As I chatted to Marty, the old guy who managed the place walked past breezily and said, ‘We could have filled the London Palladium with the bill we’ve got on here tonight.’ He hadn’t seemed to notice that this bill couldn’t even fill the Phoenix Club, Cannock.
The semi-pro, a middle-aged crooner, did Barry Manilow’s ‘Copacabana’. When he said, ‘She was a showgirl,’ he did that thing that blokes used to do in the sixties to represent a sexy woman. Y’know, when you use both hands sliding downwards to mime an hour-glass figure. The crowd whooped. Oh, I had so much to learn.
By now, I was getting friendly with a student called Lisa, the dark-haired girl who had sat under the orange dayglo poster a few months before. I was thirty-one, she was seventeen. Clearly, I was born for the showbiz life.
Maybe I should take some time out here to talk about young women and me. Caroline was twenty years younger than me. My previous girlfriend was about the same. (I don’t know if you believe in Freudian slips, but I just had to correct that ‘previous’ because I mis-spelt it as ‘pervious’. Oh, dear.) In fact, my last four relationships have had that kind of age difference, but I didn’t plan it that way. The fact is, most thirty-something women or even, God forbid, forty-something women, are in relationships. There just aren’t many older properties on the market.
For some reason that I’ll let you guess at, thirty-something women often get really angry with me for going out with young women. They always ask what I find to talk about to a girl of that age. But what can I talk to thirty-something women about that I can’t talk to girls in their early twenties about? There’s been so many TV programmes about the seventies just lately that the thirty-something women have lost their trump-card.
At the same time, one of the unpleasant side-effects of going out with girls in their early twenties is that guys come up and start shaking my hand and saying stuff like ‘You lucky bastard’, and this just makes me feel unclean. The fact is, when I was in my early twenties, I couldn’t get women in their early twenties because I was ugly and not on television, so I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. And, anyway, they’re just firmer, now leave it.
Let me take some time out to tell you about Lisa. She was, like Celine before her, well into Indie music and black clothes. She once persuaded me to completely shave her head, which I did, with a t-bar razor that got caught on a mole and pared off a strip of skin like I was peeling a potato. She took this with an indifferent shrug, which was how she took most things when I first knew her. Her dad had walked out when she was fourteen, and I think she’d decided that emotions were a kind of disability, but she had big dark eyes and a dirty laugh and everybody liked her. One night, I was, as usual, off to a comedy gig, and asked her how she was planning to spend her evening. After listing three or four potential activities, including, visiting friends and going to the gym, she said, ‘But I think I’ll stay in, sit on me big fat arse, and watch television.’ I don’t know if you find women like that outside the Black Country. Eventually, after much deliberation, she decided that a bald head was too extreme and so grew it into an orange mohican.
Although Lisa wasn’t actually in any of my classes at Halesowen, she was still a student of the college, which made things slightly problematic. She used to skip cookery classes to see me. I used to think about that a lot after we got married, especially at meal-times.
She wasn’t very keen on my comedy career and wouldn’t come to gigs because, she said, she didn’t want to watch me suffer. I once managed to drag her to a club in London, but just before I went on she walked outside and sat in the car. I suppose it’s a bit like going out with a boxer. I did persuade her to come to another gig, though, on a Saturday night in Coventry city centre, but as we wandered around trying to find the venue I was doing, dodging gangs of marauding drunkards, she said, ‘I’m sick to death of your stupid fucking comedy,’ and I didn’t try to get her along to any more gigs for quite a while.
In fact, my stupid fucking comedy was going quite well. London Weekend Television were starting a series for new alternative comics, called First Exposure, and Malcolm got me an audition. When I say it was for new acts, I mean acts that had, in the main, been around for a few years but hadn’t yet done any telly, not for new new acts like me, but I thought there was no harm in giving it a go. I drove down to the rehearsal rooms in Kennington, South London, and did my act in front of four people including the producer, Juliet Blake, sitting at a table in what looked like a massive school hall. They laughed. As I drove back, I was desperately trying to not get carried away, but I thought it had gone pretty well. They asked me if I was in Equity, the performers’ union. I said I wasn’t and they said they’d sort it out. Now, why would they have said that if I didn’t have a chance?
