Frank Skinner Autobiography

by Frank Skinner

  The other bloke stared at him for about five seconds, and then went, ‘Ha! Haha! Ha!’

  I was telling you what my publisher was saying about the book and I thought that, since we were roughly at the half-way stage, you might be interested to know what I thought of it so far. (It’s impossible to hear that phrase without also hearing Eric Morecambe shout ‘Rubbish’, but I’m going to press on.) Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to know what you think of the book so far, as well, but that’s not really practical, is it? My guess is that you like some bits but you don’t like others. It’s OK. I accept that. The problem in writing about my life is that I’m bound to cover my various interests and passions, and the chances of those directly matching anyone else’s are fairly slim. How many of my readers are going to be really keen on Elvis, football, Roman Catholicism and nob-jokes? Not too many.

  I know that all autobiographies are bound to cover areas the reader is not that interested in, but it pains me to think of it. I don’t doubt that a lot of autobiographers are so up their own arses that they think anything to do with them is totally fucking fascinating, but I can’t really go along with that myself. I know that sounds like a piece of ‘Aw shucks’ false modesty but I am, as I’ve tried to convince you previously, quite modest. Honestly. If they made an action-figure of me, on the side of the box it would say, ‘Light and bushel included.’ The thing is, if there are shit bits, you lot are no help at all. All I get is silence, and as a stand-up comic, silence is my arch-enemy. If there’s quiet bits in a gig then something’s not working. The trouble with this book-writing lark is I don’t know whether there are quiet bits or not.

  I could show the book to a few friends and ask their opinion I suppose, but I’m worried that they might see it as a License-to-Edit and start saying stuff like ‘Would you mind taking out that reference to me sucking you off while my husband rescued our disabled child from a burning apartment?’ Don’t worry. You didn’t miss that bit, it was just an example. A fictional example, I’d like to point out. But you know what I mean. If I showed it to our Nora, the whole thing could end up as a pamphlet.

  I’m still worried about the religion thing. People just don’t like that stuff. It’s all very well me saying ‘I know it’s weird but I believe that little white wafer actually becomes the body and blood . . .’, but you’re thinking, ‘Yes, it is fucking weird, so stop going on about it because you’re embarrassing everyone, including yourself.’ And if any religious people actually read the book they’ll hate it, partly because of all the dirty bits and the swearing, and partly because they’re fucking weirdos who only like the Bible and Cliff Richard.

  According to the book-marketing people I’ve recently met, books like this are mainly bought by women. Now they tell me. If I’d known that I wouldn’t have bothered putting jokes in. Hey, just kidding. And anyway, what exactly are ‘books like this’?

  Oh, fuck it. Whatever happens, at least I’ll be able to give my children a copy to stop them bothering me with tedious questions about my life, provided, of course, that they are sufficiently broad-minded. You think I’m kidding, but my vague idea that, on one level, this book would operate as a piece of family history has come into much sharper focus as the work has progressed. Even if it’s a commercial disaster it will be a pretty remarkable document as far as my descendants are concerned. Imagine reading a really intimate, detailed account of your dad’s or grandad’s life and opinions, written by him personally, without any of the usual clouding that comes when communicating with an older relative. None of the ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t be telling her this in case she tells her mom’ stuff from me, and no ‘This is fascinating but how much longer can I put up with the smell of piss’ from them. If I have kids, one day this book will give them the chance to really get to know me, and how many of us ever really get to know our parents? Even though we are literally made of them, how many people actually try to find out what that ‘them’ is all about? We often love and care about our parents but, at the end of the day, they are from the. Planet Parent and we feel we can never truly communicate with them.

  Don’t get me wrong, dear reader. I don’t want you to feel alienated by this. If reading this book feels like watching someone else’s home movies, then I’ve fucked up majorly. If my children and grandchildren ever exist, I think they’ll like this book because I wrote it for you rather than them. They’ll get me as a real human being, rather than someone who, like a parent or grandparent, is trying to impress them, or at least make them not dislike me. The fringe benefit for you, the reader, is that I think it would be wrong to tell lies to my descendants, so, consequently, I can’t tell lies to you. Of course, maybe I’m reading too much into all this. It feels like a big deal to me but, well, it’s just a book. I told this bloke I kind of know that I was writing my autobiography and he said, ‘Oh, really. Will it all be about anal sex?’

