The crowd at the 4-X were generally top-notch, but it could get a bit lively at times. I was doing a routine about bouncers one night, saying I resented someone in a tan-leather bomber-jacket and a red dickie-bow telling me I couldn’t come in because I wasn’t dressed properly. The massive blonde-haired bouncer from the pub downstairs, who had sneaked up to watch the show, took exception to this. He walked on stage and got me in a friendlyish bear-hug. ‘I suppose this is what Fay Wray felt like,’ I said to the crowd. There was a laugh, but they were clearly worried in case this very big man didn’t appreciate being compared to a brutish, ignorant giant ape. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘He won’t get it.’ He didn’t.
I was still getting bits of telly, guest spots on comedy shows and the like. On one occasion, I did the local debate show, Central Weekend, hosted by Nicky Campbell. I did five minutes of stand-up about a pilot who, that week, had been sucked half out of a plane when the window in the cockpit shattered. He wasn’t badly hurt. I even showed a picture of him sitting up in his hospital bed, and said that when he was fully recovered he should come and get his tunic off my satellite-dish. It was a squeaky-clean routine and it went really well but, once again, people who heard gags about a potentially touchy subject, in this case, a near air disaster, didn’t hang around to hear what was actually being said. The show got a hundred and thirty-one complaints, including one from local MP Edwina Currie, and one from the head of the airline.
During those twenty 4-X months I felt myself becoming more and more at home on stage, till the line between on and off became very blurred. When I did that first gig at the Portland Club, I thought I could just go on and be like I was with my mates in the pub and everyone would be pissing themselves. I was very wrong. So then I became Mr Please-like-me, trying far too hard to get the crowd, all five of them, on my side. After the university Fringe Club epiphany, I became Mr Fuck-you, almost resentful of the audience for having made me act like Mr Please-like-me. It was pay-back time. On stage, I was arsey and quarrelsome. Now the pendulum, having swung high in both directions, had settled back where I started. At the 4-X, I became me with my mates in the pub again, but this time it worked. I had found my point of view and it was basically just me. Me, with some of the dials turned up to ten, and others down to two, but, essentially me.
I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that I did hours and hours of compering during that 4-X period. The compere’s job is a very underrated one. I’ve been to a lot of comedy clubs where they don’t really bother with it. The bloke who runs the club will often just get up and introduce the acts with no attempt at patter or performance. Sometimes they will use a very inexperienced comic, because they come free or very cheap, to fill the compering slot. I’ve even been at places where nothing happens between acts except an offstage announcement. This all seems very wrong to me. A good compere is the bridge between the audience and the acts. He’s a bit of both and a bit of neither. At the 4-X, it was like I was out with a bunch of mates, and during the course of the evening I would introduce them to a few funny new friends I’d met in London. At the same time, I was doing material which kind of made me a bit of an act myself. But, because I’d brought these professional comics to see them, anything funny I said felt like a bit of a bonus. Often I’d go up to do a link I’d written and something would happen, or someone would say something, and I wouldn’t do any material at all, just improvise stuff around this new theme.
All this gave me the confidence to mess about on stage, and developed in me the need to talk to the crowd, to engage them. Stand-up is not a spectator sport, it’s a participation event. The audience, indisputably, is a crucial part of the evening. If you watch a dress-rehearsal for a play, or a band sound-checking, it’s not very different from what you get when there’s an audience there. Stand-up doesn’t work that way. The crowd is everything. If any young stand-up comes up to me and says, ‘How do I get better?’ (OK, maybe it’s happened three times in ten years), I say, ‘Compering.’ Unless, of course, they already have loads of stage presence and good material, in which case I say, ‘Quit now, you’ll never make it.’
Don’t get me wrong, I’m hardly the comedy oracle, all I’m saying is that my personal comedy journey to my current position (which I would describe, without being too ‘Aw! Shucks’ about it, as ‘Comic who is fairly well-known, and who some people think is funny and some people think is alright, but not as good as Blah! Blah!’) was massively influenced by compering all those 4-X Cabarets.
