing my first West End play, taking part in a completely improvised live TV series, and to contracting a venereal disease from a woman I met in a nightclub in Moseley in the late 1980s.
I won an award today. The Variety Club of Great Britain gave me its Comedy Award for 2000. This is fairly amazing because I’ve been nominated for, I think, fourteen awards in the last twelve years, but never won till now. Well, I won the Perrier Award in 1991, but more of that later. I was once nominated for a National Television Award, for Best Chat Show Host, but I was filming in Cardiff so I sat alone in my hotel room watching it live on telly. In short, I lost to Michael Parkinson. This, of course, is no disgrace. As a child, whenever I sat on the toilet, I would fill the time, not by reading comics or wiping bogeys on the wall, but by pretending I was being interviewed by Parkinson. ‘Of course,’ Michael would say, ‘shortly afterwards you captained England to win the World Cup.’
‘Well, yes,’ I’d reply with a chuckle, ‘but don’t ask me about the three Brazilian girls in the jacuzzi.’ (Audience laughter mingles with sound of toilet flushing.)
You’ll notice I say ‘as a child’, thus giving you the completely false impression that I don’t do it any more.
Anyway, I hate to admit it, but I got really pissed off about not winning the chat show award. That’s the trouble with being nominated. You start wanting it. I’d rather they just left me alone. So, in a fit of luvvie petulance, I turned the telly off and had a bit of a brisk walk around and around the hotel room. When I’d calmed a little, I put the telly back on. As I rejoined the broadcast, they’d moved on to Best Sitcom and were showing a really hilarious clip from Friends. Brilliant. Then they cut back to the host, who said, ‘And the winner is, Last of the Summer Wine.’ Suddenly, I felt a lot better.
Being an un-nominated neutral observer at an awards ceremony can be a bit of a laugh, though. I was at the Brits once when Eva Herzigova was presenting the award for Best New Band. She strode onstage in a fantastic low-cut dress and opened the envelope. ‘Smashing Pumpkins’, she said. ‘Hear! Hear!’ I shouted. I liked to think that somewhere in the far reaches of eternity, Benny Hill smiled.
Presenting awards can also be interesting. Once, at the British Comedy Awards, in a hall packed with top comics, comedy-writers and producers, I presented the prize for Best New Comedy Show. I was taken aback by the size of the laugh I got from the line, ‘I never watch new comedy shows because I hate that part of me that wants them to be shit.’ I believe this is known as the laughter of recognition.
Anyway, the Variety Award for Comedy is just, well, awarded, without any of the nomination nonsense, so I knew I’d won before I turned up. I accepted the award from Dale Winton and explained to the crowd that people once thought me and Dale were engaged, but only because it said so on the door. I felt obliged to do at least one engagement joke because the story about Caroline and me, including photo, was on the front page of this morning’s Daily Express.
When the show was broadcast on BBC1 the next day, they followed each of my gags with a close-up of Caroline laughing uproariously. It reminded me that a journalist from Loaded once asked me to describe my perfect girlfriend. ‘A good audience with nice tits,’ I rather laddishly replied. It’s a funny old world.
Those photographs in the rain appeared again the following day, this time on the cover of OK magazine. I didn’t look quite as bad as I thought. Nevertheless, there was still more than a suggestion of Princess Diana being hugged by W.H. Auden.
Here goes with a bit of autobiographical information. I was born Christopher Graham Collins, on the 28th January 1957 at 5.15 in the afternoon. My mother, Doris Elizabeth Collins, a slight, dark-eyed teetotaller from nearby Oldbury, gave birth to me in what was then called Hallam Hospital in West Bromwich, Staffordshire, about five miles north-west of Birmingham. My birth certificate says I was born in the town of West Bromwich, in the area of West Bromwich, in the County Borough of West Bromwich. So when people ask me why I support West Bromwich Albion Football Club, I explain that my decision was based on the only criterion anyone should ever use when choosing a football club – geography. You sit with a pencil, a ruler, and a map, identify the nearest professional football club to your place of birth, you buy a scarf with their name on it and that’s that.
