I suppose that those of you who are paying attention will be wondering what happened in the second leg of the Division One play-off against Bolton. Fuck off.
In 1967, I was sitting in the classroom at St. Hubert’s with my teacher trying to get me to think of a one-letter word. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘who is the most important person in your world?’ Obviously, she was hoping this line of questioning would eventually lead to me recognising ‘I’ as a one-letter word. ‘Jeff Astle,’ I said. Jeff Astle was Albion’s star centre-forward of the time. What they now call an ‘old-fashioned centre-forward’. He was big, strong, aggressive, and the best header of a football I’ve ever seen. He wasn’t just loved by the Albion fans, he was worshipped. In 1968, Albion got to the FA Cup Final. I couldn’t get a ticket so I watched it on our twelve-inch black-and-white telly, with my dad, of course. Astle had scored in every round. In the third minute of extra time, he scored what was to be the winning goal in the final. I can still see the goal going in. Me and my dad went skyward, then I dropped to my knees and kissed Astle as he raised his arms in celebration on our small black-and-white screen. I felt the crackle of static electricity against my lips as the Albion fans sang (to the tune of that part of Camptown Races that’s about going to sing all day etc), ‘Astle is our king. Astle is our king. The Brummie Road will sing this song, Astle is our king.’ (The Brummie Road End is where Albion’s most vociferous supporters tend to stand, or, nowadays, sit.)
Twenty-odd years later, I sat with Jeff Astle in a crowded mini-van in Portsmouth while a bunch of lads neither of us had met before sang a variation on the song, ‘Astle’s in our van. Astle’s in our van . . .’, followed by, admittedly a less enthusiastic version of ‘Skinner’s in our van . . .’. Now, how did that happen?
In the early nineties, David Baddiel and me were writing and hosting the TV show Fantasy Football League. The show included a pre-recorded segment called ‘Phoenix from the Flames’, in which we did comic re-creations of great footballing moments, joined by the footballer who’d been involved in the original incident. We did that ‘did it cross the line?’ goal from the 1966 World Cup Final with Geoff Hurst, Brazil winning the 1970 World Cup with Carlos Alberto, Coventry City’s famous ‘donkey-kick’ goal with Willie Carr, and so on. When the show was first commissioned, we sat down to compile a list of suitable football moments. I was dead keen to re-create a Jeff Astle goal, ever-so-slightly offside, against Leeds United that led to a massive pitch invasion back in the early seventies. I felt that the incident had comic potential, but my main priority was that I wanted to meet my boyhood hero. The filming was set up and Dave, a small film-crew and me turned up at Jeff’s house in Burton-on-Trent.
‘Phoenix from the Flames’ proved to be a very popular part of Fantasy Football, but not every footballer we worked with took naturally to the acting element of the job. One old Chelsea star greeted us at ten in the morning, already on his second can of cider, not a method that I could remember from the book An Actor Prepares. Dutch defender Ronald Koeman refused to dress as the Milky Bar kid because, as he put it, ‘I am not a Gazza’, Billy Bremner said yes and then no, as did Paul Ince. The old Celtic player Tommy Gemmel nearly killed me when re-creating a foul of his on the German striker Helmut Haller, and then declared, ‘I’ve had a great day: a few hundred quid, free beer, and I got to kick an Englishman,’ and the great Argentinian striker Mario Kempes took one look at the script and said, in surprisingly good English, ‘I won’t do it. It is just shit.’
But Jeff Astle was a natural. As well as being a nice bloke, he had genuine comic timing and was incredibly keen to help, as was shown when he uttered a phrase that went straight into Fantasy Football folklore, ‘My wife’ll be Gary Sprake.’ I had met my hero and he’d come up trumps.
When the second series of Fantasy Football was commissioned, Dave and me thought it might be a nice idea to end with a song. We considered singing it ourselves, but decided that Dave and me singing a song could never really capture the public imagination.
Then I remembered something. Back in the early seventies I had bought a single on RCA Victor called ‘Sweet Water’. I bought it because the singer was Jeff Astle. Apparently, when Jeff was in the 1970 England World Cup squad, they all went off to record an album and after hearing the whole squad sing, Jeff was given lead vocal on several of the tracks. So what about closing the show with a section called ‘Jeff Astle Sings’? The idea was that, towards the end of the show, the doorbell would go and it would be Jeff, dressed in a series of ridiculous costumes, who would then sing a song.
