When I’d arrived, earlier that evening, one of the organisers had asked me if I’d mind introducing Chris Eubank after my set as he’d like to do a poem. Of course, introducing someone at the end of your set is always heart-wrenching because, as you leave the stage, you can never be sure how much of the applause is for you, and how much for them, but I agreed to endure this uncertainty and introduce Mr E. Also, to be able to say that I had played even a minor part in a Chris Eubank poetry recital was more than I could resist.
So it was that the former WBO Super-Middleweight Champion of the World stood before four hundred non-paying guests at the Waterstone’s annual dinner and recited, from memory, Henry Reed’s ‘Naming of Parts’. There was a time when most ladies and gentlemen of any worth had at least one poem at their disposal that they could recite by heart. This tradition of recitation has largely fallen by the wayside, but I hereby witness that, on Monday, June 11th, 2001, at the Novotel, Hammersmith, former bruiser Chris Eubank brought it back with a bang. All boxers are brave, but to recite ‘Naming of Parts’ at 11.20 p.m., to a bunch of away-from-home bookshop-managers, all gazing longingly at the Penguin-sponsored free bar, is something else.
I recognised the poem from the ‘War Poets’ anthology I studied at Warley College. It describes a young soldier, standing, transfixed by the natural beauty of the landscape while his superior officer explains the various parts of a rifle. Chris played both parts, making the officer gruff and abrupt and the young soldier dreamy and effete. Some of the book-sellers grew restless and there was even some barely suppressed sniggering. But I was mightily impressed, even though it’s debatable whether Chris Eubank should choose to recite a poem that includes the lines:
This is the lower sling swivel. And that
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see
When you are given your slings.
It certainly saw a few hands covering pint glasses in the front row, but his performance was word-perfect and from the heart. I didn’t get a chance to speak to him afterwards, but I wondered if he was aware of those people who were sniggering. If I’d asked him to describe them, he may well have disproved the oft-cited fact that there is no word in the English language that rhymes with ‘month’. Nevertheless, so inspiring to me were his efforts that I have since resolved to learn, by heart, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ as a tribute to a man who I can now honestly say is ‘Simply the Best’.
As my story moves through the late seventies and into the eighties, we reach a fairly significant turning-point in the book. Frankly, I’m starting to lose faith in your attention span and reckon it’s about time we got me moving into the world of comedy. I said at the start that when I read a biography or autobiography (usually a biography. I don’t read many autobiographies because you don’t get enough vicious attacks on the subject), I always spend the first chunk of the book shouting ‘Hurry up and get famous, you bastard’, and now I find I’ve fannied around in my wilderness years for far too long. I could go back and hack out some passages, but I have written this book through the course of a crippling national foot-and-mouth epidemic and I’ve seen enough carnage for one year. Furthermore, I was completely arseholed for almost all of my twenties, so my memories of that period are, at best, intermittent. Many’s the pop-quiz I’ve sat out of when confronted with questions about the eighties. Therefore, a quicker-than-usual move through this period of my life could be something of a blessing for all of us.
So, what I’m going to do is fast-forward through my twenties, stop and settle a while at what I regard as absolutely key points, then move on. It is, I’ll admit, an approach largely inspired by watching a massive amount of pornographic videos when I lived with David Baddiel.
Fear not, I’ll be hob-nobbing with Bob Monkhouse before you know where you are.
I was woken up by my radio-alarm at eight this morning. I have it tuned into Five Live so I can hear Caroline doing the traffic reports as I shower or drink tea. I was fast asleep when it kicked in, so the voice talking about horse-racing took a while to reach me. He was saying something about the Two Thousand Guineas being a very big horse race. In my semi-comatose state, I wondered why, if it is such a big horse-race, they don’t call it the Two Thousand Whinnies. I smiled to myself, and began drifting back to sleep.
Then, a few minutes later, I drifted awake again, and heard a reference to the TV show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? I hadn’t moved. My eyes were still closed. It occurred to me that a desperately dull quiz show could be devised in which the winner, rather than be given a cash prize, is set up in a small hat-manufacturing business. It could be called Who Wants to Be a Milliner?
