Frank Skinner Autobiography

by Frank Skinner

‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’ll do an hour.’ He explained the cost and it turned out that the good time-slots were all too expensive for me. It’d been a year since I quit drinking and I’d managed to save four hundred quid during that time. All that would buy was a lunchtime slot, 12.45 to 1.45, at the 100-seater Calton Studios. I agreed. I wrote the cheque, and sent my life-savings to a company in Coventry so that, in ten months’ time, I could perform an hour of comedy at the Edinburgh Festival. I had the venue, now all I needed was the show.

  I should probably point something out at this stage. I had no fucking idea how to become an alternative comedian. The normal procedure, it turns out, was that you did what were called ‘open spots’ at London comedy clubs, and you carried on doing these, about ten minutes each and unpaid, until some club owner or other offered you a paid spot. Once this had happened a few times, if you went well, other paid work would come in and you’d begin to build a reputation on the comedy circuit. Then, usually, you and two or three other up-and-coming comics might get together, share the cost of a room in Edinburgh, and put on a show in which you did fifteen or twenty minutes each. If this went well, the following Edinburgh you might risk a two-hander with just one other comic, and if this was a success, finally, maybe after another two-hander combination at the next Festival, you might bite the bullet, take the ultimate step, and try doing an hour on your own. The whole process normally takes between three and six years, sometimes much longer. I was going to do the hour show having never worked as a professional comic in my life. Not because I was brave, but because I didn’t know any better.

  I even toyed with the idea of writing loads of stuff, but not actually trying any of it out in public until I opened in Edinburgh, an approach that was not so much ‘in at the deep end’, as ‘in at the shallow end, but off the top diving-board’. Just write the show, practise in front of the bedroom mirror so I know it lasts an hour, and then do it. Malcolm, having listened, mouth agape, to this plan, suggested that it might not be a terrible idea to try doing a bit of comedy beforehand. I wasn’t sure it was necessary but I thought I’d give it a go, just to be on the safe side.

  I feel that I shouldn’t go any further with this until I’ve offered some sort of definition of ‘alternative comedy’. Bob Monkhouse once said to me that alternative comedy is the same old jokes but no one’s shaved. This is funny, but not true, and is therefore not a bad example of the difference between alternative and mainstream comedy. I’m not saying that all alternative comedy is true, but it is, or was when I started doing it, generated by the comedian for the comedian. What was said on stage roughly represented that comic’s view of the world. For example, I used to do a routine about taking a woman I’d met in a pub back to my flat, and being slightly non-plussed when I asked her if there was anything she’d like me to do, and she said she’d love it if I’d lick honey off her breasts. I continued like this:

  Well, frankly, I wasn’t keen. And, anyway, I’d only got lemon curd. And if you put that on nipples, it looks like acne. So I said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t fancy that much,’ and she said, ‘Oh, for goodness sake. I’ve got just the thing for you.’ And she reached into her carrier-bag and took out some newspaper, and when she unwrapped it, she had a dozen oysters. She said, ‘You have twelve of these and you’ll be able to satisfy me all night.’ Well, have you ever tried oysters? Oh, my God. Honestly, it’s like licking phlegm off a tortoise. I thought, ‘Twelve of these and you’ll be able to satisfy me all night?’ No fuckin’ wonder. After twelve of these, oral sex is gonna be a piece of piss. If you’ll pardon the pun. I tell you, after twelve oysters, oral sex is gonna be like the fucking sweet trolley turning up.

  Now, I chose this short routine, more or less at random, in order to make my point about what I regard as ‘alternative’ comedy. Classically, so-called alternative comedy would have been a bit more worthy. They all slagged off Thatcher and bleated about Nicaragua, but my stuff was never political. However, the reason both strands qualify as alternative comedy is because they are both reflective of the comic’s world-view. Political comics, like Mark Thomas or the American Will Durst, do stuff about politics because they are interested in it, and therefore spend a lot of their lives reading, thinking and talking about it. Quite rightly, this is reflected in their acts. That’s why I do jokes about licking women’s tits and vaginas. Their material is very different from mine, but we all believe that comedy should be true, in that it should reflect the attitudes and opinions of the comic. When Frank Carson says ‘A fella went into a pub’ etc, it’s often very funny, but it doesn’t tell us much about Frank Carson’s world-view. There might be fifty other comics telling that same joke. They can’t all think and feel the same. I don’t just want the jokes, I want the man behind the jokes. That’s why, as I said before, character comics leave me a bit cold.

