I could just make out an ‘Oh no we won’t’ over the booing and trumpeting. I looked into the wings again. Three grown men had passed through asking, continued through pleading, and had now reached begging. They really wanted me to come off. I turned back to the crowd. A little frail old woman stood at the front of the stage. She looked up at me, shook her head in disbelief, and then, slowly and shakily, made her way to the toilet. ‘Well,’ I said, still trying to get the crowd on my side, ‘I don’t think she’ll see another strawberry season.’
I had to hang around in the bar to get my fifty quid. I’d decided against joining in with the ‘Auld Lang Syne’. These people were old acquaintances that I really felt should ‘be forgot’ as soon as was humanly possible. As I stood there, with people pointing at me and sniggering, and that was just Malcolm, a young girl of about eleven came over and said, ‘Excuse me, I thought you was alright but my dad thought you was shit.’ It was my first-ever review.
On the drive home, Malcolm, predictably, was merciless, but I just couldn’t accept that the dream was over before it started.
My first death had been a polite, quiet affair, with a lot of personal anguish but a minimum of fuss, but this second demise had been an act of group-savagery. I had been flayed alive. I never wanted to go through that again. So, I had two choices: get out, or get better.
I’ve been back in England for just under a week, and I spent today de-Carolining my flat. Yeah, we finally split. One of those mutual things you hear about. I guess you saw it coming. Even the tabloids had started to refer to it as our ‘on-off relationship’. Not good.
We split on Saturday night, just after the results of the Stars in Their Eyes Grand Final. Such is the back-drop for modern tragedy. And it got worse. As we spoke of broken hearts and rubbed away our tears, Des O’Connor was interviewing Bradley Walsh about his days as a redcoat.
We were two people pulled apart by love and rage. Even as she screamed at me I noticed how beautiful she was. The argument, as usual, was about almost nothing. She told me that earlier in the week she had been chatted up by Jerry Springer, which pissed me off. And I told her that, coincidentally, he had chatted up my previous girlfriend, which pissed Caroline off. But, of course, that’s not really what it was about. For the last six months, we haven’t needed much to start a row. In fact, ‘start a row’ isn’t quite the right phrase. It’s been like one long row that never got switched off. We just pressed the pause-button, so it was easy to resume at any moment. We had a love like cancer. The more it grew, the more pain and suffering it caused. But it was love, and I miss her already.
I said I didn’t want any contact at all. No texts, e-mails, nothing. We’ve had too many commas. We need a full stop. I’m not sure that ‘staying friends’ ever really works. I don’t think two people can have a normal friendship if they know what each other’s genitals look like.
I’ve just realised that there’s a horrible amount of mixed metaphors in those first couple of paragraphs. I suppose I’m just trying to work this out as I go. I had a feeling that writing about it might be therapeutic, but it isn’t, and it’s not doing my prose style much good, either.
Anyway, another door closes. We talked about staying together forever and having babies and stuff, but that’s all gone now. As she left, she offered me one piece of advice. Get a girlfriend who’s deaf. Funny to the last. She could be a fuckin’ nightmare but she made me laugh, and she had the softest skin I ever touched.
So now I’m taking down photos from the cork-board, removing sweet messages from the fridge, and pulling knives out of the wall, making my flat look like it never knew her. I’ve even tuned my radio-alarm into another station. Hearing her voice as I lie in bed would be too much. We’d been together nearly a year. It doesn’t sound that long, but I can’t remember how it feels without her. Well, I’ll soon find out.
And it’s July, at least two months before I can even think about finding someone else, because they’ve all got suntans and, well, you remember Jerry’s advice. Not that someone else feels like an option at the moment. I fuckin’ hate Venice.
There was a pub on the Hagley Road, not far from the Birmingham Oratory, called The Ivy Bush. On one Saturday every month, its upstairs room was the home of the ‘Ha Bloody Ha Comedy Club’. It specialised in alternative comedy and attracted a young, hip audience of students, ex-students, and generally broad-minded Brummies. Malcolm got me an unpaid ten-minute slot there in the January of ’88.
I decided I needed a completely new image. I was very skinny at the time as a result of running eight miles a day, and so I got some little, round National Health specs, incorporated my guitar into the act, and billed myself as ‘The Rockabilly Charles Hawtrey’. (You know, that skinny guy with the glasses in all the Carry On films.) When I turned up that Saturday night, the room was absolutely heaving. I was on just before the interval. I walked up to the microphone, looked at the crowd, and felt totally at home.