Two elaborate puns and I was still more or less asleep. Imagine my inner turmoil if I’d never found an oudet for all this rubbish. I might have become that most tragic of figures, the office-joker, forwarding amusing e-mails, sending Wicked Willy greeting cards, and referring to myself as a prankster.
I left Warley College of Technology with a total of five O-levels and three A-levels (a ‘B’ in English but only ‘E’ for Sociology and General Studies) and went to Birmingham Polytechnic to do teacher training. Like virtually everyone else on the teacher training course, I had no desire whatsoever to be a teacher but couldn’t think of anything else to do. Slowly, the others seemed to grow into it and soon people were marching around carrying overhead projectors and doing things with crepe-paper. I wasn’t. I had a five-week teaching practice in a local junior school during the second term, and it was one of the worst experiences of my life. Elvis Costello was in the charts with ‘Oliver’s Army’ at the time, and every morning as I passed through the school gates I would sing to the other student-teachers walking in with me, ‘And I would rather be anywhere else than here today.’
The kids were all cunts, and I became so desperate I even grew a beard to try and hide behind. This, combined with my poor performance, gave the school’s headmaster a fairly negative impression of me. When, thank God, the teaching practice finally ended, he called me into his office and said that he feared if I didn’t sort myself out, he could imagine me ending up as a tramp. My closing speeches from disappointed headmasters were getting ever more bleak.
Still, I battled through to the end of the first year, and during the summer holidays, I resolved that I would work much harder in future and really try to turn myself into a good teacher. Thus, it was with new-found purpose that I strode into the polytechnic on that first day of the second year. I managed to sustain my fervour until, as I stood eagerly awaiting my first class, a lecturer took me to one side and asked me if I’d received the letter telling me I’d failed the first year, and was therefore off the course. I hadn’t. She looked guilty, said sorry, and walked away. I walked, crestfallen, into the Junior Common Room, sat down on one of the yellow-plastic-upholstered benches, and wondered what the fuck I was going to do with the rest of my life. All the support, financial and emotional, my parents had given me, all my dreams and hopes of doing something significant, had come to nothing. I sat on my own and drank a cup of coffee from the machine, just like when I was expelled. Was it going to be another night of boiler-suits and slapped faces?
Then I was aware of someone standing over me. I half-expected it to be some bloke with a big scythe, but it wasn’t. It was the same lecturer who’d told me about the letter. She said that, although I had miserably failed every other section of my course, I had passed the English Literature component with a straight ‘A’. Therefore, two of the lecturers had put forward the suggestion that rather than be booted out, I should be transferred to the BA (Hons) Degree in English. However, she explained, there were a couple of large problems. Firstly, local authorities didn’t give out two first-year grants, so I’d have to live on nothing for twelve months, and secondly, the bosses of the English department might not accept me on the course. It all sounded very dubious, but I was in the gutter and any helping hand, no matter how slippery, would have to do. It also meant I could d
elay telling my parents about another miserable failure. If the transfer happened, I could say it was my choice. So, I went home, and when they asked me how the second year had started, I said, ‘Really well.’
The next day I went to see the Careers Officer at the Job Centre in Aston. I don’t recall his name but it was something double-barrelled. After a five-minute chat, he told me he couldn’t think of any organisation that I would be an asset to, and he felt the only advice he could offer me was to stay on the dole as long as I possibly could. It wasn’t quite the morale-boost I’d been looking for.
A week later, with me still pretending that I was going to college every day but actually chilling out with an unemployed mate, the English department agreed to let me transfer. The next morning, I phoned my local authority and asked them if I could have another first-year grant. The woman there said that was very unlikely, and the only time it ever happened was if someone was transferring from a four-year course to a three-year course. ‘How long is the course you are transferring from?’ she asked. The answer was three years. ‘Four years,’ I said. ‘Oh, well. That’s alright, then,’ she said.