  Be honest. Was this a quiet bit?

  And so my drinking continued. By the time I was sixteen, I had graduated to cider. I could actually taste that last line. That’s a worry isn’t it? Anyway, cider was my drink because I liked the taste and it made me stupid. I was already getting a reputation as one of the heavier drinkers of the bunch. I don’t really know why. I suppose the fact that my dad, Terry and Keith were all heavy drinkers made it seem sort of inevitable. And also I really liked it. I liked the fall-about, laugh-till-you-cry, ‘Mamma-Weer-all-Crazee-Now’ euphoria of it. Getting pissed with your mates. It doesn’t get much better than that.

  I think I’d better shut up. All this is starting to slow down the wagon to the point where it’s starting to look safe to jump off. Eric Clapton told me that if I’d quit drinking through a proper Alcoholics Anonymous programme, I wouldn’t still yearn for it now. I saw in the Millennium with my arm around Eric as we sang and he played guitar to ‘Auld Lang Syne’, at his teetotal New Year’s party. I learnt something that night. I used to think that the worst thing about not drinking was being sober when everyone else was drunk. I was wrong. No one drank at that party, and I realised that the worst thing about not drinking was just being sober. Full stop. Still, seeing in the twenty-first century duetting with a guitar-legend took the sting out of it a bit.

  I was also getting into music, big-time. I still loved Elvis, but now I was being dragged along to lots of heavy-metal gigs by my mates. Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, all the usual suspects. I guess this started to have an influence on me because I let my hair grow long. As it grew, it sort of fell into waves and ringlets I never knew I had. I was starting to look cool. In fact, I would say that this eighteen-month period, around the age of fifteen to sixteen, was the closest I’ve ever got in my life to actually being cool.

  We formed a band, a few mates and me, which at first was absolutely appalling because no one could actually play anything. We didn’t know a chord between us. My mate Tim whose spare bed I pissed years later, had an electric organ and somewhere to practise. Fez bought a bass. Another mate, Mick, got some drums, and we were off. I sang, of course, because I was nearly cool. We even made a tape of this mess and played it to Tim’s mom. Tim’s family were a bit posher than the rest of us and his mom, I think, slightly disapproved of Tim’s grubby friends. ‘Well,’ she said, having heard the tape, ‘the only tuneful thing I can hear is Timothy’s organ.’ We all giggled because it sounded slightly like a nob-joke and because she was so unashamed in her maternal favouritism. When we said we hadn’t got a name for the band, she suggested ‘The Timaloes’.

  Instead, we went for Olde English, named after my favourite cider. Another mate, Nick, came in on guitar, and we started to actually sound OK. We practised a lot and started to get together a few passable cover versions of rock classics. Then came what, relatively speaking, you might call a turning-point. Yes, we did a school assembly. In calling it to mind, I have just blushed for the first time in about fifteen years. We opened with a slightly painful version of Deep Purple’s ‘When a Blindman Cries’. Just typing that title makes me laugh. I
t was one of those sad, slow songs that heavy-metal bands do to prove that they can do sad, slow songs. Next, I read a teenage-angst poem that questioned the whole school thing: ‘If I get that bit of paper, will it make me any greater’ was my take on the upcoming O-levels, that I’d done zero revision for. Then we closed with ‘Jumping Jack Flash’. Basically, we stormed it. Our English teacher, Mr Wilcockson, approached us after and was full of praise. He said we sounded like a cross between the Rolling Stones and Howling Wolf. Looking back, he was probably doing his ‘I’m one of those teachers who know about hip music’ bit, but we were thrilled. Y’know how, when someone tells you that you look like someone famous, and you deny it and act pissed-off but secretly you’re chuffed and you start doing everything you can to look even more like them? Well, that’s a bit like what happened to us. Mr Wilcockson’s comparison with the Stones made us go a bit crazy and we put together a set that was all Stones except for Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to be Wild’, Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ and Free’s ‘Alright Now’. When I interviewed Sabbath’s Ozzy Osborne years later, I told him that when I was sixteen, I was in a band that did ‘Paranoid’. ‘That’s funny,’ he said. ‘So was I.’

