Then, the biggest change of all, on September 24th, 1986, as I approached thirty years of age, I quit drinking, sort of accidentally. I got flu. I couldn’t drink for five days. I hadn’t been that long without a drink for ten years, and I thought I’d see if I could do six days, and then seven . . . There was no flash of light, no pledge with hand raised, no vision of St. Boniface pulling a fast one on his devotees at the brewery. After a whirlwind of boozing, the end was still and undramatic.
I must admit, in recent months I had replaced the bottle of sherry on my bedside table with a bottle of Pernod. This had made me wonder if things were getting out of hand. One morning I had called my doctor away from his crowded surgery because my hangover was so bad I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even swallow the Pernod, for goodness’ sake. I suppose it was now or never.
As soon as I had gone a few more days without drink, I started running. Every morning, the ragged, shambling stagger of the reformed drinker, pale-faced, sweating, gasping for air and crippled with the stitch. My route included one particularly nasty hill and, as I approached it, I imagined my old drunken self closing in right behind me and cussing loudly as he just about managed to climb up on to my back. Day after day, I took on that hill, weighed down with this imaginary piggy-back burden of past excess.
I ran because I had to have something I could get weird and obsessive about to distract me from the drink, something that couldn’t co-exist with my former lifestyle and so would prevent me from returning to it. Of course, my return to the Church had inevitably made me think of personal reform and renewal but, as far as this new obsession was involved, it was Zola Budd, not the Pope, who was my saviour and spiritual guide. I ran because Zola ran, and because I ran, I didn’t drink. My return to the Church may have saved my soul, but it was Zola Budd who saved my life. She was the mermaid who led me away from the rugged rocks. Soon the run became eight miles a day, and the stagger gradually grew into a stride.
My friends didn’t take my new-found abstinence very well. ‘Come on, have a drink.’ That was all I heard, over and over again. Even though some of them admitted, to my complete surprise, that they had become inclined to avoid me when I was on a heavy session, the new me seemed to arouse suspicion and uncertainty in them. I had broken the drinker’s code by deciding not to go down with the sinking ship.
I had previously switched from heavy industry to academia and I would go on to become a TV celebrity and move to the bright lights of London, but none of this estranged me from my old mates the way that giving up drinking did. I carried on going to the pub and hanging out with them, but it was different. Although the old me could be a bit of a nightmare, I think they still missed him. Sometimes, so did I.
Heavy drinking is about massive highs and corresponding lows. To not drink is to travel that long straight line in between. I don’t miss the lows, but even in a job where thrills and excitement are fairly plentiful, nothing has ever really replaced the unmitigated bliss of being completely arseholed. Like that little kid who had shouted loud in the dark garden, I found myself back in the warm, brightly lit kitchen, but this time my incarceration was self-imposed.
But, within a year, I was doing my first-ever stand-up gig. I was entering a world that meant working in pubs every night, where someone always wanted to buy you a drink, where the obvious preparation for standing in front of a room full of indifferent strangers and trying to make them laugh was a bit of pre-gig Dutch courage, and where the obvious accompaniment to post-gig celebration or despair was another five or six glasses. If my old self had climbed down off my back and gone into that world instead of the new me, he wouldn’t have lasted twelve months. Of course, I say all this in hindsight. When I gave up the drink, I had no idea that I was preparing for a brand new obsession. And it was going to last a lot longer than Zola Budd.
I went to a K-League game tonight, Taejon Citizens versus Harpong Steelers. As I walked to the ground, I thought I’d stop for snacks. None of the food looked very familiar so I decided to go for a small bowl of crinkly nuts. This seemed like the safest bet. They tasted pretty unpleasant but needs must. After some investigations, they turned out to be glow-worms. I managed to keep my composure and even managed to muster a ‘light snack’ joke.
