Frank Skinner Autobiography

by Frank Skinner

  A few years ago, someone sent me a photo of Frank Skinner’s grave. I don’t know if it was the same bloke, but the inscription reads ‘Peace after pain’, which I like a lot. It’s now on the cork-board in my kitchen, where all those pictures of Caroline and me used to be. Peace after pain.

  Oh, for goodness’ sake. I’ve got to stop being so bloody melodramatic about my split-up. I’m sorry, it’s just that I’m at that odd, ‘What do I do now?’ stage that people go through when they’re immediately post-relationship. I just feel like a bit of a Billy No-Bird. But I’m desperately trying to avoid all those predictable things that just-got-single people do, stuff like joining a gym, phoning up your exes, and wanking so much that your cock drops off. Anyway, I won’t mention it again. Back to the name-change.

  And so it was that the next time I strode on stage and grabbed a microphone, I said, ‘Hello, my name’s Frank Skinner, which, as some of you will have already worked out, is, of course, an anagram of ‘skunk fucker’. Well, it isn’t quite an anagram of . . .’

  Malcolm suggested I could run a comedy workshop at the college on Monday nights. If we could get a dozen people who wanted to be comics, and give them the benefit of my massive experience, then we could finish the course with a showcase performance, hosted by me and helped out by a couple of pros from the London circuit. He’d got the idea from a play he’d seen, Comedians by Trevor Griffiths, but the difference was that, in the play, the bloke who ran the workshop had been doing comedy for about thirty years. Our version was more a case of the near-sighted leading the blind. I justified my role as comedy-sensei by telling myself that these hopefuls would be better off with someone who could still remember his first, faltering steps into comedy, rather than someone who had left his early days far behind him. I mean, I’d be shit at running a comedy workshop now. If anyone showed promise, my advice would be ‘Do a couple of eighty-date tours and then get your own chat show.’ Hopeless.

  Anyway, we advertised the course and the response was really good, not only from potential students, but also from the media. All the local papers and telly were interested, and even the Guardian wanted to come and watch a workshop in action. We filled up the twelve places straight away, each of them paying £31 for the privilege. The theory was that stand-up is made particularly difficult by the fact that you have to do all your rehearsals in public. Actors have a few weeks, locked away with a director, to get it right before they show their stuff to a paying audience. This gives them the chance to leave a lot of the shit in the rehearsal room. The comic just walks out there and does it, and if it goes badly it’s kind of awkward to ask the audience for a de-briefing.

  Our plan was to get in a video camera so people could watch their own act and say what they thought about it. Then me and the rest of the group would offer our opinions, all done in a friendly and mutually supportive environment. And every week, the homework would be ‘Get funnier’.

  Then, on the Saturday morning before the course was due to start, I picked up a nasty injury whilst washing my hair. I was leaning over the sink in the communal bathroom at my bedsit in Ravenhurst Road, when my back went. I mean really went. I was holding on to the sink to keep upright, and the shampoo was running down into my eyes and mouth. Lisa, who had moved in a few weeks earlier, mainly because there was no room for her at her mom’s new place, just stood and looked at me. Four hours later, I was lying on the floor of my room, full of pain-killers, watching Grandstand. There was a sort of a newsflash. Apparently there’d been a bit of trouble at the Liverpool–Forest Cup semi-final at Hillsborough. I watched, still in agony, as the commentary team gradually realised that people were dying. Bodies were being carried on advertising hoardings, and laid on the pitch. Any human being that watched it would have been moved, but for a football fan, it was inexpressible. It was the first time I’d cried for years. But this was to be a big week for crying.

  The next day, a couple of friends of our Nora’s turned up at the door. (I didn’t have a phone.) My mom had been taken to hospital. It sounded serious. My mate Paul drove me there. It was the hospital where my mom had given birth to me, thirty-two years earlier. The nurses gave me some injections for my back, and a walking stick. For five days, as the country was wrapped up in the aftermath of Hillsborough, I watched my mother slowly die. I arrived, each day, with my pockets full of Hubba Bubba bubble gum. If I thought I was going to break down, I just shoved a couple of pieces in my mouth and breathed through my nose, and it went away. I didn’t want to cry in front of her, or my dad, for that matter. I did cry at home, suddenly, with no warning, mid-meal. Poor Lisa, she looked at me in shock with tears dripping off my chin and food falling out of my mouth. She just didn’t know what to do.

