The magistrate looked stunned. He said he had been in the job for fifteen years and he had never heard such a speech. It was a real shame, he said, that a marriage that had produced such sentiments hadn’t worked out. All this conversation went on in front of Lisa and the two lawyers. The magistrate said he thought that £30,000 was a ‘fair’ settlement, so I wrote the cheque and handed it over. My lawyer had gone purple. That was on the Friday.
Two days later, Lisa was in the Sunday Mirror, saying how horribly I’d treated her and quoting loads of stuff that I’d said in those ‘totally confidential’ counselling sessions at Relate. The headline was ‘My Half-Time Sex with Fantasy Frank’. She said that, on one occasion, we’d been watching football when the half-time whistle blew, and I’d immediately turned to her and suggested that we squeezed in a quick shag before the second half. Well, so what? It was a televised game, we weren’t on the fuckin’ terraces. I think it makes me sound quite loving, and remember, these were the days when the half-time interval was only ten minutes long. I’d get two in now. There’d even be the opportunity to change ends.
A year later, she was in the News of the World, telling a similar tale but with a bit of extra spice, which I imagine was added by the journalist. In this version, I would only have sex if there was football on the radio, and after we’d done it, I’d run around the bedroom, kicking a football and shouting, ‘Skinner has scored.’ If anyone accused me of that now, I could bring in Mr Keepy-Uppy as a character witness. He’d testify that I could never get all the way round the bedroom without losing possession to an inanimate object.
And then, in late 2000, Lisa spoke to the papers again, this time the Sunday People. She would soon be able to list her profession as ‘columnist’. Having used up all the true stuff in the first two stories, she moved into fiction. She claimed I had tricked her into taking a lump-sum divorce settlement and that our relationship put her off sex for life. She had two children and one on the way. She also stuck in a personal message to Caroline, telling her to get out fast before I ruined her life as well. Here, hold on a minute . . .
Anyway, I guess she got her own back. In my defence, I was devastated by my parents’ death, and I stupidly thought that marriage would make everything better. As the balance of power was heavily weighted towards the rising TV star, I suppose she had to use what methods she could. I got a bit pissed off after each of her articles, but I still wish her well. After all, what is this, or any other autobiography, but an elaborate kiss-and-tell. Maybe one day she’ll forgive me my mistakes. She might as well, she’s running out of Sunday papers.
Following my Perrier success, and despite my move to Avalon, Channel Four were very keen on a second series of Packet of Three, but they felt that some changes needed to be made. Their first suggestion was a bit of a shock. They wanted to get rid of Henry. I thought this was unjust. The first series had been a flop, but it was hardly Henry’s fault. The show just didn’t work. And anyway, if they dropped Henry, who would host the show? They had a suggestion. Me.
Their argument was that it was a waste to have the Perrier winner on the show and not let him do any stand-up. This was really difficult for me. First of all, Henry was my mate and I didn’t want to stab him in the back, even though Channel Four insisted that they would do the show without him whether I hosted it or not. Secondly, my now girlfriend, Jane, was set to produce the new series. I didn’t want people thinking that I’d got the job because my bird was running the show. It was all a bit grim, but I did want to do a second series and prove the critics wrong.
First Lisa, then Malcolm, now Henry. That’s what it felt like. What should I do?
I hosted the second series. It was re-titled Packing Them In. Henry moved on and began concentrating on his writing. He became a top-notch writer on the award-winning Mrs Merton Show and also on the award-winning Royle Family series.
Packing Them In died on its arse.
When Packet of Three was slowly going down the plughole, the Perrier Award turned up and saved my comedy bacon. How was I going to get out of this one?
I got asked to appear on the BBC satirical panel show Have I Got News for You? Y’know, I like those little introductions I’ve started slipping in just lately – ‘the BBC satirical panel show’, for example. Maybe I could make a feature of them. I should try something like ‘the disjointed, disappointing variety show Packing Them In, hosted by ‘the ruthless, back-stabbing, gone-all-la-di-da Perrier Award winner, Frank Skinner’. Actually, maybe I’m being a bit harsh here. Packing Them In wasn’t all that bad.
