Frank Skinner Autobiography

by Frank Skinner

  He laid the book open on a table and the four of us just stood staring at it. I mean, for ages. I can still see those breasts even though I haven’t seen the book for years. And I absolutely guarantee that it was a picture of bare breasts and not the solar system. We just stared. And then Stephen said, in a slightly hushed voice, ‘Y’know, when I see something dirty like this, my thingy goes all stiff.’

  Suddenly, eureka! I have never felt so relieved in my life. I thought it was just me. I thought I had some sort of paralysis thing. I looked around and I could see that the other two were similarly relieved. Yes, all our thingys went stiff when we saw something dirty. Hurrah! I could have hugged Stephen for this revelation. We all got giggly and joyous that we’d discovered something universal and important. We even shook hands. We actually shook hands. We were normal. The experience was uplifting in every sense. I’m glad we held back from hugging each other because if Mother Mary had come in and found us all locked in a group embrace, each with an erection, there would have been four other wooden crucifixes on the wall outside her office, and we’d have been on them.

  There’s a science fiction story about a guy who goes backwards in time and while he’s in the past, he accidentally steps on a butterfly. When he returns to his own time, we speak a different language and Britain has a fascist government, all because of the changes he triggered when he stood on the butterfly. Just like I can never know the weird and unfathomable effects the half-ender I chucked at my neighbour might have had on my life, how can any of us possibly predict the consequences of even our most trivial actions on the lives of others?

  Could that African tribeswoman have ever imagined that her breasts would have such a massive effect on an eight-year-old schoolboy on the other side of the planet? She brought me sexual arousal, removed what seemed like very real fears about my health, and gave me a strong sense of belonging and self-awareness, all with one unsmiling flash of her tits. It was a truly important moment in my personal development, all thanks to her. It could also be seen, of course, and not as facetiously as you might think, as another step on my ladder to nob-joke fame and glory. It added a new dimension. We all became firm friends. I guess you’d call it group solidarity.

  I thought I’d give you a brief run-down of a weekend in my life. Make of it what you will. Perhaps it will be read by some kid I’ll never meet and change his life like the tribeswoman’s tits changed mine. I can’t imagine that but then, as I say, neither could she.

  Friday night. 11th May 2001. If we take our lead from Ready Steady Go, the weekend starts at tea-time on Friday. Guess what? I’m in my office at Avalon (y’know, my management company) in Ladbroke Grove, West London, writing this book. I’ve worked out that I need to write 3,000 words a day to make my deadline. This is slightly scary but I’m starting to really enjoy writing it. Let’s face it, I’ll probably never write another book, unless I do volume two of this when I’m eighty, so I might as well enjoy it. My girlfriend, Caroline, says she thinks writing the book has made me more reflective, especially about my background. She reckons I’ve suddenly become very class-aware, more inclined to make casual anti-posh remarks, to whinge about privilege. I need to watch this. I don’t like rich, successful celebs who go on about their poor backgrounds. Shit, I’ve done that big time, haven’t I? Well, it’s an autobiography. I’m trapped in facts.

  I sit in my office, which has a window that faces a brick wall, so I get no hint of the sunny day outside. On the wall, pics of Muhammad Ali, Bruce Lee and Elvis Presley. A photograph of me and another hero, former Albion star Jeff Astle. I go for heroes on the office wall. In the corner, a life-size cut-out of John Wayne. On top of my computer there’s a teddy bear dressed as Elvis, a gift from Caroline. There’s also a baseball that has the inscription ‘The one who complains about the way the ball bounces is likely the one who dropped it’, and a little model of my great inspiration, Wile E. Coyote from the Road Runner cartoons. He’s the one who gets blown up, fried, crushed, and generally badly hurt in his pursuit of the Road Runner, but keeps going. He’s the ultimate symbol of endurance, determination and single-mindedness. When I’m writing the book, a TV show, or stand-up, he looks over me. Fuck failure, keep going.