Now I did warn you that when I talk about comedy, I always disappear up my own arse, so I’ll close this bit with a quote from a Brummie journalist called John Kennedy, writing about the 4-X in a local mag called Brum Beat in 1990. This should make everything a lot clearer:
‘Take one Frank Skinner, an Excalibur forged in the mighty furnace of Oldbury’s creative fury . . . a Theseus, treading boldly through the labyrinth of trivia ready to slay the half-man, half-bullshit Minator of mainstream comedy.’
In March of 1990, Malcolm got a phone call from Sandy Gort, Steve Coogan’s manager. Steve was a fairly well-known impressionist, who’d done a lot of the voices on ITV’s satirical puppet-show, Spitting Image. He was going to do a show in Edinburgh that August, and he wanted me to be his support act. Furthermore, there would be a national tour to follow, sponsored by Cutty Sark whisky. It all sounded great but there was a slight hitch. A woman called Judith, who worked at the Pleasance Theatre where we were to perform, had heard tell of my act and said, ‘Frank Skinner will play the Pleasance over my dead body.’ As I didn’t walk around much on stage, this wouldn’t really have been a big problem. If you’re gonna make an omelette . . . Anyway, in the end she relented and the deal was done.
Meanwhile, I was still doing the London clubs at the weekend, sleeping on people’s floors and sofas, friends I’d met on the circuit. One comic who gave me a regular settee-slot at his place in Islington was a guy called Patrick Marber. Patrick was one of the circuit’s top turns, with an act which had a lot to do with a suitcase of silly props like plastic ears and toy trumpets, and a lot to do with Patrick’s ability to improvise. When I virtually stopped doing the circuit in 1992, I more or less lost touch with him. The next thing I knew, he’d become a big-time playwright, director and actor, in the West End, at the National Theatre, and on Broadway. I wonder who sleeps on his settee nowadays.
One Saturday night I was at the Red Rose Club and the performance-poet from Manchester, Henry Normal, was on the bill. Henry seemed a bit edgy in the dressing room. He explained that he had been having talks with Channel Four about doing a comedy show set in a theatre, a bit like the Muppet Show but with humans, so you’d get real acts on stage and a sort of sit-com going on behind the scenes. The saucy blonde-bombshell comedienne Jenny Eclair was up for a regular part in it as well.
The woman from Channel Four was in the audience that night and Henry was feeling nervous. At the time, there were always dressing-room conversations going on about TV ideas and projects. Television companies were really getting into the alternative comedy thing. I think they liked the idea that when they hired a comic they automatically hired a writer as well, and that his gags would tend to be ‘his gags’, not ones that he’d heard someone else do at a working men’s club in Salford.
I loved comedy-circuit dressing rooms. Once you established yourself as a circuit regular, they were a joy to inhabit. Because the same comics did so many gigs, there were always people on the bill who you knew really well. Jack Dee would come in, his motorbike helmet under his arm, having sped from a gig on one side of London to a gig on the other. He was all jeans-and-jumper in those days, no flashy suits, but already dead-pan and dead funny. Eddie Izzard might be having an incredibly intense conversation with another comic about why some rooms suited comedy and some didn’t. Steve Coogan would be telling someone how much his designer sport-jacket had cost, and getting all excited about a new pair of tan-leather driving gloves he’d seen in Big Fast Car magazine.
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It was a real comedy community, with everyone having stories about weird gigs in weird places like, for example, Bungay, where Malcolm Hardee, I think just to be awkward, had started a club. This particular line of chat would usually end up with someone quoting that part of the comic’s code that says, ‘Never do a gig in a place where they still point at aeroplanes.’ Then there’d be stories of student gigs, getting sucked-off by an Economics fresher in a phone-box in Bolton, or seeing a stage-hypnotist make a female volunteer describe having anal sex, in front of 700 students at a May Ball in Scodand. It was heaven. And every now and then, one of us would get up to do his twenty minutes, and the ‘Have a good one’s would echo around the room, or an act would return from the stage and everyone would ask, ‘How was it?’ In the tiny Comedy Store dressing room, the trivia quizzes and anecdotes would occasionally be punctuated by someone getting up to have a piss in the sink in the corner of the room.