‘I took my driving test this week. I had a really polite examiner, which, to be honest, confused me a bit. Instead of just telling me what to do, like my instructor does, he said stuff like, “Would you like to turn left here, Mr Collins?” Well, I thought it was optional. (Laugh.) He said, “Would you like to turn left here, Mr Collins?” and I said (miming as if to turn left and then thinking better of it), “No, I don’t think so. (Big laugh.) There’s a bit of a nasty junction down the bottom, there. (Laugh.) I nearly killed some fucker last week.” (Laugh.)
Oh, joy of joys. They were laughing. They were really laughing. I felt my confidence rise up like one of those massive waves that big-time surfers ride. I was a comedian. I wasn’t getting paid and I was only doing ten minutes, but I was a comedian. Anyone who doubted that only had to listen. During the interval, people were coming up and saying how much they liked my stuff. I was so happy.
A few days later, I was in a club in Moseley when I noticed a really stunning woman, skinny but with big tits, looking at me and smiling. Eventually, like after about forty seconds, I went over. ‘I saw you at The Ivy Bush last Saturday,’ she said. ‘I suppose you get fed up of people telling you this, but you’re brilliant.’
As I left her place the following morning, I knew, at last, that I had found my true vocation.
My publisher asked me to put in something about love. This worries me, talking about ‘love’. Pop singers do it all the time, usually without even noticing because they’re concentrating on the tune and making decisions about their next sensual body-shape. Comedians are supposed to be above that sort of thing. You remember those ‘Love is . . .’ cartoons that were always stuff like ‘Love is . . . buying her flowers for no reason’? I was asked to do one once, for a Valentine’s Day something-or-other. Mine was ‘Love is . . . just about the only four-letter word I don’t use during sex’. It’s my job to undermine all that single-red-rose, teddy-bear-in-a-’I-Heart-You’ t-shirt bullshit. And to really talk about love, I mean properly, in terms like you don’t get at the card shop, well, that’s for novelists and poets, not for comics. Comedians are supposed to be below that sort of thing.
Despite all this, because my publisher is so keen on the idea, I’m going to give it a go. On Love. I once found an old diary of mine from the eighties. There was only one entry. On January 3rd it said, in a version of my handwriting that suggested the intervention of drink, ‘There can be no true love without the fear of losing.’ I don’t remember what caused me to write this, but I still think it’s true. As soon as that fear subsides, there is a short period of bliss, steadily undermined by complacency and ordinariness. How long can you sit atop a mountain before you start to miss the climb?
I never reached that easy bliss with Caroline. We didn’t fade, we snapped. We watched it happen. We saw the individual strands pinging, one by one, but we couldn’t do anything about it, except brace ourselves for the fall. This was a different end for me. Harder, because I hadn’t finished loving her.
But my usual ending, quiet, wit
h a steady hand, is even scarier. It gives love a kind of built-in obsolescence. You love until you drive out the doubts, you take a breath, you turn around, you realise that love went with them. It sounds sort of cyclical, doesn’t it?
Some people ask me why I bother. I’m on telly, why don’t I stay single and free and dine only on fresh meat? Of course that has its thrills. Not knowing what you’re going to see at the unpeeling of underwear is breathtakingly exciting, feeling different lips against your skin, hearing a different sigh, smelling a different smell, tasting a different taste.
But what about the shared moments you re-live together, over and over, and the utterly unhelpful hot drinks you make when they’re ill, and the way your mouth opens slightly when you hear them fumbling for keys and know they’ll soon walk through the door, and the way you say ‘Let’s put the light off. We can still talk’, and you both know you’ll be asleep in thirty seconds? What about all that? What about knowing what her lips will feel like against your skin, and aching in anticipation of it? What about fucking someone, quick and hard, in a hotel toilet and desperately caring about them at the same time. That’s what love is, but it doesn’t fit on a teddy-bear’s t-shirt. And even as I write, I can’t remember how all that fades, or what it feels like when you gradually become aware that the shadows are lengthening. I know it feels bad enough to make me pretend it’s not happening, but it’s not shocking and sharp like a sudden fall. Either way, in my experience, it ends.
OK, I did it. I talked about love. I think I’m better at nob-jokes.