My dad was John Francis Collins, a heavy-drinking, sports-mad amateur pub singer, with a big chest and a bald head, who came from West Cornforth, County Durham. My dad always told me that he came down to West Bromwich to play for the non-leaguers, Spennymoor United, in the third round of the FA Cup in 1937, when he was nineteen. I’m not sure he actually made the final eleven that day but West Brom managed to win 7–1. That night my dad and some of the other Spennymoor boys sought out a local pub and got invited to a party by a bunch of Oldbury boys. My dad-to-be decided that these boys were a bit dodgy so decided to give them a false name, Len. At the party, he saw this pretty dark-eyed girl and asked one of the Oldbury boys if he knew her. ‘Yeah, it’s my sister,’ he said. ‘I’ll introduce you.’ And my mom called my dad Len till her dying day.
Of course, the upshot of this story is, if it wasn’t for West Bromwich Albion, I would never have been born.
When my dad approached that eighteen-year-old girl at that Saturday night party, he couldn’t possibly have known the effect his appearance would have had on her. A few years earlier, as my mom maintained to her death, she had had a dream. She was in her bedroom when she heard heavenly music and opened the windows to hear more clearly. As the sun streamed in, she began to make out a group of angels in the distant sky. They seemed to be carrying a young man. As they got nearer, she could clearly see the man’s face. It was no one she knew, no one she’d ever met, well, not until a slightly drunk amateur footballer said hello to her at a party a few years later. Shortly after they married my mom sent this story into a newspaper and won two shillings for the Letter of the Week.
Who’d have thought that sixty-odd years later her little boy would still be milking the same story for financial reward?
My dad was what used to be called a man’s man. He was sturdy and short-tempered but also very funny, with loads of stories and anecdotes. He would tell me how his uncle, Tom Shanks, had carried a horse across the town square for a bet, and how my grandad, after a disagreement, had hanged a man in a Newcastle pub. He finally allowed regulars to cut the man down when he started to go purple. Apparently, it had been suggested they might cut him down when the man was still only blue, but my grandad insisted they wait till the man had a head like an aubergine.
My grandmother was also a formidable north-easterner. I remember my mom telling me about the shock she experienced when she first met my dad’s parents and they were both smoking pipes.
My mom’s dad died just as the 1957 FA Cup Final between Man Utd and Asto
n Villa kicked off. His wife, whose maiden name was, I’m happy to say, Polly Stocking, was the only grandparent I remember. She was a game old bird who lived into her nineties and regularly breakfasted on shepherd’s pie and Guinness in her later years. I remember she was rushed into hospital in her late eighties and we all thought this was the end. She survived, and before she left the ward they decided to perm and set her hair as a bit of a treat. After lots of teasing and spraying, they took out the curlers and my gran’s hair returned immediately to its natural, Don King-like, I’ve-been-electrified look. ‘It’s like me,’ my gran explained. ‘It’s dead but it won’t lie down.’
I was driving to the West Brom-Crewe game today when my mobile went. It was a conference call, with my sometime double-act partner David Baddiel, and our manager, Jon Thoday, on the line.
Jon Thoday is a chunky, dark-haired man, who looks like I imagine Michael Winner looked when he was in his thirties. He is the boss of Avalon, a company that manages and promotes comedians, and has the reputation, rightly or wrongly, for being tough, ruthless, and downright rude in its dealings with broadcasters, theatre managers, and other employers of comics. I like Jon, though. He is, with me at least, funny and charming, and inclined to giggle in a high-pitched way that belies his scary reputation. I’ve been with Avalon nearly ten years. A few months after I joined, I walked into their then tiny offices in Litchfield Street, London W1, and found Jon on the phone. ‘Fuck you and your fucking attitude,’ he was shouting, and then he slammed down the phone with such force that it broke into about six pieces. ‘Ah, Frank,’ he said, suddenly mellowing, ‘I don’t think you’ll be doing that radio show.’ There was a pause, and then we both pissed ourselves laughing.