A few days later, my first term’s cheque arrived in the post. No one had bothered to verify my claim. They just stamped the request and sent me the money. I joined the BA (Hons) English course, read all the books I’d never read, discovered all the writers I’d never heard of, felt my mind expanding day-by-day, and finished up with the highest marks on the whole course. The following year I went to Warwick University and got a Master’s Degree in English Literature. I’d had my third chance and I’d fuckin’ taken it. And neither my mom and dad, nor my local authority, ever knew the truth.
At the risk of sounding like a complete berk, studying English literature really changed my life. I went through all the stupid student-things, like letting the beard go totally wild so I looked like I should be in an Irish folk band, wearing army-surplus gear, and even, for a spell, going a bit left-wing. But, more importantly, I started thinking about things differently. I had always been obsessed with words. I’d repeat some phrases over and over just because I liked the feel of them on my lips: a quotation from a Nazi leader, ‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver’; a bit of stray snooker-commentary, ‘the game of chess played on the green baize’; or a sentence from a letter to a pornographic magazine, ‘“Guess you’d like to handle these floppy old tits of mine,” she said, swinging them to and fro in a massive display of succulence.’ I started thinking more and more about turns of phrase and use of vocabulary. Having read my prose, you may find that hard to believe, but my obsession with words was not entirely fruitless. It enabled me to slowly become that most heroic of men, the poetic drunk. I was at my happiest leaning on a bar, foul-mouthing, philosophising, and free-associating with a bunch of cronies.
Mind you, not all the side-effects of a literary education are good. After my success in my first degree, I had a massive burst of self-confidence that was perilously close to cockiness. One night in the Duck Inn, my regular haunt, I had a debate with a very hard bloke I knew called Duncan. I suggested that, given my superior intellect, it was very stupid of him to challenge my opinion. He beat the shit out of me, and the next day I looked at my bruised face in the mirror and said out loud, ‘You deserved that, you arrogant bastard.’ I went up the pub, thanked Duncan for saving my soul, and bought him a pint. I’m not sure he ever understood, but I have no doubt that beating pulled me back from the brink of lifelong cuntiness. Maybe they should bring back flogging.
One non-academic milestone that occurred at Birmingham Poly was that I wrote and starred in a comic play, as part of the poly’s ‘D.H. Lawrence Week’ celebrations. It was called Sadie Chatterley’s Lodger, a kitchen-sink comedy in which I played Lawrence as an amorous Jewish lodger, chiefly because I’d been to a Vicars and Tarts party as a rabbi a few weeks earlier and still had the costume. The play began with a prologue, sung by me in George Formby, cheeky-wink mode, complete with ukulele. It had the same tune as ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows’, and included references to Lawrence’s Oedipus-complex and various risqué episodes from his novels.
Here’s a song I love to hum
About a lad from Nottinghum
A nice boy and he loved his mum,
David Herbert Lawrence.
In the books of his I’ve got
The characters are really hot
And showing everything they’ve got,
David Herbert Lawrence.
The Rainbow seemed a nice book, I’m afraid I spoke too soon, With big fat pregnant women dancing underneath the moon.
Nude men wrestling by the fire
Temperatures get higher and higher
It certainly made me perspire.
David Herbert Lawrence.
Typical undergraduate drivel, but I liked being up there getting laughs. The play itself was pretty disgusting, including a sex-scene with Sadie’s neighbour where I tell the audience, mid-shag, I’m thrilled because she’s a virgin. Then she turns to them and explains that she’s still got her tights on. Still, it stormed it, and afterwards a lecturer told me he’d never seen anything that ‘adhered so strictly and consistently to bad taste’. Signs of things to come, I suppose.
Anyway, with two English degrees under my belt, the way forward was pretty obvious. I went on the dole for three and a half years.