Now, Jeff could sing, but he didn’t actually seem to recognise any songs. We once asked him to sing Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’ and he said that he didn’t know where we dragged these obscure songs up from. His lovely wife, Lorayne, would conduct Jeff from just behind the auto-cue, so he knew when to come in, and he would go for it. It was very funny, but only because Jeff was really trying to do a good job on the song. If he’d deliberately messed it up, it would have been rubbish. He was totally aware that the worse he was, the funnier it was, but he was always trying to prove he could sing really well. When he did, the audience roared encouragement. It became a crucial part of the show, Jeff would sing, and Dave and me would dance behind him.
When Eric Cantona, in an elaborate metaphor about media-attention, spoke of the seagulls following the trawler, we had Jeff come on dressed as a trawler, and we danced behind him holding up photos of Stephen Segal. (We were shameless.) Jeff is from Nottingham. (He always said that D.H. Lawrence had lived in the same street. From the sublime . . .) When an old lady who had been Jeff’s next-door neighbour in that street wrote to us saying that she used to scrub his back when he was a baby, we wheeled Jeff on in a tin bath at the end of the show with that same woman scrubbing his back. In our now-established tradition of incongruity, Jeff sang ‘There’s no business like show business’.
Through it all, Jeff was a real pro. At heart, he was a showman. He had milked the applause as an Albion player and he loved showing off on the telly. He began touring the midlands with his ‘Jeff Astle Roadshow’, which included him singing, sometimes, alarmingly, done up as Tina Turner, telling gags, and doing a question-and-answer session. Audiences would vary between Albion fans to whom he had always been a cult-hero, and Fantasy Football fans to whom he had quickly become one. I know it was a success because my niece, Helen, went to see him and he charged her fifty pence for an autograph!
When Jeff retired from football, he started up an industrial window-cleaning business. When we went to his house to film that day, he had his company van on the drive. On the side it said, ‘Jeff Astle never misses the corners’. Up until Fantasy Football, non-Albion fans had known Jeff only as the bloke who had missed a sitter against Brazil in the 1970 World Cup. Suddenly, he’d become a TV star.
Hold that thought, I’m about to change the subject completely. I’m writing this in my tenth-floor two-bedroom flat in Birmingham. It’s what I like to call Mirrorlands, because I bought it with the money I made from writing a weekly football column for the Daily Mirror, a few years ago. It’s June 3rd, a sunny day, and in the distance I can hear a brass band playing in the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. As I write, they are banging out a chirpy, rom-pom-pom version of ‘Born Free’. No doubt, those bandsmen can see the smiling, appreciative faces of the assembled punters around the bandstand, but none of them could know that, half a mile away and a hundred feet from ground-level, their music is making me think of African tits and schoolboy hard-ons. I’m sure some of them would be appalled by this news. Still, on this occasion, where there’s brass, there’s muck.
Anyway, I sometimes worried about Jeff. He would drive down with Lorayne, from Burton-on-Trent, on a recording day, and have to spend quite some time getting his knee-joints operational again. Footballers were often injected with cortisone, in the sixties and seventies, so that they could play through the pain of an injury. The more important the player, the more desperately the club wan
ted him to play, so Jeff had played through a lot of pain for the good of the Albion. But now the damage was starting to show. Also, a TV show, especially the 1998 World Cup series, which was three or four live shows a week, can be a stressful business. Jeff was expected to learn and perform jokes, songs, and even sketches, that would have thrown a lot of much more experienced performers.
On one occasion, Jeff had to deliver the line ‘Thanks for letting me stay in your flat, Frank.’ He couldn’t get it and the floor manager threw a bit of a wobbly, which was very much not on. This rattled Jeff, and when I took my cue, walked on, and faced him for the next take, he looked at me forlornly for what seemed like an age. I was willing him to do the line and get it right. At last, he spoke. ‘Thanks, flat,’ he said with a terrible tone of world-weariness. I wanted to hug him. Should I be putting the old war-horse through all this? I know Dave and me dressed up and made fools of ourselves but we didn’t really have any dignity to preserve. I had a few guilty moments when I wondered if we were making him look foolish. Well, obviously, we were making him look foolish, but was that bad? Can you still look up to an old war-horse if he’s dressed as Tina Turner? The thing was, apart from the fact he was well-paid, famous, and touring a spin-off show, he just loved doing it. Jeff didn’t give a shit about dressing-up, and when he murdered a song, he treated it like missing a goal-chance: he’d get the next one.