David Baddiel tells me that the first time he became aware of my existence was when we were both working as stand-up comics on the London comedy club circuit in 1989. I was on stage at the Comedy Store, at that time a basement club in the corner of Leicester Square, and Dave was with a bunch of comics watching the show. I was still fairly raw. I’d been doing stand-up for about a year and a half and was only just starting to get gigs at this much-respected comedy club. It was about 1.15 in the early hours of Sunday morning when I walked on. The crowd were often a bit drunk and mouthy by this stage, but I was having a good time. There was some heckling but, after being a bit scared of hecklers in my very early days, I was now almost encouraging their intervention. It got me thinking on my feet.
There is something of a myth about heckling. It’s often suggested that every comedy club has a throng of hecklers making clever, witty remarks that the poor comic is scarcely able to compete with. In fact, I’ve been doing and watching stand-up comedy for fourteen years and in that time I might have heard three or four funny heckles. Mostly it’s drunks shouting ‘Fuck off’ or just making incomprehensible noises and then falling over.
Perhaps the best heckle I ever received was at a club called the Red Rose in Finsbury Park, North London. There was a blind man, a regular punter, who was in one night just as I was beginning a twenty-minute set. About two minutes in, the blind man shouted, ‘Get off, you Brummie bastard. (Pause) Has he gone yet?’ I prided myself on being pretty quick with hecklers but a blind man is a tricky opponent. I considered engaging him in friendly conversation for a few minutes whilst, at the same time, holding my hands in double V-signs about six inches from his face, but I wasn’t sure the crowd would go with me on this. I decided against shouting, ‘Well, at least I can fucking see’, for the same reason. In the end I silenced him by trumping his ‘You can’t attack me because I’m disabled’ card by suggesting to him that he was only against me because I was Pakistani. He looked genuinely ashamed.
Verbal jousting with the disabled is, generally speaking, thin ice for a stand-up. I once did a gig at a theatre in Cambridge and had cause, in an improvised moment, to start talking about those people you see who are bent over double with hunched backs and walk along staring at the ground. A man at the back shouted, ‘It’s called ankylotic spondylitis.’ Well, nobody likes a smart-Alec so I asked him how come he knew so much about it. ‘I’ve got it,’ he shouted in reply. An uneasy murmur started in the crowd. ‘Well . . . ,’ I began, fumbling for a way out of this comedy cul-de-sac, ‘ermm . . . well at least you’ll probably never stand in dog shit again.’ The crowd took a second or two to consider this and then, thank God, applauded. I’m not really sure why. Were they being heartless in taking my side against the woefully stooped heckler just because I’d bounced back with a cheeky response, or did they honestly feel that I had shown true compassion by identifying, for the man, a silver lining in his dark, dark cloud?
I have to admit I don’t always find a happy way through these dark patches that sometimes occur during audience banter. I was performing at a club in Manchester and casually asked a guy if he had any kids. ‘Not alive,’ he said. I never like to just ignore an audience remark but this one floored me so I just carried on as if it hadn’t happened. Even Homer nods.
So, it’s very late at the Comedy Store, I’m on stage, the crowd is lively and David Baddiel, still a stranger to me, is in the audience. Then came the heckle. Now, a lot of comics have set responses to heckles. These, as I’m sure you know, are called put-down lines. It’s not really an activity I approve of because the same put-down lines get shared around and I think it’s really important that a comic treats each heckle as an individual case. Otherwise every turn is doing ‘Don’t drink on an empty head’, ‘Isn’t it a shame when cousins marry?’ or ‘Do your gums bleed once a month?’ regardless of the heckle, and the spontaneity, the challenge of dealing with the unexpected, is lost. So, I’m still on stage at the Comedy Store and the heckle comes: ‘Don’t I remember you from medical school?’