  My dad wouldn’t accept that all this was happening. He kept saying that she’d pull through. I sat at my mom’s bedside, remembering all my childhood hugs and goodnight kisses. I held her hand and leaned in towards her. She told me that she loved me, and I told her that I loved her. I had lots more to say, but I felt like she knew anyway. There was an Indian doctor there and my dad said to him, ‘Hey, do you know who this is? It’s Frank Skinner.’ Of course, the doctor had no idea what he was talking about. I had only just got around to telling my parents about my comedy thing. I never told them anything much about my life after I moved out. They didn’t even know about Lisa, the woman I was living with, until I turned up with her at my mom’s deathbed. They didn’t know that I’d gone back to the Church. I wanted to be all independent and free. But I didn’t want this.

  Then on Thursday, April 19th, I watched the priest read the last rites, and she was gone. I leaned over for one last kiss. The pain in my back didn’t seem very important now. I kissed her soft, warm face. I recognised the familiar feel of it against my own. All my life, I had associated that kiss, that soft cheek, with love and caring and security. All my life. I touched her hair and looked at her face for the last time. And then I hobbled out of the room.

  You know, it’s hard, when you’re reading back through your book, and doing corrections and re-writes, and trying to make the whole thing presentable, because grammar and punctuation, even the words themselves, seem pointless when you’ve got tears dripping off your chin.

  The comedy workshop was quite a hit. The group were an incredibly varied lot. There was Tom, a fifty-nine-year-old ex-brewery worker who told comical stories about the war and wanted to specialise in doing old people’s homes; Ron, a retired British Leyland foreman who wrote Stanley Holloway-type monologues, including one about a haunted house that had about seven puns on the word ‘ghoulies’; Suzanne, a busty club-singer who talked about the horrors of marriage; Terry, a trendy systems analyst from Land-Rover, who did mainly politics and PMT; and Evo, who developed a special-needs-type character called Norman.

  Evo, six-foot-three and sixteen stone, did a few open spots as Norman. He would turn up in character, with bad clothes, unnerving stare, and mysterious carrier-bag, and genuinely scare the punters before he went on. He then dumped the character-comedy, became a working magician, and now makes a balloon-animal second to none. Shame about Norman, though. A special-needs magic act is something I would pay to see.

  I have no idea what happened to the rest of them, but week after week, they turned up, did their stuff, and talked comedy. The showcase was, as you might imagine, a bit of a curate’s egg. Malcolm Hardee, one of the London special guests, made the audience squirm with guilt when he told them that Tom, who had just gone down quite badly, was dying of cancer. It was a complete lie. But one very interesting thing happened during that workshops period. One night, out of the blue, Jasper Carrot turned up. Apparently he’d met the college principal on a train, and the conversation had turned to the comedy workshops. The idea had fascinated Jasper, so he made the forty-five-minute drive and dropped in to check it out. He stayed for about three and a half hours, listened to all twelve acts, and offered advice and encouragement to all of them. I decided that night that, if I ever got to be a t
op TV comic, I’d remember my roots and try to be a nice bloke like Jasper. Oh, fuck it.

  A new alternative comedy club had started in Birmingham. It was called the 4-X Cabaret, named after the sponsors, Castlemaine 4-X lager. It took place on Thursday nights in, inevitably, a room over a pub: the Hare and Hounds in King’s Heath. The show was hosted by the same double act who’d run and hosted the club in the Ivy Bush, where I’d done my third-ever gig and pulled the skinny bird with the big tits and the venereal disease. They were a nice pair (the double act, I mean), but they didn’t have much time to write new stuff together, so the audience, many of whom were regular attenders, soon got a bit over-familiar with their material.