Anyway, back at the Red Rose, Henry said, ‘Have a good one,’ and I walked towards the stage and, boy, did I have a good one. Though I say it myself, it was an absolute belter. Within a few days, Malcolm had a phone-call. How would Frank like to be a regular character, and co-write an eight-part Channel Four series, with Henry Normal and Jenny Eclair?
Things were really happening. The 4-X and Pillar Talk gigs were fantastic, I had an Edinburgh show and tour lined up, I was about to do my first TV series, and I’d only been doing comedy for just over two years. What could possibly spoil my fantastic year?
I’d been a bit worried about my dad. He’d never really got over my mom dying and I’d watched him slowly crumbling since she’d gone. There was no more searching for timber, no more trays of seedlings. His garden, for the first time in my life, was overgrown and neglected. The only gardening he did now was tending my mother’s grave, which he visited every day.
He had always been a robust, barrel-chested bloke who liked to have a good drink before deciding whether he fancied a punch-up or a sing-song. Even in his sixties, I remember him coming home one night, after a few pints, with his right hand swollen and bruised. I asked him what had happened. He explained that a bloke had approached him and asked if he knew the time, so my dad hit him so hard in the face that the bloke went over a garden wall. This, to me, seemed an overreaction. I asked him why he’d responded so violently to someone asking him the time, but all he said, enigmatically, was, ‘Ah, I’ve seen that trick before.’ I wondered what kind of conversation was going on at the other bloke’s place.
One Sunday afternoon, Lisa and me turned up at my dad’s house for tea and a chat. It was about two in the afternoon. As we walked towards the front door, I noticed that the Sunday Mirror was still in the letter-box. I felt my stomach go into a knot. I rang the bell over and over but there was no answer. I walked across the lawn and looked through the front bay-window. I could see my dad, dressed in a suit and tie, sitting on the settee. ‘Please God,’ I whispered, ‘let him just be sleeping.’ My brother Keith lived just around the corner, so we went to his house. I don’t know exactly why. I suppose I needed some family with me. I told Keith what had happened and the three of us walked back to my dad’s. Keith and me went around the back of the house and decided to break a window. As I was the smallest, I clambered in. Keith distinctly told me to walk straight down the hall past the door leading to the front room where I knew my dad was sitting, and let him in. Then we would go into the front room together. I jumped down from the window and was in the kitchen. My heart was beating hard. I started to walk down the hall. I stopped at the door to the front room. I could see Keith trying to peer through the frosted glass of the front door to make sure I came straight through, but I had to see my dad. I walked in. He was sitting there. He really looked like he was sleeping, like he was just sleeping. Then I touched his hand. When I kissed my mother just after she had died, I was reminded of all the times I had kissed her and she had kissed me. All that warmth and love. My dad’s hand was hard and cold, like stone.
He was my hero and now he was gone. I cried like only an orphan can cry. I could hear Keith, outside the house, banging at the door and telling me to let him in, and he could hear me, inside the house, crying for our dead father. All through Keith’s tears and Lisa’s hugs and the policewoman’s stupid questions, all I could say, over and over, was ‘I just want him to be alive. I just want him to be alive.’ He’d been so strong, so big and loud and funny and more alive than anybody. But not just lately.
He had died of a heart attack earlier that morning, one year and seventeen days after my mother. They don’t use the phrase ‘broken heart’ on death certificates. Often, when my mom and dad had an argument, he would throw the brakes on, half-way through, and say, ‘Well, anyway, there’s only one thing I want. If you die on the Monday, I want to die on the Tuesday.’ In many ways, that’s exactly what happened.