The ground was pretty impressive. Unfortunately, there was hardly anyone in it. I stood with the Taejon Ultras, all two hundred of them. They are known as the ‘Purple Crew’, and they were very much in the news this week because last Saturday they staged the K-League’s first-ever pitch invasion. Well, one of them did. But it caused quite a stir. The ref, who’d brought about this encroachment by accidentally sending off the wrong player, was sacked and there are threats to fine the Citizens club, so I was in the eye of the storm tonight. Me, a couple of drummers, a hundred and fifty slightly pissed Korean blokes and about twenty schoolgirls who joined in with the chants, like English schoolgirls joining in with Bob the Builder’s song, and screamed every time there was a goalmouth incident. The attitude, generally speaking, was a bit different from a British ‘end’. When Taejon went a goal down, the interpreter explained that the resulting chant from the Purple Crew was, in translation, ‘It’s OK. Don’t worry about it.’ A lovely gesture but I can’t really see it catching on at the Albion.
This was followed by someone setting off a purple smoke bomb. Well, it was more red than purple but the thought was there. I have to say, it was a particularly unspectacular moment. One bloke held up the smoke bomb and the, shall we say, maroon smoke slowly poured out. It seemed to bring with it a sort of acid snow that fell ‘deep and crisp and even’ on the Purple Crew’s heads. The two schoolgirls standing on their seats in front of me seemed particularly pissed off by this and kept interrupting their carefully co-ordinated clapping to pick particularly hot bits out of their hair. I think we were all happy when the smoke finally stopped spewing forth. Even the bloke who’d held up the bomb laid down the still smouldering casing with an expression that said, ‘I’ll be glad when I’ve used these up.’
Then the Purple Crew showed their dark side. Harpong scored again and, with the interpreter having gone to the toilet, I was left to presume that the ensuing chant was something along the lines of ‘Oh, well, these things happen.’ Then Taejon scored, but the ref disallowed it and all hell let loose. Well, not ALL hell, more like a very small section of it. The drummers and their friends had arrived at the ground with several crates of blue Gatorade, which seemed to be for communal use. I had wondered if the red smoke bombs were deliberately chosen to make the Gatorade look purple. Now, the still-full one-litre plastic bottles became missiles. The Purple Crew started chucking them on to the pitch and surrounding running-track, and one bloke chucked his training shoes as well. Even one of the schoolgirls went crazy, and after a particularly high scream which must have set dogs barking in restaurant kitchens all over Korea, she threw her mobile phone on to the running track.
A fat senior-steward-type came out to try and quieten the mob, but they began chanting and pointing at him. I hoped that they were singing ‘Who ate all the glow-worms?’ but I don’t suppose they were. Eventually, he managed to calm them, partly by the use of placatory hand-gestures, and partly by picking up the schoolgirl’s mobile and the training shoes and passing them back through the perimeter fencing. I thought this was very reasonable, but then it went a bit silly. A second steward turned up with a supermarket trolley and began gathering up the Gatorade. When he’d done, he came up to the fence and slowly handed back the bottles that had survived the impact. One of the drummers forsook his instrument to help.
Meanwhile, Harpong scored a third, and the Crew started to get very encouraging again, feeling, perhaps, that they had neglected their duty during the user-friendly riot. At the end of the game, the Taejong players came up to the fence looking distinctly apologetic, and did a very well-synchronised bow to the fans. We all applauded their 3–0 drubbing at home, and that was that.
After the game I was introduced to one of the Taejon
board of directors, who presented me with a mini-football with the Taejon badge on it. Clearly, word had got round that, when it came to free footballs, the best bet was to give me something slightly ornamental.
Fasten your seatbelts, I’m about to get a bit experimental on the chronology front. I had met a bloke in a pub who worked at the nearby Halesowen College. He said he could get me some work doing a bit of part-time lecturing. I was still boozing at the time and was worried that this sounded a bit too much like a proper, responsible job, not really suited to a drinking man. Then he explained that it was fifteen quid an hour and I started to weaken. That was twenty-odd pints, so I said I’d give it a go, thus crushing two very big butterflies in one go. If we move forward to late 1987, I can show you the butterflies in very close proximity.
Butterfly Number One was a dark-haired sixteen-year-old girl, dressed all in black, sitting in a college corridor. She smiled. I smiled back. Above her head was Butterfly Number Two. It was a dayglo-orange poster for a charity gig in Birmingham.