  The soundtrack to my writing is an endless wall of hip-hop. Today it was Dr Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg and the Notorious B.I.G. Throbbing bass lines, and people rapping about niggers, bitches and motherfuckers while I write about garden sheds and schoolboys weeing their trousers. It works for me but I’ve no idea why. I didn’t even get into this sort of music till about three years ago. I didn’t like rap. When people tried to win me over, I would say that if I needed bad poetry, I’d buy a greetings card. Then I got drawn in via the weirdest route, French hip-hop. I went out with a woman who was into MC Solaar and ‘I Am’, both French rap acts, and I got hooked, even though I had no idea what they were saying. Maybe because I had no idea what they were saying. It was the human voice as musical instrument, just a good noise, but now I need all those nasty words as well.

  At 6.45 p.m. my car turns up. I drive but, particularly when I’m working, I’ll often hire a car with driver, and, if he’s available, I always book Gerry. Gerry is arguably the most Irish man in the world. He also has more stories than anyone I’ve ever met, my favourite being the one about when he patented a device for picking up dog excrement. It was called the Mess-Stick, and when he tried to get the pooper-scooper franchise with Westminster Council, him and his friends turned up at the plush council offices to discover that their rivals had all brought plasticine to aid their demonstration. Gerry and his boys had stopped off in Green Park to collect real dog shit for theirs. It didn’t help. Gerry is also a Catholic, so that reduces the weirdo factor if I ask him to stop off at the local Catholic church so I can light a candle for someone, or get in the car with ashes on my head.

  I like Gerry. I always sit in the front, partly because he’s become a mate and it makes chatting easier, and partly because it’s bad enough swanning around in a chauffeur-driven Merc without sitting in the back like Lord Twat. We’re off to the Shaftesbury Theatre for the last weekend of the Unplanned run, picking up David Baddiel from his house on the way. It’s a sunny day and the streets are full of scantily clad women. Gerry and me sit in traffic in Notting Hill and two sexy black girls in breathtakingly short skirts recognise me and start waving and giggling. I wave and giggle back. Maybe a vague shadow of the Born Free book rolled across my subconsciousness, but if it did, I didn’t notice. Gerry points out a white girl in cut-off denims, crossing the street. ‘Never choose a new girlfriend in the summertime,’ he says, ‘because everybody looks good with a tan.’ I nod, and remember he gave me the same advice last summer. I think about my own girlfriend, Caroline. She presents an entertaiment news show called The Juice on Radio Five Live. They record it on Friday afternoons and I’m wondering how it went. She is DJ-ing at a club called Strawberry Moons tonight. We’ll probably meet up later. I’m not really sure how I rate as a date. She’s a party girl at heart. She’s twenty-three, with a taste for strawberry martinis and tequila slammers. I’m twenty years older and I don’t drink. The age wouldn’t really matter if I drank because everybody is seventeen when they’re drunk. Mind you, comedy is definitely not a grown-up job, so maybe I get away with it. What can I do? I can’t get younger and if I start drinking again, in six months I’ll be living on waste ground with seventeen carrier-bags, shouting, ‘I used to be on television.’ I don’t see how that would help.

  Caroline came to a couple of Unplanneds early on, but she didn’t enjoy hearing me answering questions about my past sex life and the like. I sympathise. I don’t feel so good talking about these things if I know she’s in the audience. Unplanned is about opening up to the crowd, about talking to them like they’re old mates, so I have to go for it. Most couples don’t hear their partners when they’re talking about that stuff, especially not with 1,400 witnesses.

  We turn up at Dave’s place. He comes out nearly smiling. Dave is
not a great one for chirpiness. I ask him how he is, knowing that he will always say ‘tired’. Often he will fill this out with additional information like ‘I slept like a cunt last night’. We set off and pass more girls. He cheers up a little.

  As we pull up outside the theatre, Dean and Bobby, our minders for the West End run, are waiting to greet us. Neither of us need minders in the everyday run of things, but Unplanned is essentially a free-for-all and we’ve had a couple of blokes try to get on stage. They may well have only been looking for a handshake or a moment in the spotlight, but it’s nice to think that if they were looking for blood they’d be dealt with.