I just got into Northern Seoul today. I don’t mean I’m spending my weekends at the Wigan Casino. I mean I’m in Korea. I’m going to be making a documentary about Korean and Japanese football when I’ve finished this book, so I’m out here with Phil the producer/director and Bernie the assistant producer. Phil, mild-mannered in thick spectacles, looks like a very brainy twelve-year-old, but has made loads of documentaries and you get the feeling he really knows what he’s doing. Bernie is blonde, business-like, and probably in her thirties. If I’d seen her in a bar, I would have said she was cute, but I don’t think she’s the kind of woman who’d really enjoy that adjective. They’re both good company, though, and I’ve been looking forward to the trip. We’re doing a bit of a recce. I didn’t find out how to spell ‘recce’ until very recently, and now I find myself on one. I must be careful not to find out how to spell ‘heamephrodite’.
Sorry, I’m just trying to work out what tense I’m writing this in. There’s a temptation to write these journal-bits in Present Tense but I’m going to switch back to Past Tense now. I think it’s a bit classier.
Having met up with Phil and Bernie, who’ve already been here for a week, we went out to meet a couple of English guys, Brian and Mike, who’ve been living in Korea for about twelve years. They used to be journalists but now they do PR, including helping with Korea’s World Cup bid. We had a traditional Korean meal, with bowls and bowls of pickle-type stuff, and a bit too much sitting on the floor for my liking. When we’d finished, I limped outside and noticed that the barber-shop across the road was still open. It was nearly midnight. Mike explained that barber-shops in Seoul are a bit unusual. The barber asks you if you need any special services, and if you say yes, he steps out of the individual booth that the chair is in, and a young woman comes in and masturbates you.
No, I didn’t. In fact, there seemed something very odd about the whole concept of what I suppose you’d call the barber’s hired-hand. I wonder if being in a barber-shop influences her approach to her work? I wouldn’t want to be masturbated by a woman who was saying stuff like, ‘D’you see the match last night, sir?’ or asking me where I was going for my holidays. And I’d be very uneasy at the end, when she held up the mirror for me to see the finished job from various angles, with me having to go ‘Yeah, that’s great, that’s very nice’ before she moved on to the next one.
My mate Fez had already had a little spell on the dole, and had upset the Social Security people at his initial interview by turning up drunk and asking, across a crowded waiting room, ‘Excuse me. Is this where you get the free money?’ This approach, refreshing in its h
onesty, I thought, didn’t go at all well with the Social, so I decided to play it straight. I went to the Supplementary Benefit Office in Smethwick, took a numbered ticket from the machine and waited my turn. My plan, brilliantly conceived by my Careers Officer some years earlier, was to stay on the dole for as long as I possibly could. I even left home and moved into a horrible bed-sit so I wouldn’t be under any parental pressure to find a job. I’d worked my balls off academically for four years, and was now trained to use my spare time constructively. I thought it might be nice to take a few years off to read some books and get drunk. All I needed was a few bob to keep me going.
On the staircase leading to the Benefit Office, someone had written in black felt-pen, ‘Cheer up, money isn’t everything’. It made me laugh every time I passed it. The waiting room at the top of the stairs wasn’t so funny. I was surprised to discover that some of the people there were actually looking for work. I couldn’t quite get my head round that. The waiting room always had loads of kids running about and getting intermittently screamed at by chain-smoking young women in laddered tights, who, apparently, didn’t own any shampoo. The men fell into two groups: the younger ones, with tattoos and lumberjack coats, also chain-smoking, mainly roll-ups, and the middle-aged, who had always worked but had fallen victim to international economics, and other stuff they didn’t understand. These guys always wore a suit and tie for their appointment, as if to say ‘I shouldn’t really be here. It’s just temporary, I’m sure.’ Over the years, I watched their suits and their optimism slowly grow threadbare. Most of those men never worked again.
I, on the other hand, was living the life of Riley. My housemate, Paul, was a manager at the Triangle Arts Centre in Gosta Green, Birmingham, and I started doing a bit of voluntary work for them. Basically, they paid me in cinema or theatre tickets, so most nights I’d nip in their canteen for some ethnic food, catch a Beckett play or a Japanese movie, and then get pissed and talk about women and football in the pub next door.
Frank Skinner Autobiography Page 24