  I got booked to do the 4-X and had a bit of a stormer, so much so that the brewery phoned Malcolm and asked him if he’d like to run the club with me as the regular host. Thus began one of the happiest spells of my comedy career. I’ve won awards, had hit TV shows, and got laid in the changing room at Bloomingdale’s in New York, but none of these were quite as joyous as the twenty months I spent hosting the 4-X Cabaret. If I could ever get across, in a TV show, the specialness that permeated those 4-X nights, I’d be the highest-paid . . . oh . . . well, anyway, I’d be more successful than I am now.

  Of course, you couldn’t do it. One of the great things about the 4-X was that it was profoundly local. I used to do gags about Bearwood Fruit Market, the mad bloke with the long scarf who hung around the Hagley Road, and the nearby chipshop that sold bright-orange chips. I wrote more exportable material as well, but I found the fact that I put so much effort into writing gags I knew I couldn’t use anywhere else in the world was incredibly liberating. We didn’t need London or telly, it was fuckin’ party-time every week, and most of us lived close enough to walk home afterwards. I used to get so adrenalined-up at the gigs that when I got home, I’d watch old boxing videos into the early hours just to bring me down slowly. Because King’s Heath sold out its two-hundred-seat capacity every week, we opened a second 4-X club, at the three-hundred-seater Bear Tavern in Bearwood on Wednesday nights, and that sold out as well. So then we took the show to the Fleece and Firkin in Bristol on Tuesdays for more wild nights. There was no holding us. Malcolm started a fourth club called Pillar Talk at Cheltenham Town Hall on Monday nights. It was another smash.

  So this was my schedule: Monday – Cheltenham, Tuesday – Bristol, Wednesday – Bearwood, Thursday – King’s Heath, and then, at the weekend, I would do every Friday and Saturday in London, often three or four twenty-minute sets each night, jumping on and off tube-trains and often turning up as the compere was just getting ready to introduce me. I usually did only one London gig on a Sunday. Lisa felt more confident about watching my gigs by now, but I wouldn’t say we were spending a lot of time together. Especially as I had to find the time to write half an hour of new material every week, including specially tailored bits for Birmingham, Cheltenham and Bristol.

  At first, I tried to combine all this with my lecturing job, but I had recently been given a one-year full-time contract at the college, and it was all getting a bit too much. Then something happened which made me decide I didn’t want to be a lecturer any more. One Sunday night, somebody fucked the college goat.

  I’m sorry. I felt that just had to be an end-of-paragraph. But it’s true. People whose houses overlooked the college playing-fields had phoned the police and said that a man was having sex with the caretaker’s goat, which was tethered there. By the time the coppers turned up it was all over, but the next day, everyone at college was talking about it and the CID had been called in. There was one obvious suspect, a local bloke who was known for being particularly weird. Let’s call him Nick. He did all his own tattoos, badly, and had a habit of jumping on a complete stranger’s back, without warning, and aggressively demanding a piggy-back. In the case of the goat, this habit had obviously got totally out of hand. The caretaker, understandably upset by the incident, said that the goat would have to be put down, because he wouldn’t want to drink her milk after she’d had sex with Nick. It says something when a man fucks a goat and people are worried about the goat catching something.

  Now, the English department at Halesowen had quite a strong politically correct contingent. One woman in particular had had a bit of a go at me because I once held a door open for her. I thought this was a little extreme, but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to be seen losing a fist-fight to someone in floral leggings. I wasn’t one of these bitter anti-feminists. One of my best friends, Olga, was an extreme women’s-libber, as I still like to call them, but she also had a heart of gold and a sense of humour. This woman at college was certainly a bit short on the latter.

  I’d come up against the politically correct lobby on some of my London trips and I found the whole thing a bit crap. Of course, women had taken a lot of shit over the years and some things needed to be put right, but I once got hissed at the White Horse pub in Brixton, which was, of course, full of white middle-class people, because I used the phrase ‘my girlfriend’.

  ‘Oh,’ said some woman, who almost certainly had a job with the word ‘community’ in it, ‘so you own her, do you?’ It wasn’t the kind of heckle you’d get at the 4-X.