  They say Elvis Presley used to have a revolver tucked in his boot on stage. Obviously, this wouldn’t stop him getting shot, but Elvis’s priority was that the assassin wouldn’t be alive to go around afterwards saying ‘I shot the King.’ What a fantastic image that is. Pandemonium as a dying Elvis, sprawled on the stage in a blood-stained white flared jumpsuit, fires haphazardly into the crowd where women and children drop all around the fleeing assassin, struck by the King’s stray bullets. And the ever-professional orchestra still blasting out ‘All my trials, Lord, soon be over . . .’ On stage one night Dave asked Dean and Bobby, in their usual front-row, centre-aisle seats, if they’d take a bullet for us. Neither of them seemed outraged at the prospect.

  On Fridays and Saturdays we do two shows, at 7 and 9 o’clock. The first one was OK. I won’t bore you with the blow-by-blow. The heat has slowed the audience down a little but I like the slightly quieter vibe. OK, it was shit. Dave liked it, but to me there are two kinds of show, shit and brilliant. Ergo, any show that isn’t brilliant is shit. It’s a tough rule but it keeps you on your toes.

  Caroline’s old mate Pete was in the audience. He comes to the dressing room to say hello. Pete is a fanatical Watford fan and talks to me and Dave about football, hard-core style. Football is a great conversation fall-back, so he probably didn’t like the show and used football to avoid having to confess it. Thus works the mind of the performer. Dressing room visitors are on frighteningly thin ice unless they take an undiluted-praise approach. Anything else will be picked apart by the performer until he finds the most negative possible interpretation of what was said. If you want to drive a performer crazy on your dressing room visit, why not try the old classic, ‘Well, you’ve done it again.’ This is a slow burner. The performer might well take it as positive at first, and then be woken in the early hours by all the dreadful connotations that will have been slowly released in his mind.

  One that always throws me is when they say, ‘Well, how did you feel that went?’ If these fuckers are going to come to the dressing room, they can at least shoulder the post-show-critique responsibility and not try to switch it on to me.

  An actor friend told me he was once waiting for a backstage visit from a fellow actor and was keen to see what his colleague would say about the performance. Eventually, the fellow actor put his head around the door and said, ‘You bastard. Fancy a drink?’ That was his only comment on the show. That’s one to dissect in the early hours.

  The second show was better, but very dirty. No one loves a dirty joke more than me but, in Unplanned, the audience set the agenda and tonight they wanted filth. This can get a bit turgid after a while. (Did I say that?) Still, big applause at the end and off we stride. Dave and me and a few friends go for a drink across the road. As it’s suddenly become summer, people are standing out on the pavement in their shirtsleeves. Dean and Bobby come too, in case we get kidnapped. Or become targets of a drive-by shooting by Ant and Dec.

  I invited my doctor tonight, and his young son is telling me at length about why his favourite comedian is Eddie Izzard. Anyway, it’s a hot summer’s night in the West End and lots of people are saying hello and talking about stuff that was in the show. Then, two men in their early twenties, one short and one tall, approach me. ‘Excuse me,’ says the short guy, talking to me but pointing at the tall guy, ‘I’ve been asking him to come back with me tonight but he’s been staring at you and saying he wants to wait and see if you’re interested. Now, I keep telling him you’re not going to put out. That’s right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well . . .’ I’m trying to sound cool. ‘Erm . . . no. I’m not going to put out.’

  ‘Thank you,’ says the short guy with an air of impatience, ‘now will you tell him to come back with me?’

  ‘Right,’ I say, turning then to the tall guy. ‘I think you should go back with him.’ Without a word, the tall guy takes the short guy’s hand and they turn and walk off into the night. I think about the butterfly that got trodden on. Did I just change the future of the world? And what about the Catholic church? I just gave my blessing to a homosexual act. Do I have to confess this?

  I phone Caroline. She’s finished her gig and is on her way home. I say I’ll pick up some chips in Camden. We sit on the sofa and eat chips and talk and kiss. She was unhappy with her radio show today. Everyone else liked it. I think she may have caught my ‘shit or brilliant’ bug. She falls asleep in my arms. She does the breakfast show as well. She was up at 4.20 a.m. this morning. I look at her face while she sleeps. I’ve got a big surprise for her in the morning. No, I mean after that.

  So ends the first day of my weekend. I’m quite enjoying the present tense. There isn’t enough of that in autobiographies.