Malcolm decided I should try my act in London, so he booked a weekend of ‘open spots’ for me. All ten minutes, all unpaid. On the Friday night, I drove down from Birmingham after college and did a gig in a club in Notting Hill, run by Tony Allen, an alternative comedy legend. He had been on the bill the night the Comedy Store opened, and was known as The Godfather. He was very nice to me but I didn’t go very well. After the gig, because I didn’t know anyone in London and couldn’t afford a hotel, I drove till I found a quiet street and slept, or at least lay with my eyes shut, in my Vauxhall Viva.
The following night I did a club called Drummond’s, near Regent’s Park, run by a bloke called Ken Ellis, who had done a lot of TV work with Noel Edmonds. There were about twelve people in the audience and, as the night slowly progressed, one after another, they went up on stage and did a spot. It turned out that only five of the people there were actually paying punters. Again I didn’t go very well. After the gig, I drove to another quiet street and once again laid down my weary head in the Vauxhall Viva.
On the Sunday, I drove to Camden and bought a very fine brown-leather flying jacket with the fifty quid I had been paid for New Year’s Eve. I reckon I could have got the bloke to go as low as forty quid, but I was very keen to spend my exact fee on the jacket. I needed to feel something warm and lovely had come out of that terrible experience. Obviously, it wasn’t as warm and lovely as what had come out of my Ivy Bush gig, but then the jacket didn’t give me a sexually transmitted disease.
On the Sunday evening, I had my last gig of the weekend, at a club near to the Blackwall Tunnel. The club was called The Tunnel, and when I was on the London comedy circuit, everybody had a terrible tale to tell about it. This is mine. The Tunnel was run and compered by a comic called Malcolm Hardee. Yes, the same bloke who tipped me off about This is Your Life, ten years later. He was a chubby, affable bloke with thick horn-rimmed specs and greasy black hair. He usually wore a scruffy old suit covered in cigarette burns and beer-stains. Malcolm always said that he had the second biggest testicles in showbiz, second only, he once told me, to Jenny Agutter’s dad’s. Well, I never saw Mr Agutter’s, but Malcolm’s were enormous. I know, because he used to get them out on stage, fold his penis into a sort of nose, and do a fabulous impression of General Charles de Gaulle. On that fateful Sunday night at The Tunnel, Malcolm closed the show by having a piss from the front of the stage. It was that kind of club. But the real star of The Tunnel was the crowd, or, more precisely, that part of the crowd that did the heckling. It was the heckling that brought in the people, not the acts.
For example, if a comedian called Jackson was having a bad time, the crowd would start calling ‘Cab for Jackson’ till he got off. Sometimes, the heckling didn’t even require words. Comics would get hummed off. The whole crowd would start humming loudly until the poor devil would just give up and walk offstage. Then Malcolm would come on and say something along the lines of ‘Well, he was shit. Nice bloke but shit. That bloke who was on earlier and went very well, he’s a cunt.’
They say that Jim Tavare, a comic who was also to be part of that plan to tip me off about This is Your Life, once opened his act at The Tunnel by saying, ‘Hello. I’m a schizophrenic,’ and someone shouted, ‘Fuck off, both of you . . .’ Anyone could die at The Tunnel, and anyone did. Every comic I had spoken to that weekend had warned me about it.
I had one routine that had been going relatively well. It was about Skippy the bush kangaroo. Yes, I was. still flogging the kids’ telly theme. The routine was fairly standard stuff, centred around the fact that Sonny Hammond, the little kid who was Skippy’s best mate, could understand everything Skippy said even though the only noise the kangaroo made was ‘Tut, tut, tut, tut, tut’. This gave me a chance to do my Aussie accent and a bit of kangaroo miming. Here’s kind of how the routine went:
. . . so Skippy would come bounding in and go (I stood, crouched, with my limp hands at chest-level, kangaroo-style, for all Skippy’s bits), ‘Tut, tut, tut, tut, tut.’ And Sonny would say:
‘What’s that, Skip?’
‘Tut, tut, tut, tut, tut.’
‘Helicopter crash?’
‘Tut, tut, tut, tut, tut.’
‘Forty-seven miles north-west of Walamaloo?’
And, even as a little kid, I’d think to myself, ‘Bollocks.’ I bet what Skippy is saying isn’t anything to do with a helicopter crash. I bet he’s saying kangarooey-type things like (back into Skippy-pose):
‘Excuse me, could I have some leaves please?’