The poster said:
Mitchells and Butlers presents
An Evening of Alternative Entertainment
Featuring . . .
Earl Okin
Andy Feet
The Nice People
Chris Collins
At The Portland Club, Icknield Port Road
Wednesday 9th December. 7.30 p.m.
Door Charge £6.
This was to be my first ever stand-up gig. The girl in black was to be my first ever wife. I think we need to go back a bit further still. Don’t panic, it’s all under control.
I’d started working at Halesowen College of Further Education, to give it its full tide, in September 1985. At that time, no formal teaching qualifications were required in FE colleges, so anyone hanging around the building come September was likely to pick up some lecturing work here or there. I started off teaching engineering students how to write letters (I think we got as far as ‘J’) and was soon doing a General Studies class where the students and me just talked about what we’d seen on telly that week. This was listed on the timetable as ‘The Media’. Unlike my terrible time on teaching practice, I quite took to lecturing. I was more confident after my academic success and the students were all at least sixteen, which meant I could talk to them on a more adult level and even shag some of the prettier ones. I suppose I was the young, trendy lecturer that female students often go for. Of course, in reality, I was neither young nor trendy, but, luckily, the other lecturers managed to make me seem both. In the country of the bland, the one-eyed man is king.
I had a few liaisons with female students. This is not as bad as it sounds. Several of the female students at Halesowen were of a similar age to me, or even older. Obviously, I didn’t shag any of them but I just thought I’d mention it in order to mislead you.
Anyway, a far more significant relationship was one I struck up with a twenty-stone man with long curly hair, brown-tinted spectacles and a Viva Zapata moustache. His name was Malcolm Bailey. He was a big bear of a bloke who had a love-hate relationship with most of the students and staff. He was blunt, opinionated, liked a drink and a smoke, and constantly took the piss out of everybody. I liked him and we got on really well. Malcolm was head of the college drama department and directed quite a few plays. He was planning to take Ron Hutchinson’s play Rat in the Skull to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1987 and asked me if I’d like to be in it. I was to play the part of a nasty, right-wing London copper who’s trying to stitch-up various suspects. I thought it sounded like a good laugh so I went for it. In August of 1987, Malcolm, the other three members of the all-male cast and me headed for Edinburgh in a hired white van.
By now, I had a new girlfriend, Celine. (I’ve changed the name. The rest is true.) She was tall and busty with cropped peroxide-blonde hair and a wardrobe that was almost exclusively black. We used to listen to the Smiths a lot. I’d kissed her goodbye and told her I’d see her after our play had set the theatre world on fire.
We totally bombed. The play was alright but no one came to see it. Well, we probably averaged about five people a night. After the performances we’d go and see other shows and generally soak up the Festival vibe. One night we went to a venue called the Pleasance. This was to become a special place for me. The show that night was called the 12.12 Cabaret, because it began at twelve minutes past midnight. I’d never seen any so-called alternative comedy in the flesh before, but by about half past midnight I’d decided what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
The compere that night was called Ivor Dembina. He was funny and did a lot of ad-libbing with the audience. I remember he christened one bloke ‘Foetus’, and kept on going back to him for endless digs and put-downs. He introduced an American act called Ray Hanna who did really slick one-liners and played keyboard and sang funny songs. (Coincidentally, Hanna went with Eddie Izzard and me to Sweden years later, and then returned to Edinburgh with a one-man show about Lenny Bruce.) I was too shy to speak to either of these guys afterwards, but I really wanted to tell them they were brilliant and I wanted to be like them.
I spent the next day in a daze. I told Malcolm I’d decided to become an ‘alternative comedian’ and he said, ‘Yeah, but you’ll be shit.’ Then he smiled. It was about as encouraging as he ever got. So the next night I went back to the 12.12 to get another man-sized swig of my new obsession. This time the compering was done by a double act, two energetic, fresh-faced student-types who, again, were really funny. They were called Black and Baddiel. Yes, THAT Baddiel, with a pre-Newman partner from Cambridge University. Again, I would have loved to speak to them afterwards but, well, this is another problem with not drinking. Stone-cold sober, I was uneasy about initiating a friendly chat with two relatively unknown comics, but when I was drunk I was perfectly at home dancing in front of Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen with my nob out.