I have to stop for a moment. Throughout this book I have tried to be completely honest, even if it hurts, but now I’m doing something else. When that Henry Normal thing happened, I felt a bit uneasy at first, but I never felt like I was doing a bad thing. I spoke to Henry while it was all going on, and he seemed totally fine about my part in it. So there’s being honest, and there’s that Catholic hitting yourself with a cat-of-nine-tails to try and prove how pious you are. Oh, I don’t know. Maybe this is another one for you to call.
Anyway, I got asked to do Have I Got News for You? which was at the very peak of its popularity. The show was made by Hat-Trick Productions, at that time the Man United of independent television companies, certainly as far as comedy was concerned. Hat-Trick had tried out another panel show earlier that year, called The Brain Drain and I had really rocked on one of the episodes. One question was ‘What never happens in movies but you wish it would?’ I said that when, in Robin Hood films, Robin and his merry men, dressed all in Lincoln Green, leap from the Sherwood Forest trees to ambush the Sheriff of Nottingham’s men, I wish, just once, one of the baddies would point at Robin and say, ‘You just wait till autumn.’
Anyway I must have impressed someone because I ended up on the very prestigious Have I Got News for You?, and went really well, so much so that I was the first guest to appear twice on the same series. These two appearances were very important for me. Suddenly Packing Them In was forgotten and I was on the up again.
Even twice-bitten Channel Four were still showing faith in me. They were planning a series called Bunch of Five. The idea was based on the old BBC Comedy Playhouse format. The series would consist of five sitcom pilots, and the one that went down best would become a series. The five included Dead at Thirty by Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, The Weekenders by Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, and Blue Heaven written by and starring me. Guess which one got the series?
Blue Heaven was about an unemployed West Midlands bloke in his early thirties called Frank Sandford (played by me, obviously), who still lived in Smethwick with his parents. My dad was played by John Forgeham, who I remembered as Jim Baines in Crossroads, and Paula Wilcox, who I had fancied for about thirty years since she was in Man About the House and The Lovers, played my mom. In fact, she was still pretty stunning, which is the last thing you want from someone playing your mother.
I took the name Sandford from Teddy Sandford, an old Albion player, and the whole series was my sort of love-letter to the Black Country. It was mainly shot on location around Oldbury and Smethwick, and the scripts included lots of incidents from my life, including Celine and the earrings, and Fez asking at the Social if it was where you got the free money.
In the show, I was half of a pub duo called Blue Heaven. The other half, my onscreen mate Roache, was played by the Irish actor Conleth Hill, a good Catholic boy who became one of my closest friends. I spoke to the camera, mid-dialogue, like Michael Caine in Alfie and there was no laugh-track. It was sort of like The Grimleys, but with jokes.
To be honest, if you’d asked me a few years ago what I thought of Blue Heaven, I would have said it was no more than a fair try by an inexperienced writer, but six months ago, a fan at a stage door gave me all six episodes on one VHS. I was really chuffed because I didn’t have any of it on tape, and the next night Conleth and me watched the whole series, straight through. I didn’t remember any of the gags seven years on, so it was like watchin
g someone else’s stuff. As a great athlete once said, I laughed my bollocks off. It was the funniest sit-com I’d seen in ages.
I know this sounds terrible, but it’s a problem I have. When I was in that Edinburgh flat with Dave Baddiel in 1991, we watched a TV show called Edinburgh Nights, hosted by Tracey McLeod. Tracey was a friend of Dave’s and I had got to know her during that Edinburgh. She was one of the unfortunates that I would sit down and tell about my broken marriage. I remember explaining to her that I was still upset but I wasn’t crying anymore. I called it my post-blart stage.
Anyway, that’s by the by. Dave and me were watching Edinburgh Nights, mainly because I was on it. They did a short interview and, as usual, I sat looking at myself and thinking, ‘Fuck off, Baldy.’ Then they showed about five minutes of my stand-up. I laughed like a big fool. Dave was amazed. ‘Why are you laughing?’ he said. ‘You’ve heard all the jokes before.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but I’m doing them so well.’