On the night of his funeral, I did a gig at the Fleece and Firkin in Bristol. I’m sure no one there would have suspected a thing. Once I was back on stage, I felt a lot better. I knelt in the Catholic church in Stourbridge the following Sunday and prayed for help. When I was a kid, I had watched TV footage of an astronaut walking in space. I remember thinking what it would be like to do that and have the cord break, to be left floating in dark nothingness, totally isolated, totally alone. I had been thinking about it a lot since my dad had died. How could I get rid of that feeling? How could I replace that bond? Then I got it. Of course, I’ll get married and have babies of my own. I told Lisa. She was shocked but sort of went along with it. I told my priest. He suggested I thought it over. What’s the rush? But I had made my mind up. I was thirty-three. I would marry my nineteen-year-old girlfriend on September 29th, 1990, Jerry Lee Lewis’ birthday.
The Edinburgh show with Steve Coogan was a great success for me. To be honest – and Steve is very open about this – I blew him off the stage most nights, which, in the end, I think was the best thing that ever happened to him. Steve is an incredibly talented bloke, but he was a lazy bastard. He was making so much money out of easy voice-over jobs that he never took the time to work on his act. Our Edinburgh show, and the resulting tour, was the kick up the arse he needed. As he’s won about fifty awards in recent years, I don’t suppose he’s too bitter.
He was a joy to work with, a naturally funny bloke who would have me rolling around his kitchen floor just by pulling faces and doing funny voices. Although the reviews tended to say nice things about me and negative things about him, I never got the slightest hint of resentment or malice from him, in Edinburgh or on the tour.
The show was simple. Basically, I would do the first twenty-five minutes, storm it, introduce Steve, and then he would do half an hour of material he’d been doing for about six years, a lot of it on national television, which he was clearly bored with. We’d close the show with a song we’d written, called ‘It’s Over Now’, a sort of Hope and Crosby spoof, and that was that.
On tour, we did mainly student gigs, all offering half-price Cutty Sark whisky to the kind of kids who could get drunk on half a lager. To be fair, it was always going to be easier for a dirty-mouthed, heckle-if-you-dare comic like me than a subtle, clever character-comic and impressionist like Steve, but he was much richer and better-known than me, so fuck him, I thought to myself.
After a tour gig one night, as me and Steve sat nattering in the student canteen, a woman came up and said to him, ‘You know, I came here specifically to see you, but he was much funnier.’ Then again, on another occasion, a much better-looking woman came up and asked Steve to sign a poster. After he’d done so, he passed it to me, but she snatched it back. ‘No, thank you,’ she said to me. ‘I don’t want yours.’ I remember thinking that being in a comedy double-act must be a bit of a nightmare.
I got married in St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Vivien Road, Harborne, at five in the evening. My best man was my old drinking-partner, Shane, and Steve Coogan did a couple of readings from the Bible. Happily, he resisted the temptation
to do Jesus as Ronnie Corbett, or anything of that sort. The disco was about as West Midlands as you can get. There was a sort of DJ double-act, two fat blokes with moustaches, who both wore those baseball hats with false hands on the top that clap when you pull the strings. And they pulled the strings a lot. Lisa and me had the first dance, to Elvis singing ‘Love Me Tender’, and the rest of the night was all Black Lace and ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ with the volume turned down for the chorus.
My wife and I spent the next day, Sunday, sitting around reading the papers and getting the confetti out of our hair. The honeymoon had to be put on hold. On the Monday morning, I set off for ten days of touring with Steve. My ‘stupid fucking comedy’ couldn’t be put on the back-burner, especially if it was going to pay for the new house we fancied and all those kids I was planning to bang out.
We filmed the Channel Four show in June 1991. It was called Packet of Three. To be honest, although we had a great time making it, in front of a live crowd at the Wakefield Opera House in West Yorkshire, it didn’t really work. I had had my usual dreams of earth-shattering success, but it didn’t happen. We had some decent guest turns, with early TV appearances for Harry Hill and Al Murray, a whole show based around the Reduced Shakespeare Company, who performed the Complete Works of Shakespeare in ten minutes, a French stunt-motorcyclist, and a sixty-five-year-old yodelling accordionist called Billy Moore. We just never managed to successfully marry the onstage and backstage stuff.
Frank Skinner Autobiography Page 32