  As you may have already begun to suspect, whenever I try to analyse comedy I disappear up my own arse, but here’s a look at the oysters routine that says why, apart from the fact that it’s written by the performer, I think it’s ‘alternative’ comedy rather than mainstream.

  Firstly, it’s a bit too rude for mainstream. Mainstream comedy tends to go for cheekiness but not graphic detail. Graphic detail is a bit too true for a mainstream crowd. The usual criticism that mainstream comics aim at alternative comedy is that it’s ‘too crude’ or ‘blue’. ‘Dirty’ comics, such as myself, are just going for the ‘easy’ laugh. This is all a bit misleading. I agree dirty jokes that aren’t funny are bad. I also think that clean jokes that aren’t funny are bad, but, I’ll admit, a bad dirty joke suggests that the teller might have been hoping to get a laugh merely at the mention of swear-words or rudeness. In my experience this doesn’t work. Occasionally, and unfortunately, an audience will laugh simply because something dirty has been said, but they won’t laugh for long if that’s all that’s on offer. Audiences are not that stupid. Anyone who thinks there are ‘easy’ laughs to be had should try doing a bit of stand-up.

  I like funny comics. Clean, filthy, political, slapstick, surreal, the lot. I am quite a dirty comic but a clever dirty joke is a beautiful thing. For example, here’s a gag I was doing in my early days:

  I have to admit, I don’t like condoms. I hate that moment, after sex, when you look down at yourself, and there’s a pink, wrinkled condom, just hanging there. I hate that. Especially if you weren’t actually wearing one when you put it in. (LAUGH.) Oh, it can happen, you know. Those ribbed ones will stay there for months. It’s like knocking a fuckin’ rawlplug in.

  That is a dirty joke, but I’d defend it because I believe it to be funny and well-constructed and quite clever, if you’ll excuse me saying so. If you find the joke offensive, fair enough, but that is to condemn it because of its subject matter rather than on its comic merits, such as they are. There is no comic hierarchy based on clean and dirty, only on funny and unfunny. Champions of mainstream comedy are always going on about how political correctness has killed comedy, but the antismut thing is also political correctness, just someone else’s interpretation of ‘correct’.

  I was once compering a gig and I did a short routine about the difficulty of masturbating while watching a dirty film on television rather than on video. The dirty bits are often quite short, and you never know exactly when they’re coming up, so you have to sit in a state of preparation, ‘not rigid, but rubbery’, to give yourself a bit of a head start. By the time that dirty bit comes, ‘you need to be half-way up the runway’. That’s your only chance of making it. I went on to explain how I’d got myself into this state of preparation when Channel Four kicked off its new documentary series, Censored, a collection of previously banned TV films described by the broadcaster as ‘Television they said you should never be allowed to see’. As you can imagine, I was all set and raring to go. ‘Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried masturbating to a fifty-five-minute documentary about the miners’ strike . . . but it’s not easy.’

  It might not be top-drawer comedy but it
got a few laughs.

  However, the next bloke I introduced at the gig was very much from the mainstream circuit. He glared at me as we passed on stage, apologised to the audience, and said he wished to totally disassociate himself from the filth I had just uttered. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘these two niggers went into a pub . . .’ Different taboos, that’s the thing.

  Where was I? Oh, yeah, the oysters. I would say that that routine not only reflects, in some ways, my world-view but, furthermore, is, if you want to go look for it, quite political. Also, and I’m playing with fire here, I think that one of the reasons I’ve done alright as a comic is that I’m a working-class bloke who got educated and worked in an arts centre. Though I may sound anti-mainstream in some of my above remarks, the fact is that I dislike any kind of restraint on a comedian’s work other than his own personal morals. I reckon I’m probably half-alternative, half-mainstream, half-university, half-factory. I’ll show you what I think I mean, though I should warn you that this view of my stuff as ‘alternative mainstream’ has only just, this minute, occurred to me, so we walk hand-in-hand along a rickety bridge that I’m very much still building.