I know it’s not a story that shows me in a great light. I just thought I’d add egomaniac to my ever-growing list of self-abuse. Self-abuse? No, I must get on. The fact is, I’m a very good comedy audience. I laugh at other comics so why shouldn’t I laugh at me? Besides, I once read that my all-time comedy hero, Stan Laurel, used to laugh like a drain at Laurel and Hardy movies. That made me feel a lot better.
If something’s funny, I laugh at it. If it happens to be my gag, so what? I’ve had to read this book through a few times before publication, and I always laugh at the line about someone fucking the college goat. Even though I know it’s coming.
While I’m in the mood, I should tell you something else about myself. I’m not very good at watching my shows with other people. I spend too much time watching their reaction. Sometimes they don’t laugh where I think they should, and then they talk over really good bits. I once switched off a video of the previous night’s Fantasy Football after one of my friends had talked over a really good gag, and said, ‘Well, look, obviously no one’s interested in this so let’s just talk.’ I was half-joking, but only half. Stop looking at me like that. If ever you see me on the tube, and you’re reading this book, my advice is start looking enthralled.
Anyway, there was one bit on the Blue Heaven tape when I really laughed. I was talking to a barmaid about my brother, Brian. He had murdered somebody, and she’d seen the whole thing.
BARMAID: Ooo! It was amazing. He just walked through the door with a gun in his hand.
FRANK: It was a revolver, wasn’t it?
BARMAID: I don’t remember what kind of door it was.
Every episode I, or at least my character, would bump into my old Asian mate, Prem, (Nadim Sawalha), who was also unemployed. His last job was working for BT as ‘the Asian bloke who answers the phone when you dial a wrong number’, but they had made him redundant and replaced him with samples from old Peter Sellers records. Prem would always offer a piece of Eastern-sounding philosophy, which never sounded quite right, like:
Life is like a goldfish. It may sparkle and shimmer but, if you look closely, there is usually a long piece of shit hanging off the back of it.
The series passed by virtually unnoticed. I was starting to wonder, how many unsuccessful TV series could I make before broadcasters lost faith in me? The answer was quite a lot, actually.
In August 1992, I went back to Edinburgh with a brand new stand-up show, then took that show on a national tour with Al Murray as my support. I suppose we played around thirty dates. In ’91, I’d done a post-Perrier tour of around twenty dates. In ’94 I did a sixty-date tour, and then, in 1997, a one-hundred-date tour, culminating in a show at Battersea Power Station in front of five and a half thousand people, which was, at the time, according to the Guinness Book of Records, ‘the World’s Biggest Solo Comedy Gig’. I know because I’ve still got their official certificate on my wall. Maybe I should get that Return Form from the Calton Studios in 1988, and frame them together, so every time I walk past, I can ‘treat those two imposters just the same’.
Anyway, the reason I lump these three big tours together is because I think I should say a bit about my tours in general.
Firstly, apart from the chat show, which I’ll discuss later, when I do stand-up nowadays, I do it as part of a national tour, usually in venues that seat between one and two thousand people. Whether this is, at the end of the day, a good thing, I don’t know. There is part of me that thinks stand-up belongs in a poky little room above a pub, rather than a plush two-thousand-seat theatre (or, indeed, in Battersea Power Station, with the show projected on to two enormous screens on either side of the stage). But I also think that a two-thousand-seater theatre can feel just like a room above a pub, when the force is with me.
On tour, the show opens with a support act who does about twenty minutes, then there’s a short interval, and then I come on and usually do about an hour and a half. Sometimes, I wonder if this is too long. It sounds a lot, doesn’t it? People do seem to laugh all the way till the end and ask for an encore, but it could be that they’d be just as happy with an hour. Then the show would take less time to write and I could tour more often. How am I supposed to know? Oh, anyway, what do you care about this? Honestly, sometimes this stops being a book and just becomes chit-chat.