Sure enough, on June 28th, 1988, two hundred and two days after my first-ever gig, I made my television debut. I know comics are supposed to have years of struggle and all that, but this was one of those ‘right place, right time’ things that happen to lucky people. Of course, the producers liked the idea of a wet-behind-the-ears Black Country lad appearing with all the stars of the London alternative circuit. I had novelty value. And I was funny-ish. The recording was at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. I spent most of the day chatting to a bloke called Hank Shanks, who told me that he had chosen this as a stage-name purely because it gave the compere the chance to say ‘Thanks Hank Shanks’ at the end of his act. The compere that night was Arthur Smith, who sat in one of the lovely old theatre boxes and did his intros from there. Arthur is a truly funny comic, and the author of perhaps the finest piece of observational comedy I ever heard: ‘Whatever happened to white dog shit?’ On that night, he forgot my name during the intro, and had to stop and think for a bit before it finally came back to him. I bounced on, looking positively thrilled to be there, and did the sneezing routine, complete with my old swinging ding-film gag, as a closer. It all went pretty well. The show didn’t exactly open a lot of doors for me career-wise, but just getting on and getting laughs was a massive boost for my confidence. I also got a cheque for £149.69. That was it. I had placed my foot on the bottom rung of the ‘Highest-paid Man on Television’ ladder. Only thirteen years to go.
When I watch that show now, only for research, you understand, there’s one thing that always makes me wince. As the audience applaud at the end of my set, I say, with Uriah Heep-like humility, ‘You’ve been very kind.’ I think this highlights a problem that was holding back my act at the time. I was a bit too desperate to be liked. The most important thing for a comic, I think, is to ‘find himself onstage. To know who he is and why he’s there. A comic, like I’ve said, needs a point of view, and I hadn’t found mine yet.
My main problem, at this stage in my career, was that I couldn’t get enough performance time. My hour-long show in Edinburgh was only two months away and I had put together about fifteen minutes of slightly shaky material so far. I needed to work at my act on a regular basis.
There was a very strange pub in nearby Tipton called Mad O’Rourke’s Pie Factory. It was the first theme-pub I ever saw. The theme they had chosen was, well, abattoir, I suppose, with phoney cows’ heads and other animal parts making up the bulk of the decoration, but the most talked-about aspect of the pub was its catering. They sold these enormous ‘Desperate Dan Cow Pies’, complete with horns made of pastry, that were a challenge to even the greediest bastard. People came from all over to try the pies and get arseholed on one of the many real ales they had behind the bar. It quickly became a Black Country must-see. And it had an upstairs room.
So, Malcolm and me opened a comedy club at the Pie Factory. We got two acts from London up every week, I hosted, and if any locals fancied an open spot, we stuck that in the mix as well. Nick Hancock, Jo Brand, lots of people who went on to do really well, played the Pie Factory at that time. Nick Hancock, probably best known as the host of BBC’s They Think it’s All Over, is a man not known for his sophisticated social niceties. He’s very competitive and
a bit grouchy, but he took the time to give me a lot of praise and encouragement one night at the Pie Factory, when stuff like that, from an established London name, meant a lot to me.
I was writing my bollocks off, forming a habit that I’ve never shrugged off. If I could spend thirty or forty hours a week drinking, I didn’t see why I shouldn’t spend fifteen hours a week trying to write gags. Stand-up seemed to be justifying all my wild years. I thought I’d wasted my time, chasing rough birds and getting pissed, but now it all turned out to have been research. More and more of the things that had happened to me got shoved into my comedy sausage machine, and came out the other end as neat little sausage-shaped routines.
Of course, an autobiography is the ultimate example of turning life into work. Speaking of which; I think I should make a point about this book.