  Saturday 12th May 2001. Shortly after we wake up, I tell Caroline my news. I put in an offer on a house and it’s been accepted. It’s got four bedrooms and a garden and off-street parking and two balconies and a conservatory. It’s a big moment. Buying a house instead of a flat suggests that I’m growing up at last. I’m maturing. I’m thinking like a proper adult. She agrees. Then I tell her where it is: next-door-but-one to David Baddiel.

  She takes the last bit quite well. Dave once said to me that our ideal situation would be if we had houses next door to each other. Obviously, that would have been ridiculous.

  Next-door-but-one is close enough for tea and a chat, but far enough away for Caroline and me to feel, when we hold each other, like there’s no one else on the planet. It also means I’ll be able to spend lots of time with a plastic rifle, trying to shoot a matchbox off the top of Dave’s shed-door. Though, knowing Dave, I have a feeling I’ll be missing a lot more than I used to.

  So we go and look at the house. It’s only a ten-minute walk. We meet Dave in his silver convertible, top down, on his way to buy an evening suit for tomorrow night’s BAFTA awards ceremony. You may recall that Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned is up for Best Comedy Programme. We won’t win. I know this because Bob Monkhouse’s son died recently so Bob, who was due to present an award, pulled out and BAFTA phoned to see if we’d stand in for him. They wouldn’t have asked us to present an award if we’d won one. Dave is still optimistic. Ish.

  Caroline likes the house. So she should at two million fucking quid! And yes, I think that did deserve an exclamation mark. It’ll be the first time I’ve lived in a house that wasn’t owned by the council. Ooo, if me mom and dad could see me now. ‘Maybe they can,’ says Caroline.

  I had a dream once. I was walking down the road when I bumped into my mom. She explained that she had been trying to get tickets for her and my dad to go on an open-top bus trip around the Black Country, but they’d sold out. I laughed when she told me. I explained that if her and Dad wanted to go anywhere, I mean anywhere, I’d sort it out. I asked her where she’d most like to go in all the world. ‘Spain,’ she said. (I doubt that that would have been her choice but dreams are never perfect.) I was delighted. I explained that I’d pay for everything and I’d get them a driver and, well, just anything they wanted. When I woke up I was ecstatic. What a brilliant idea, and so obvious. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? Then I realised why I hadn’t thought of it before. They were both dead.

  My computer has just underlined the word ‘dead’ with a green squiggly line. I believe this tells me that it is grammatically incorrect. I can’t see why. Suppose, I mean,
just suppose for a second, that this is my parents’ way of telling me that they can see me now. That ‘dead’ doesn’t necessarily have to be followed by a full-stop. Now it’s underlined full-stop as well. The hiphop’s stopped. I’ll change CDs and move on. Wu-Tang Clan.

  Then Caroline and me went shopping. She buys a slinky black top for the BAFTAs. I buy four hip-hop CDs. She buys two Madonnas and a Moby.

  The General Election is coming up so there are people on the street trying to tell you how good their party is. As we pass the Liberal Democrat supporters handing out leaflets and stickers, I politely refuse a leaflet. ‘Labour scum,’ the guy mutters under his breath. I walk on a bit and then ask Caroline what he said. She confirms that it sounded like ‘Labour scum’ so I go back to check. By now the bloke has moved to the back of the bunch and is looking sheepish to the point where I’m starting to wonder if it was him I spoke to. I get bored and move on. There was a time when something like this would have really wound me up. My masculinity would have felt challenged and I’d either have had a row with the bloke or not had a row and then beat myself up for not sorting it out. Now, I just can’t be arsed. Labour scum? I’ve just bought a two-million-quid house. Maybe he meant New Labour scum.

  In fact, I do vote Labour, but only because of some vague sense of working-class duty and the fact that Tony Blair was nice to me and Cherie Blair is Catholic. The bottom line is I’m not really interested. My dad was a classic working-class Tory. His view was that the Tories had been trained to rule; it was the natural order of things. Labour people were too much like us and, as he often said, ‘If you beg off a beggar, you’ll never be rich.’ My mom voted Labour, so one election they came to a deal that they might as well not bother to vote at all because they cancelled each other out. As we sat at home that night, the political correspondent on the telly announced that the polling stations had now shut. My mom turned to my dad with a triumphant smile. ‘I voted,’ she said. The old man didn’t see the funny side.