  But the Stones were our thing. I did all the Jagger strutting and pouting stuff, and we became, in the universe that was Oldbury Technical School, rock stars in our own right. I remember sitting in the art room, while Jayne (the Nervous Test girl) and her mate teased my ever growing hair into a Roy Wood-like shaggy afro. As they did this, I felt their thighs and bums and neither did a thing to stop me. When we, Olde English, arrived at school in the morning, little girls would be hanging out of the windows calling our names and trying to take our photographs. I remember one first-year girl bravely approaching Mick, our drummer, and telling him she thought he was great. Mick scowled, and said, ‘Fuck off, you sparrow-legged virgin’ and the girl ran off in tears. And just think, Liam Gallagher wasn’t even born yet.

  For all this attention, I was, at sixteen, still a sparrow-legged virgin myself. I had gone through a period about three years before when I decided I was infertile. Basically, my first three hand-jobs were literally dry-runs and it seemed that there would be no son with whom to share an ‘Abide with Me’ on Cup Final day. Then, one night after school, I gave it one more try, in the outside toilet, and the floodgates opened. I actually ran up the garden and jumped up and down cheering for about three or four minutes. Thankfully, my parents never asked. At last, I had become a man. I could feel myself developing an interest in timber.

  My sense of what was manly was, of course, a bit askew. I always kissed my mom and dad before I went to bed at night, but on the night of my fourteenth birthday, I kissed my mom and then, when my dad approached me, I stuck out a hand. He paused, smiled, and shook it firmly. I think I saw a tear in his eye, which could have been because he was proud, or could have been because I was really squeezing his hand hard to show how manly I was.

  He was lucky. Within a year, the muscles in that hand had developed considerably. I was checking that the well had not run dry, and I was checking it on a very regular basis. On average, about three times a day. In the school holidays, I would often hit double figures. After a while, I started to worry about the religious implications of this. Would I be ‘teased and toasted for all eternity’ because of my new hobby. That’s all it was, a hobby. Why should I be teased and toasted when those kids with unfashionable hairstyles and bad skin, who collected stamps and made model aeroplanes, would almost certainly remain unsinged? One year, I gave it up for Lent. Forty days and forty nights of sheer hell. As midnight struck to herald in Easter Sunday, I whipped up a storm, to a point where it felt very hot and itchy afterwards. The next morning it had swollen to about three times its normal thickness. Believe me, this sounds a lot better than it looked. I took it as a warning, as a punishment, as a sign. And the message was crystal-clear. I must never give up wanking again.

  Then I met a girl called Liz. I suppose she was my first girlfriend. She was a slim, Italian-looking girl, with dark eyes, pigeon-toes and a smile that suggested hidden sophistication. I met her in Langley Park, which was about fifty yards from the New Inn. Life was very centralised in those days. Our relationship was largely about snogging, a skill that was still very much work-in-progress as far as I was concerned. I couldn’t make my mind up whether it was best to snog with the eyes open or closed. When quizzing some girls at school about this, they said that it was generally accepted that if you closed your eyes you were very passionate. This was good enough for me, so the next snogging-session I had with Liz I did a lot of eyes-shut stuff. However, about half-way through, I decided to check to see if Liz passed the passion-test. I sneaked open an eye and could see that hers were closed. This was good news. After about another five or ten minutes of snogging, I decided to check again. Sure enough, her eyes were shut, but then, suddenly, they opened. I think she had heard the passion-theory as well and was doing some checking of her own. I froze, like a rabbit in the headlights. We just stared at each other, which is actually quite painful from such close range. Eventually, I drew back, winked, gave her a double thumbs up, and then carried on.

  Liz gave me my first under-bra experience. I still recall the exciting contrast between the firm, rubbery nipple, and the soft flesh around it. We were under Uncle Ben’s Bridge, by the side of the canal, at the time. That night, I lay in bed musing on the ludicrous fact that, in an age when man could land on the moon, you still couldn’t buy a headboard with a toilet-roll holder fitted.