Now, as heckles go, this one was quite tricky. Firstly, it didn’t follow the normal heckle-structure of insult from audience, followed by better insult from comic. It was more of a polite enquiry, but still potentially destructive and probably still motivated by bad intent. It sounded friendly but it was designed to throw me. Secondly, you’ll be surprised to hear, it was not a heckle I’d had before, so I couldn’t even fall back, if stuck, on my own personal heckle-response back-catalogue. If someone says they remember you from medical school, there isn’t much logic in suggesting that, as a result of this, they’ll never stand in dog shit again. Thirdly, I never went to medical school. Anyway, the exchange went like this,
Heckler: Don’t I remember you from medical school?
Me: Oh, yeah. You were the one in the jar.
Dave tells me he joined in with the applause. We didn’t actually speak that night, though. Dave was already established on the London circuit and I was just breaking through. There was a fairly rigid pecking-order on the circuit, the general rule being that established comics sat at one end of the dressing room, sharing in-jokes and ignoring the new boys, and people like me sat on their own, giggling nervously at overheard gags they didn’t quite get but which the established boys thought were hilarious. I made a vow that if I ever got established on the circuit, I’d always make an effort to make the new boys feel at home. You know, go over and ask their name and so on, maybe even introduce them to the closely knit in-crowd I was now part of. Of course, when the day came that I did get established and accepted, I thought, ‘Oh, fuck it. Let someone else sit in “Twats’ Corner”.’ Human nature, eh?
Dave and me (yes, I know it should be ‘Dave and I’ but I’m trying to find my real voice. I just read what I’ve written so far and I thought some bits sounded a bit grand) had our first proper conversation in a dressing room at a club called Jongleurs in Battersea. It was during the 1990 World Cup and there was a telly in the dressing room so we could watch that night’s Republic of Ireland game. Being of Irish Catholic stock, I was supporting the Republic. I’d said hello to Dave on a couple of occasions but we hadn’t had anything like a proper conversation. He was doing pretty well at the time. He was getting a lot of radio work and doing gigs at all the best
clubs. I was sort of world famous in Birmingham and getting on OK in London, but the differences didn’t stop there. Dave, or David as everyone called him. Hold it. I found a difference already. In my whole life up till then, I had never met anyone called David who people called David. In Oldbury, he would have been Dave, no messing. And he was Jewish.
I don’t think I’d met a Jewish person before. If I had they’d certainly kept it under their hat. Which seems unlikely when you consider how small those hats are. (I’m not totally happy with this gag because although Jews do wear those little hats clipped to their heads, they also wear those big trilby-cum-stetsons which, I imagine, have loads of storage-room for secrets.) I may have sort of known a Jew back in Oldbury. There was a bearded, East-European-sounding local nutter who everyone called Jacob the Jew. I have no idea if Jacob was a Jew (I mean Jacob the nutter, of course, not Jacob, the brother of Esau and the son of Isaac. He was definitely a Jew). The rumour that Oldbury’s Jacob was Jewish was definitely beefed up a bit when my mate Ogga saw him on. Crosswells Road shouting, ‘The Suez Canal: what for?’ over and over. None of us really understood the significance of the Suez Canal at the time, but it certainly sounded Jewish to me. I’m not even sure if he was a nutter. This is not always easy to judge. I find, as a general rule of thumb, if you see someone wearing more than two badges, they’re a nutter. But that’s a personal viewpoint. I went along with the theory that he was a nutter mainly because it enabled me to pun on the popular foodstuff, Jacob’s Crackers.
On a darker note, my dad told me a story of how a Jewish money-lender he knew of, back in the north-east, had driven a poor woman to put her head in the gas oven because of his cruel interest rates. My dad was not a man to hold back when it came to enforcing a racial sterotype.
Frank Skinner Autobiography Page 2