Offstage Jeff could be a bit of a handful. He was big and strong and would arrive in the canteen keen to tell gags and stories from his week. He would accompany these with a series of digs in the ribs, slaps on the back and bear-hugs, that were very much the habits of a man who didn’t know his own strength. But he was a lovable bloke and I could forgive him the odd bruise. Through it all, whether he was dressed as a giant parrot or singing the worst-ever version of Michael Jackson’s ‘Earthsong’, I would occasionally look at him and think of when he would raise both arms to the Brummie Road after yet another goal, or when I would wait with the other kids after training to try and get his autograph (free in those days), or when I kissed my TV screen back in ’68. I was really upset when an Albion fan said to me that I had made a mockery of his hero. He was my hero as well, and he’d become a hero because he was fearless and he loved to entertain, and those same qualities had made him a comedy hero on Fantasy Football.
So, Jeff and me became mates. He gave me one of his World Cup shirts (imagine how much that meant to me), I was godfather to his granddaughter, Taylar, and I went with him on that trip to Portsmouth.
Albion needed to win at Portsmouth to avoid relegation to Division Two. We won 1–0 and all was well. After the game, Jeff took me to meet his old mate, the then-Portsmouth manager, Jim Smith. Smith, or Bald Eagle, as he was known, sat at his desk, drinking neat whisky and smoking a fat cigar. At the side of his desk was a metal waste-paper basket, and all it contained was about two hundred cigar-butts. We chatted a while and then Jeff and me left the ground. Our hotel was a couple of miles away and I was preparing to walk when Jeff suddenly strode into the middle of the road. A mini-van screeched to a halt and Jeff went over. He had noticed a couple of Albion scarves hanging out of the windows and knew he would be greeted with enthusiasm. ‘Can you give me and Frank a lift?’ he asked. Of course they said yes, and pretty soon we were on our way with ‘Astle’s in our van’ belting out through the open windows. Back at the hotel, Jeff explained that he often did this and it never failed. This, then, is how Jeff Astle introduced me to Celebrity Hitch-hiking. I told Dave this story, and a few months later we tried it after an England game and it worked a treat, right to our doorstep. Obviously, we risked kidnapping or worse, but a taxi would have been about twenty quid so Dave thought the risk was worth taking.
Jeff and me had a few games of pool at that Portsmouth hotel before heading back to our respective homes. As Jeff played one shot, I heard him gently singing to himself, ‘Astle’s in our van. Astle’s in our van.’
I went to the Pearl Harbor premiere on Wednesday night. I wore a shirt with pictures of Japanese warriors on it. As an Albion fan, I am always instinctively drawn to the underdog. I went with a friend, Marino, because Caroline and me had had a big row. In fact, I’m probably the only person who went to the Pearl Harbor premiere for a bit of peace and quiet. The invite suggested a dress code of ‘Military chic’ but I thought the samurai shirt would have to do. Marino had suggested that I wore one of those comedy aeroplane costumes, y’know, with a child-size plane that hangs around your waist, held up by heavy-duty braces. I could, he said, paint it up in Japanese colours and top off the outfit with a kamikaze headband. I explained that I was not going to get big, awkward equipment specially made and then be weighed down and uncomfortable all night, just so I could get my picture in the papers. Who did he think I was? Jordan?
These premiere things always follow the same format. I step out of a Merc, straight on to the red carpet, and the crowds who have hung around for hours to see the stars shout ‘Frank. Frank.’ But in a way that says ‘It’s quite nice to see you, but none of us could honestly use the word “excited”.’ I sign enough autographs to keep up my ‘man of the people’ club membership. Then it’s over to the banks of paparazzi where I try to come up with a pose that will get me in the papers. I go for military salute. I think this is not bad. Those of us who don’t have big tits have to try mildly tragic ploys like amusing shirts and relevant hand gestures. Then, of course, there are proper big stars who just . . . well, turn up. Anyway, the salute made it into the Sun the next day on the same page as David Baddiel, who arrived separately from me. And yes, he was doing a fucking military salute as well. I should have gone with the plane.