  Firstly, the woman in the routine is independent, innovative, and inclined to be the dominant partner. She is much more sexually liberated than me, happy to use any aid to sexual pleasure, be it the product of the mighty ocean or the humble bee. In fact, she sets a sexual agenda I find threatening and altogether more sophisticated than anything I might come up with. The fact that I only have lemon curd to offer makes me sound small-town, domestic, cheap and old-fashioned. The oysters represent sophistication. Rather than embrace their differentness, I am repelled by it and seek familiarity in still more small-town comparisons, tortoises and phlegm. All this is pretty alternative stuff. No bimbos or brash male behaviour here. She is Madonna, I am Jack Duckworth.

  Then it turns. Having firmly established the alternative credentials of this encounter, I am now able to make a Bernard Manning-like point: that men don’t like giving women oral sex because it often doesn’t taste very nice. However, the point is made in a very non-confrontational, docile fashion. I think about the oral sex comparison but there is no evidence that I voiced it to her. Thus, it can be concluded that she continued to dominate, and that I did give her oral sex, be it from motives of fear or compassion, neither of which enhance my macho credentials.

  Interesting, but, essentially, bollocks. I wrote the routine because I thought it was funny. Everything else is incidental. Now, can someone fetch me a step-ladder so I can get out of my own arse?

  Today, Phil, Bernie and me went to the Seoul Stadium, where they’ll be playing the opening game of the 2002 World Cup. The stadium isn’t quite finished yet, so we had to wear hard-hats. We wandered around the press box and had our photos taken on the running track. It was thirty-six degrees in the shade. Throughout the trip, the stadium’s technical people were testing out the sound system by playing, very loudly, over and over again, that Tom Waits song that goes ‘And the small change got rained on, with his own .38. And the small change got rained on, with his own .38.’ It echoed around and around the empty arena. God, it was hot.

  So, it was to be my first gig as a stand-up comedian. December 9th, 1987, at the Portland Club in Birmingham. Malcolm had decided he wanted to be a comedy promoter, so he got together a few local acts and a couple of turns from the London alternative circuit, Earl Okin and The Nice People, and staged a charity gig, sponsored by Mitchells and Butlers, a local brewery, at the Portland Club in Icknield Port Road. It was an ugly red-brick building that, among other things, was the home of the Birmingham Anglers Association. The idea was that I would compere the gig, free of charge, obviously, and I was very excited. Today, the Portland Club, tomorrow . . . Malcolm, of course, had a period of much-verbalised doubt about my role in the event, wondering aloud whether I was up to it, but, having pulled two or three legs off my psychological spider, he finally said I had the job. Thus, I began my preparation. Without wishing to sound like a twat, I had been getting big laughs from my mates for as long as I could remember, and I didn’t see why this audience should be any different.

  There was a show on TV at that time called Saturday Live. It was more or less the only place people from outside London could see alternative comedy. I remember being utterly convinced that once word had got round of how brilliant I was, I would almost certainly be on there the following week. I don’t know how I imagined that word of a crappy gig in Icknield Port Road would reach the ears of the comedy intelligentsia in London, but I did. It scares me when I look back and think about that. I mean, I was thirty, for fuck’s sake, not some stupid kid. At least when I’m banging in goals for Barcelona I know it’s just a fantasy. But this was something that I honestly thought would happen.

  I had spent the previous weeks trying to remember funny things I’d said or done in the pub, writing them down, and then working them into little routines I could do in between the acts. For example, sometimes when I was out with my mates, I would pretend that I was about to do a massive sneeze and start frantically searching my pockets for a handkerchief. Then, suddenly I would turn away, sneeze, and turn back with a massive length of snot swinging from one nostril. Of course, it wasn’t really snot, it was wet cling-film, but it always got a big reaction from the other customers, especially if they were eating. I decided I’d try this on stage, and then wrote some sneezing material to precede it. I suppose, having already sounded like a twat once in this section, I might as well suggest that this particular bit was an examination of the class-system through the medium of sneezing. It centred on the fact that working-class people, in my experience, do massive great sneezes.