The following night I went to see Julian Clary, or The Joan Collins Fan Club as he was then known. I’d heard that he got someone out of the audience to sing ‘I’m Gonna Leave Old Durham Town’ so I deliberately sat near the front and laughed a lot. Sure enough, I got chosen and stood on stage in my first-ever professional comedy show as Julian Clary’s straight-man. (Leave it.) As he handed me my script, he whispered, ‘Don’t be nervous. You won’t be humiliated.’ I bet he’s used that one before. No, it was sweet, but, of course, I was loving being up there. I delivered all the lines enthusiastically and enjoyed the applause as I left the stage. It was also a nice change, after the play, to gaze into an auditorium that didn’t look like a very orderly furniture exhibition.
Meanwhile Rat in the Skull crawled on to the end of its run and we left Edinburgh, driving past a few of our already-tatty photocopied posters flapping in the August breeze. The mood inside the hired white van was a bit more subdued than when we’d arrived. Nevertheless, I had decided I was going to come back the following year, this time as a comic.
On the way back, I got Malcolm to drop me off in Nottingham. I was due to meet Celine at a party there and stay at her aunt’s for the night. We danced and kissed and ended up in bed together, naked. I’d bought her a stick of Edinburgh Rock. It doesn’t sound much, but her birthday was coming up and I’d just spent ten quid on a pair of earrings she’d said she liked, so don’t go thinking that I was holding back on the financial front.
Anyway, I sat in bed with Celine, telling her how I was going to set the comedy world on fire, but she seemed troubled by something. Eventually she looked at me and said, ‘Y’know, this is really hard.’
‘It’s rock,’ I said, ‘it’s supposed to be hard.’ (That sounds like a routine, but it really happened that way.)
‘No,’ she said. ‘I mean I’ve got something hard to tell you.’ I listened. ‘There was this bloke in the pub who kept asking me out. In the end, I went just to shut him up.’
I could see where this was going. I immediately got out of bed and put my pants back on, thinking, ‘Well, you won’t be seeing that ag
ain, m’lady.’ Then I got back into bed, and she went on to explain, in more detail than I needed, how she had fallen for this guy. I suddenly remembered that I had spent ten quid on a pair of earrings for this woman, and I started to laugh at the grim irony of it all. I deliberately made the laugh arch and pronounced so she’d ask me what I was laughing at. She did, and I was able to do a sort of ‘Well, what a mug I was . . .’ speech, during which I adopted various body-shapes that made me appear tragic and mis-used. As planned, she was overwhelmed with guilt. ‘Oh, tell me how much the earrings were and I’ll buy them off you. Oh, please.’
‘Twelve quid,’ I said.
They say you come away with something from every relationship. In this case, two quid. But years later, I incorporated the earrings thing into a storyline for a sitcom I wrote, so even more good came out of it. When I bid Celine farewell the next day, I said, ‘Have a nice rest of your life’: I was still playing it like some sort of Hamlet-figure. Thus, I found comedy and lost my bird. She had dumped me for a double-glazing salesman called Kevin. (In this case, it seemed a shame to change the name, so I didn’t.)
When I got home to Birmingham, I decided to book my space for the following year’s Edinburgh Festival virtually straight away. This was about six months earlier than people usually booked venues for Edinburgh, but I didn’t know that at the time. There was a company in Coventry called Tic Toc, who I knew ran a venue at the Festival, so I phoned them up. I explained to the bloke that I was a comedian called Chris Collins and I wanted to hire a room for Edinburgh ’88. He asked how long the show was. I hadn’t even written one gag yet, so it was a bit tricky to estimate. ‘Oh, about an hour and a half, two hours should do it,’ I said.
‘Look,’ said the bloke, ‘no offence, but I’ve never heard of you. Even the big acts only do an hour.’
Frank Skinner Autobiography Page 26