  The big deal for comedians on the London circuit in the late eighties was the comedy section of Time Out, a local listings magazine. Every week the comedy specialist, Malcolm Hay, would write a little profile of a circuit-comic. Every Tuesday, comedians would flick through the new edition to see if it was their turn. In late ’89, it was mine. After pointing out that I lacked originality and went for ‘easy laughs’, he closed by saying: ‘The positive reaction he got recently at the Comedy Store to a spoof quote by a reviewer about his routine (“I laughed my bollocks off”, Fatima Whitbread) was a reason for despair.’

  Now who’s getting the bad review here, me or the audience? The fact was, when I hit the London circuit there were a lot of comics doing stuff about Thatcher and ecology and things, but I wasn’t interested in all that stuff. (Though I admit I did get the whole 4-X audience to dance and sing ‘Ding, dong, the witch is dead’ the night Mrs Thatcher resigned.) I liked gags about shagging and football, and, at the end of the day, so did most of the audience. Some people saw me as a backlash, but if I was, it was an accident. I was a working-class bloke from the Black Country. Why should I pretend to be anything else? In my opinion, I was definitely non-sexist and non-racist. The problem is that some people hear a topic come up and their politically correct siren goes off before they’ve actually stopped to hear how that topic is being treated. One socialist London comic described me as ‘symptomatic of the New Right’, but for fuck’s sake, I was doing nob-jokes, not invading Poland.

  Anyway, I’m straying from the point. I was talking to my colleague in the floral leggings about the caretaker having the goat destroyed. ‘Typical,’ she said. ‘Some male can’t control his libido, and the innocent female has to pay the penalty.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘maybe you should start a Goat Support Group.’ It was a nothing line, she didn’t really react, and I forgot about it. A few weeks later, I was called into the principal’s office and he explained to me that there had been an official complaint about my goat remark.

  On Friday, January 19th, 1990, against the advice of hecklers everywhere, I finally gave up my day-job. Suddenly, I was a full-time professional comedian. That night I went to Sainsbury’s with Lisa and we combed the shelves for half-price offers and ‘eat within the next twenty minutes’ stickers. I had explained to her that things were going to be tough. I had ten gigs lined up for the last twelve days of January, and another twenty-five lined up for February. We’d probably be OK.

  The 4-X gigs were going from strength to strength. We were even getting ticket touts outside. One visiting comic described it as being like a ‘Frank rally’, but most of the acts seemed to have a good time. One exception was Sean Hughes, now a regular on BBC’s Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Sean, an Irishman, was a very good stand-up, and he
was booked to close the show in King’s Heath with a half-hour set. I introduced him and then wandered off into the corridor to have a fag. I was still smoking on stage at this point. I wanted to quit, but the brilliant Scottish comedy-magician, Gerry Sadowitz, a man who would sit with me in the back-bar of the Comedy Store talking comedy into the early hours, and saying very supportive things about my act, advised me against it. He reckoned that my comic timing had become reliant on the rhythm of my smoking. If I lost the ciggie, Gerry maintained, the whole thing could collapse like a house of cards.

  It turned out he was wrong, but I loved the way he talked so intensely about comedy. I was in a Montreal theatre in the summer of ’91 when Gerry got thumped on stage by a French-Canadian punter enraged by an act that had begun, ‘Greetings, moose-fuckers’, and gone on to describe how smelly French people are.

  Anyway, Sean Hughes at the 4-X. About ten minutes into his set, Sean began a bit about the IRA. Now I’d seen this routine before, and I knew that it very cleverly avoided all the pitfalls of talking about such a touchy subject, and was, in fact, really funny and not offensive. However, Birmingham, at that time, was not a good place to do IRA material. The Birmingham pub bombings in the early seventies had hit everyone very hard. It was a horrible time, and the memory lingered, as it probably will for many years to come. I had drunk in the two pubs that were blown up, and, like a lot of people, I knew it could easily have been me that night. Consequently, two blokes went off at Sean, gave him a load of abuse and, when they felt they had had their say, noisily stormed out, shoving their way past me in the corridor. Sean was understandably a bit thrown, and when he finished, although he got good applause, there was a tense atmosphere in the room. When it gets tense in a comedy club, it is the compere’s job to release the pressure-valve a bit. ‘Well,’ I said on my return to the stage, ‘what happened there? I was standing in the corridor having a fag and two blokes came past, shouting about somebody called Iris Hunt.’