When I read all this back, especially the journal stuff, it actually sounds like I lead, and have led, a very interesting and eventful life. Well, that’s how it reads to me. There might actually be people reading this who are slightly envious. Well, listen, if your only knowledge of football was Match of the Day, you might think that it was all about goals and nearmisses. It isn’t. Most games have quite long patches of dead time when everything is bogged down in midfield and no one can put two passes together. Well, it is at the Albion, anyway. Match of the Day, or its equivalent on ITV or Sky, is a highlights package. They take out the shit and just give you the good stuff. Though it might sound like I’ve spent most of the duration of this book swanning around premieres and award ceremonies, driving Bentleys, and jetting off to Venice, Korea and Japan, the fact is I’ve spent most of the duration of this book shut away in a room, on my own, writing it. Besides, I’m forty-four and single. Who’d envy that? Yeah, OK, put your hands down.
I don’t know where that speech came from, but we’ll move on. The Pie Factory gave me a chance to try stuff, loads of stuff, every show. The thing was, we got the same people in all the time so I had no choice other than to keep giving them new material. I suppose I wrote about twenty minutes every week. I don’t want to reveal too much of it to you now, because I’d like you to think I was a lot better than is actually the case, but this is the truth of it:
Hello, my name’s Christopher Collins, which, as some of you may have already worked out, is actually an anagram of ‘willing cocksucker’. Well . . . it isn’t quite an anagram of ‘willing cocksucker’, but one feels that it ought to be.
As you may have guessed, I also work as a children’s entertainer, but when I’m doing that, I have to have a chirpy, cheeky, children’s entertainer-type name, so I don’t call myself Christopher Collins. Besides, a lot of them little kids wouldn’t know what an anagram was.
So when I’m doing kids’ parties, I call myself ‘Berdum-Berdum the Clown’, because kids make that noise, don’t they, ‘berdum-berdum’? (Wait for response that doesn’t come.) Well, you’ve obviously never run one over.
I was sitting in that cemetery, next to St. Philip’s in Colmore Row, when this tramp came and sat next to me. And I tried to ignore him and concentrate on my sandwich, but he was scratching the old scrotum and tugging the old penis . . . and eventually I said, ‘Look, will you just get your hands off me?’
I had a friend who worked with tramps in Wolverhampton and he told me that the main cause of anyone becoming a tramp is a broken heart. That’s sad, isn’t it? I wonder how long that process takes. Does a bloke get in from work one night and his girlfriend says, ‘Listen, Geoff, I’m not gonna lie to you. I’ve met someone else. It’s all over between us. I’m sorry but I’m leaving,’ and the bloke says, ‘Oh, God . . . I just can’t . . . look . . . you haven’t got ten pence for a cup of tea, have you?’
Anyway, I’d like to finish my act . . . and who wouldn’t?
When the Pie Factory gig was totally full, Malcolm and me still lost fifty quid a week each. So, after a couple of months, we knocked it on the head, and headed for Scotland.
Edinburgh ’88 was not a massive success for me, box-office-wise, but it was a major turning-point in my career. I did two weeks at the hundred-seater Calton Studios, from 12.45 to 1.45 p.m., at two quid a ticket and, on August 18th, 1988, I got the following returns (I know because I have kept the Return Form to this day).
Venue sales – 0
Fringe Office Sales – 0
Comps – 0
Total in audience – 0
It was, to be fair, my only blank sheet of the run, but my record attendance was only twelve, and over the two weeks I averaged about four. The show before me in that space was a kids’ show. They got two people in during the whole week’s run, and they were close friends of the cast. Every day, when I arrived, they’d be sitting around in clown outfits and jolly-face make-up, moaning about how much money they were losing and trying to work out how the rot could be stopped. It couldn’t.
I got two reviews during my two-week run. A newspaper called Review ’88 said, ‘He is a very ordinary, lad-next-door type of character, with a fairly sound repertoire of jokes, but he desperately needed an atmosphere to get himself and the audience going – something which a dingy bar upstairs in the Calton Studios doesn’t provide at one o’clock in the afternoon. Stick him in the corner of a busy pub, heaving with drunken revellers, and I’m sure he would go down a storm.’