Unlike most of the people I spoke to, I really liked the movie. Mind you, I was raised on John Wayne movies so I like my military history au gratin. There seemed to be a John Wayne film on telly every week in the seventies. My dad would often come in, a bit worse for wear, on a Sunday afternoon, and, after flicking through the channels, repeat for the ten millionth time his theory that ITV was ‘owned by John Wayne and Derby County’.
I explained to an interviewer after the film that, out of sheer frustration, the Japanese often bombed places they couldn’t pronounce. I think she believed me until I mentioned their 1956 attack on Rhyl.
As always at these events, the after-show party had a special VIP section with security men vetting all who entered. Crap as it may seem, I still get a slight thrill when these people recognise me and usher me in with a polite greeting. The exclusive VIP bar is based on the profoundly inaccurate theory that celebrities don’t like being stared at. Instead, we all stand in there and stare at each other. Kate Beckinsale, who stars in the film, was there and so was Josh Hartnett. These two form a sort of a love-triangle thing with Ben Affleck in the movie. Josh Hartnett was doing that ‘I’ll just skulk about unnoticed’ thing that celebrities do to make sure they get noticed. I’ve done it myself, not at a big do like this or I’d just get, well, unnoticed, but I’ve made it work in Budgens in Belsize Park. Just in case this approach failed, Josh had decided to top off his smart trousers and white shirt with a dark-green woollen hat. This, of course, forced me to completely dismiss him as a human being. Still, he’s young. And American.
Caroline e-mailed me the next day to remind me that she was interviewing Kate Beckinsale for her radio show and, as I was too spiteful to take her to the premiere, did anything happen there that it might be good to ask Kate about. I suggested that it might be worth asking her who she would choose if she was in a real love triangle with Josh Hartnett and Ben Affleck. And then to point out that if she chose Hartnett, they’d probably be known as Josh and Becks. I told her she could use this. No greater love hath any man than to give his bird one of his gags. And I managed to do it in a holier-than-thou, ‘I’m not one to bear a grudge’ way that gave me great satisfaction. She phoned me later to say that Kate had laughed at the gag and described it as ‘very original’. I was chuffed. I know that sounds a bit pathetic, but I was worri
ed because I don’t often send my gags out into the big wide world on their own. And besides, gags are like children to me and we always like it if people say something nice about our children.
The next day, I got a call from Caroline, during which she happened to say that her producer had cut the gag from her interview because he said it was ‘not relevant’. I carefully explained to her that although in this case it was almost certainly an error, even I have sometimes cut gags if they’ve felt out of place or tacked on. I’ll bet I’ve cut at least three in the last fourteen years. She then mentioned that he had said the gag was ‘not funny’. I carefully explained to her that there are a lot of people in positions of power in the media who know fuck all about anything and who should keep their dog-shit opinions to their stupid selves. I asked her if it would have been appropriate to give him a really hard slap in the face. This, I suggested, might have brought him to his senses. Of course, I wanted to scream, ‘I bet you fucked up the delivery, you stupid cow,’ but I feared it could have been seen as unsupportive. I could tell that she thought I was over-reacting. Maybe you do as well, but what else would you expect from the man who left in the ‘where there’s brass, there’s muck’ gag.
I’m going to break off from the story here to explain that this was actually the second time I have written the Pearl Harbor section. Last night, I pressed the wrong button on my computer and lost that section and the one after it. It was about two and a half thousand words in total. Having spent a whole morning trying to get it all back by technical wizardry, I have now been reduced to writing the whole thing again, from memory. I ask you to spare a thought for any jokes or wise words that I forgot and are thus lost forever.
Of course, being a Catholic, my first thought when the two sections disappeared was that it was an act of God. I’m serious. Maybe it’s the ‘moving in mysterious ways’ thing that he does sometimes. I might have actually had a gag deliberately cut by God for some reason that is beyond my mortal comprehension. What a thought. Still, I’m glad he left the Jordan one in. I can’t say I would have returned the favour with his Jordan gag, ‘So Lot chose for himself all the Jordan Valley, and Lot journeyed east, and thus they separated from each other.’ (Gen. 13:11.) It’s got potential, but I do feel it needs a bit of work.
Frank Skinner Autobiography Page 15