‘What’s that, Skip?’
(Very big sigh.) ‘I said, could I have some leaves please?’
‘Helicopter crash?’
(Looking all around.) ‘Where?’
‘Forty-seven miles north-west of Walamaloo?’
(After a long pause with puzzled expression.) ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
So, anyway, I began this routine on that Sunday night at The Tunnel. Just as I started getting into it, a bloke shouted, ‘It was Flipper.’ Flipper, you may recall, was a dolphin in another kids’ TV series.
‘No, mate,’ I replied, keeping very calm. ‘It was definitely Skippy.’
‘Listen,’ said the voice, now sounding much more threatening, ‘it was fackin’ Flipper.’
I panicked. I tried to see the routine through, but change Skippy to Flipper as I went along. So I had Sonny come down the ranch-house steps and say:
‘Ooo! What’s that strange wheezing, slithering sound? Oh, it’s you, Flip.’ I then stuck in another elaborate mime: Australian schoolboy picks up slippery, wriggling dolphin. After much struggling, I thrust my index finger down the air-hole on top of his imaginary head, to keep him still. ‘They hate that,’ I explained. Then, at last:
‘What’s that Flip?’ Now my mime had switched from kangaroo to dolphin, with hands acting as flippers.
‘Click, click, click, click, click.’ (Y’know, as in the sound a dolphin makes.)
‘Submarine crash?’
Shortly afterwards, the crowd started shouting ‘Malcolm’ – the compere, not my manager – and he stepped in like a boxing referee to stop me from taking any further punishment. I drove back to Birmingham that night and was back in college at nine on Monday morning.
Malcolm had entered me for a talent contest at a place called the Phoenix Club in Cannock. It was a small, dingy place, but I was impressed by the fact that the front of the bar was covered in fake
leopardskin. It gave the place a sort of a Vegas feel. I suppose there were about forty punters in there, all eager to see the stars of tomorrow. The winner would go through to the Grand Final, in Wolverhampton. The show was hosted by a chunky comic stroke singer, who was billed on the poster as Marty Miller, ‘The man with the golden voice’. He opened the show with a light operatic number, which I think was Renee and Renata’s ‘Save Your Love’, told a few quick gags and then brought on the first of the turns. The act before me was a big fat woman who sang ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’, looking like some sort of chiffon mountain. No one seemed to mind that another woman, three acts earlier, had sung the same song. I went on and did ten minutes and went pretty well. By now I was writing new stuff every day. The obsession was starting to kick in.
During the interval, Marty Miller came over for a chat. ‘You’ve got something, son. I don’t know what it is, but you’ve got something,’ he said. I was very flattered. ‘You won’t win, but you might well come second.’
‘How do you know I won’t win?’ I asked.
‘Well, we’ve got a ringer in.’ I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘He’s a semi-pro. He wouldn’t come if we didn’t promise him Wolverhampton.’ I was shocked. Just a few months in and I was already face-to-face with showbiz corruption. Marty was nice to me, though. He was very drunk, but he was nice to me. ‘What you need,’ he explained, ‘is a sure-fire opening gag, something that can’t fail. Then they know you’re funny. I always start with this.’
He told me his sure-fire opener:
I picked up this bird the other night and when I got her back to my place and took me prick out, she said, ‘Who ya gonna satisfy with that?’ and I said, ‘Me.’
‘You can’t use that though, that’s mine,’ he explained. I felt really privileged. It was like a sort of comedy master-class. Years later, I got some more advice from a helpful comic. I suppose this next tip shows how my career had progressed. I had done a storming set at one of the top clubs in London, Jongleurs in Battersea, and I was getting a lift back, in a BMW, to Malcom Hardee’s house, from a comedy-magician called Keith Fields. Keith was a nice bloke but very business-minded as comics go. He was the first comedian I ever saw with a mobile phone. I was doing alright but I was still very new. ‘Frank,’ he said, as we got nearer to Malcolm’s place, ‘you’re going to do well in this business, very well.’ Again, I was flattered. ‘And I’m going to offer you one bit of advice.’ I was all ears. Keith was quite successful, and I felt that one pearl of wisdom from him could be a crucial piece in my comedy jigsaw. He paused for effect, and then went on, ‘When you buy a BMW, and you will, make sure you get one with power-assisted steering.’
Frank Skinner Autobiography Page 29