  That year, a few mates and me went on holiday to Brean Down, near Weston-super-Mare. One night in the caravan, we got very drunk on scrumpy-cider and one of my friends hit Shane over the head with a wine bottle. This sounds dangerous, but Shane was one of the hardest people I ever met. He was a scruffy lad, with a big, beaky nose, and black spiky hair that made him look like a dishevelled crow. When he became a working man, doing felt-roofing, he once fell off a house, arseholed, and turned up at the pub two hours later with his face bloody and pieces of gravel embedded in his head, all set to carry on drinking.

  Anyway, that night Shane remained upright, so the other guy hit him again, this time selecting a slightly weightier vodka bottle. I stepped in and managed to calm things down but it caused a bit of a stir on the camp-site. The police were called, but by the time they arrived the storm had passed. When we went home, I carried a blue St. Christopher that I’d bought for Liz out of my meagre spending money. I gave it to her on the Saturday night we got back. She thanked me, told me the postcard I’d sent describing the vodka-bottle incident had caused her mom and dad to forbid her to see me again, and went on to say that, anyway, there was a boy at her school who wanted to go out with her and she liked him better. So that was that. I had been dumped for the first time.

  I saw her eight months later and she had stupid hair, so I was glad.

  Inevitably, I suppose, it was Nervous Test Jayne who gave me my first under-knicker experience. We went to a party one night and got a bit drunk. We were both fifteen. On the way back, we snogged and groped like, well, fifteen-year-olds. I went under the bra first. This was the order of things. Her nipples were cold, and when this became known around school (what are you looking at ME for?) she was given the nickname Crystal Tips. I stopped there. Partly because I was scared and partly because she had bad breath and I was starting to lose interest. But she wasn’t. ‘Would you like to see my new panties?’ she asked. To be honest, it was a bit dark for a fashion show, but I didn’t want to cause offence so I went with it. She undid the zip on her skin-tight turquoise flares and opened them to show me her knickers. Her smile told me it was lucky-dip time. I slipped my right hand down her proffered pants but it got stuck. During my spell as very-local rock hero, I had taken to wearing two rings on the middle-fingers of my right hand, each with a large letter ‘C’ so that, on adjacent fingers, they formed my initials, ‘CC’. (You remember, Chris Collins.) How cool is that? Of course, I didn’t wear them in bed, or their rhy
thmic clicking would have caused my parents to think that I had bought a very large stop-watch. The rings had now caught on the waistband of Jayne’s knickers. Without missing a beat, she reached down, slipped them off my fingers, and popped them in my jacket-pocket. What a girl. I took a breath and then dug deep. What a time to be thinking about your infant school nativity play.

  I think Jayne was hoping that we might develop things even further over the coming weeks, but the bad breath had put me off and I avoided her till the summer holidays set me free. At the time, I was not aware that bad breath was often just a temporary thing, perhaps, on this occasion, brought on by drinking disgusting wine. Anyway, I let Jayne slip away, and when we returned from the summer break she was going out with a bloke who looked like a parrot.

  It was election day, yesterday. Last election, in 1997, I was working for the BBC as part of their Election Special team. My job was to spend the whole day and, as it turned out, the first eight hours of the next day flying around the country in a helicopter, giving a (how did they put it at the meeting?) ‘light-hearted and slightly off-the-wall view of the day’s events’. I went to an OAPs’ tea-dance and listened, as you might expect, to the usual OAP mixture of right-wing clichés and downright silliness, including ‘I blame decimalisation’, ‘There’s too many blacks’ and ‘The weather hasn’t been right since they landed on the moon’. I met a Tony Blair lookalike and a John Major lookalike, neither of which really did, and I visited an exhausted Asian couple in hospital, where they had just had one of the first election babies. All through the early hours, using makeshift landing sites in fields and jumping into fast cars, the soundman, cameraman, director, pilot and me listened to the results coming in on the radio: Portillo’s lost his seat, Labour have gained Grantham, ‘it’s looking like a landslide’.