  . . . My dad would do about three or four sharp intakes of breath, kind of false starts, before the sneeze actually happened. This gave you a chance to put away your stamp-collection, put the food into tupperware containers, and get the smaller children into hats and mackintoshes before the big explosion came. And when it did, there was no ‘hand in front of the mouth’ thing. It was just ‘AAASHOWWW!’ We used to actually surf on my dad’s sneezes. (At this point I’d demonstrate, complete with theme from Hawaii Five-O.) But then, when I got a bit older, I met some middle-class people. And they’re nice and everything, but different. And I was sitting with this middle-class bloke one day, just having a chat, and he said (in a posh accent), ‘You know I think I have a bit of a cold com . . . oh . . .’ (And then my impression of a little squeaky sneeze like, it has to be said, middle-class people do. I look puzzled.) And I thought, ‘What was that? Has he just swallowed a chaffinch?’

  OK, I was just finding my way, but it turned out to be the first bit of stand-up I ever did on stage.

  I turned up at the gig pretty early. It was quite a big room and I sat on the edge of the stage with my legs dangling, wondering how it would be when the place was full with laughter. One of the other acts, a comic called Andy Feet, was another early arrival. He was a tall, thin, swarthy-looking bloke, I guessed about fifty years old. In anticipation of his performance, Andy Feet wore a smart pale-blue suit, with man-sized footprints made of red fabric stitched to it. There were four on the front of the trousers, and four on the jacket, including one on each lapel. He also wore a massive silver footprint medallion over his shirt and tie. I thought all this was a great idea, but I knew it wouldn’t really work with Collins. I’d seen him do a club in Aston, on the same bill as the singer who’d done the Andy Williams number. The centre-piece of his act was an impression of Anthony Newley, so you wouldn’t call him topical, but he made me laugh. Now, I was slightly in awe of him. But Andy Feet was nervous. He kept asking me what time the bar would open, and when he finally sat down with a double scotch he told me that he’d had two heart attacks, and had spent some time in a wheelchair after the last one. He also told me that he’d played Vegas, and that Bill Cosby had said to him, ‘Andy, when you come back again, we’ll meet up and talk comedy.’ It was a conversation still pending.

&nb
sp; I got the impression that he didn’t feel his choice of profession had helped much in the stress department. As he sat, head bowed, looking down past his dangling footprint at the whisky, he seemed like a man with a great deal on his mind. But this was a bloke who earned his living by making people laugh. I couldn’t work out what he was worried about.

  Eventually, we went backstage and the tables and chairs in the auditorium started to fill up. There were about two hundred punters in. I stood in the wings, waiting to blow ’em away.

  My thoughts turned to that mate’s girlfriend, the one who’d asked me, ‘What’s it like to be thirty and on the scrapheap?’ It was a fair question. I hadn’t done much with my life. I mean, I had a couple of degrees, but I followed them with three and a half years on the dole and I’d spent a large part of my adult years getting too drunk to remember why I needed to get drunk. But through it all, there’d been gags. At the very lowest times, there’d been gags. As I’ve already said, people had been telling me I ought to be a comedian since I was at infant school. It was the only thing I’d ever been any good at. It was so obviously what I should be doing. How could I have taken so long to realise it? Malcolm came up to me. I was expecting a ‘Good luck’ but he just said, ‘Let’s start then.’ And I walked out of the gloom into the bright light.

  Slight snigger on Hawaii Five-O, a laugh on the chaffinch, a laugh and some groans of disgust on the swinging cling-film. I bombed. Not horribly or completely, but to a man who was expecting that, after his opening routine, people from Saturday Live would be chartering helicopters in order to get to Icknield Port Road in time for the second half, it was a major shock. I honestly couldn’t believe that the crowd weren’t on their feet. I mean applauding rather than leaving.

  Before the show I had been completely calm and confident. Now, as I stood in the wings watching the first act, The Nice People, get laughs, I was filled with dread. I couldn’t do it after all. I’d been kidding myself. I was just shit, and I had to go out there again and again and again. My next routine was, worryingly, a slightly more experimental piece about the X20 bus that went from New Street station to Stratford-upon-Avon. I suggested the bus was named after the Stingray character, X-Two-Zero, Titan’s evil henchman, and began to riff on this very unconvincing theme. This was fraught with problems. For a start off, this was just before reminiscing about kids’ TV really took off, and very few people in the audience seemed to know who X-Two-Zero was. Also, everybody who knew the bus, which was maybe a quarter of the audience, referred to it as the X-Twenty. Most of the two-hundred-strong crowd had heard of neither the puppet nor the bus and, although they weren’t openly hostile, they were starting to lose faith in me, fast.