And the Festival Times said, ‘His inexperience as a performer lets him down slightly. He never manages to move far enough away from the nice bloke approach to bring out the best in his material. He’s worth watching though, and with a bit more experience and slightly bigger audiences, he could be very good indeed.’ Not bad for an hour-long show from someone who’d only been doing comedy for nine months. Meanwhile, the ‘nice bloke approach’ was about to go out of the window. The Students’ Union building at Edinburgh University had a venue known as the Fringe Club. Acts of all types, musicians, poets, comics, would go there and do a bit of their Edinburgh show for free, as a sort of a taster so that people who liked it would go and pay to see the full show at a later date. The crowd could be very horrible, pouring beer on the acts from above, throwing paper aeroplanes, and generally being abusive.
When I turned up for my spot, that’s what they were like. Acts were leaving the stage in a state of shock. I was shitting myself. As it got to my turn, I could hardly breathe, I was so scared. Then, thank God, that which I like to call my ‘Oh, fuck it’ factor kicked in. I asked a friend for a cigarette, I hadn’t had one since I’d stopped drinking, and walked on stage with an expression not a million miles away from the one that Jack Nicholson had when he chopped down that door in The Shining. Though, I say it myself, I was fuckin’ unstoppable. I was belting out my usual stuff with a swagger that gave it new life, improvising, having a go at people in the crowd and dealing with hecklers like I’d been doing it for years. I wanted to be a comic, and these fuckers weren’t going to get in my way. And after a while, I realised they didn’t want to, they just wanted to hear me being funny. I fucking stormed it, got my first-ever encore and left the stage a new man. I had found my point of view: Mouthy Brummie, who couldn’t give a fuck. It was a slightly distorted version of my personality, but I can’t say it was a totally false one.
Funny, isn’t it? Just remembering that gig seems to make me swear more.
I’m worried you’re missing the journal bits. I figured that now I’ve actually become a comic in the story, you wouldn’t need my regular showbiz injections to keep your interest. I know playing to zero people in a bar in Edinburgh isn’t, strictly speaking, what you’d call ‘showbiz’, but bear with me and we’ll see how it goes. To be honest, I’m worried that I took too long to get you to this point, too much wilderness years and not enough razzmatazz. Oh, fuck it. You might as well finish it now you’ve come this far.
When I got back from Edinburgh, I found that my Equity membership had come through. An Equity card was still quite a prestige thing in those days, but there was one problem. I had to change my name. There was already a
Chris Collins in Equity, a northern club singer, if I remember rightly, and they didn’t allow two members to have the same name. So, just as I was starting to think Chris Collins was finally becoming a comedian, I had to stick him in a drawer and find a new identity.
To be honest, this was not such a big deal to me. My parents, for some weird reason, always called us kids by our second names. At school I was known as Chris, my first name, because that was the name on the register. So when mates called for me, they’d say to whichever of my family opened the door, ‘Is Chris in?’ and the answer would be, ‘Yeah, I’ll call him. GRAHAM!’ So another name here or there didn’t make much difference. The question was, what name should I choose?
At first, I fancied ‘Wes Bromwich’ but I thought this might be a bit too parochial. Thank God. How would you have fancied going into a bookshop and asking for a copy of Wes Bromwich by Wes Bromwich? I don’t think so.
Then it hit me. When I was a kid, my dad was the captain of a local dominoes team (we were a very sporting family). Every week I’d watch him take a load of names, written on little bits of white card, from an old Strepsils tin, and pick his team. There was one name that always stuck in my mind. I used to go on to my dad about how much I liked it, but I’m sure he just thought it was little kid’s nonsense. Now was my chance to take that name for my own. Thus, I became Frank Skinner. I’ll never know why the name fascinated me so much when I was a child, but I’ve still got the tin, and the bits of white card.
Frank Skinner Autobiography Page 30