Anyway, when I wrote the material for the Perrier show, I didn’t know I was doing it. I was just writing stand-up for the 4-X and then Edinburgh came along and I thought, ‘Well, I can use all this stuff I’ve already got.’ Now I have to aim my writing deliberately towards a long theatre show. This means, if I fancy it, I can write quite long routines. One review of a show I did in 1994 said that I’d done nineteen minutes on football, and twenty-three minutes on anal sex.
In this case, I feel the subject somewhat dictates the duration. With football, I have to allow for the fact that some audience-members may not be knowledgeable about the game, so some time is taken up by explanation. Anal sex is a similar case. The latter routine is slightly longer than the football stuff because I also need time to discuss the health issues. I always make a point of telling the women in the audience about the, in my opinion, hare-brained theory that anal sex is dangerous. I try my utmost to be completely objective in this, explaining that, if they wish to discover whether it is indeed dangerous, they should ask around their female friends, nip in the Citizens Advice Bureau, or even phone up This Morning. After all, it’s best that the woman doesn’t leave such enquiries to the last minute. She’s hardly likely to get an unbiased response from a man with a bottle of Johnson’s Baby Oil in one hand, and his nob in the other.
So, if a club gig is like a degree, a tour gig is like a Ph.D. I have more scope to specialise.
At the same time, a funny gag is a funny gag and they all get in on that merit. Not that it’s my choice. I have the most reliable editor in the world, the audience. When I’m preparing for a tour, I write about twenty-five minutes of new stuff a week, a target I’ve stuck to since the days of the Pie Factory. Naturally, some of this will be shit. I have to find out which and get rid of it. If thy shit jokes offendeth thee, pluck them out. So, I’ll do a couple of circuit gigs a week to try out my new twenty-five minutes and then, depending on the response, I’ll split the stuff into three categories.
Firstly, God willing, there will be some jokes that get good laughs. These go into the drawer marked ‘In’. Secondly, there will be some jokes that go quite well but not great. These go into the drawer marked ‘Potential’. As I’ve said before, my jokes are like children to me, I want to give them a fair chance. This is why I try virtually all of the new stuff at least twice. Maybe I delivered a new gag badly and didn’t do it credit; or maybe it’s not right in its present form, but it could be slightly re-written into a better gag. If one of these methods works, the gag gets transferred into the ‘In’ drawer. Thirdly, there are the gags that die on their arses. I mourn them, briefly, and then bury them in the drawer marked ‘Shit’. I don’t literally have drawers for these gag
s, obviously, but that’s how I split them up.
After the gigs, I’ll scribble a note next to each gag, signifying its allotted drawer. Incidentally, all my stand-up gags are written free-hand. Everything else I write, sit-coms, sketches, this book, is written on a computer, but that just doesn’t feel right with stand-up. I’ve never really worked out why. Perhaps it’s simply that I was writing stand-up before I owned or knew how to operate a computer, and old habits die hard.
But sometimes I think it’s because stand-up has such a special place in my heart. It was seeing live stand-up that inspired me to go into comedy in the first place. It was stand-up that I was writing in my dirty bedsit in Ravenhurst Road, and if I hadn’t been writing that stand-up I wouldn’t be moving into my two-million-pound house in North London next week. All through my career, it’s been the constant, the one link between the beginning of the journey and where I am now. And I’ll tell you something, when it works, it’s the best fucking feeling in the world. Yeah, OK, I get a bit romantic about stand-up. Still, you get the picture.
The tour-show building process is something of an emotional journey. You’d think that some bloke off the telly who turns up to do a gig in a room above a pub would be holding all the aces, but it doesn’t work like that. When I appear at those circuit gigs, I’m on the bill with comics who are doing material they do every night. It’s slick and, what’s more, they aren’t worried about forgetting half of it. I go up there, people settle down to watch the amazing famous bloke, and all I have with me is my completely new and unfamiliar stuff that might possibly be total shit. This, it has to be said, gives the whole experience a bit of edge.
Frank Skinner Autobiography Page 34