Frank Skinner Autobiography

by Frank Skinner

  However, when I watched the show go out the following night, my question and Cliff’s answer had been removed. In the broadcast version, Sister Wendy, suddenly, out of the blue, started talking about women priests, for who knows what reason, and, get this, they had even stuck in a shot of Cliff, nodding his apparent agreement as she spoke.

  I don’t know why this happened. Your guess is as good as mine. But I decided if I ever had a chat show, I’d want to have a say in what got cut and what stayed in.

  Things weren’t going too well with Jane and me and we decided it would be better if I moved out. I phoned Dave Baddiel and asked if I could sleep on his sofa for a couple of nights until I found somewhere more permanent. I stayed for five years.

  The time I spent living with Dave was one of the happiest of my life. It was like those two weeks with Denis Leary in Edinburgh, but it lasted one hundred and thirty times longer. When I first moved in with Dave, he lived in a very grotty flat in Kilburn, north London. Shortly after I arrived, he went on tour with Rob Newman and left me on my own in the flat. Within a few hours of his departure, I found a flea on my arm from his cat, Zelda. I hated cats and I wasn’t that keen on fleas. I found some flea spray, completely soaked an armchair in it, and stayed on that till Dave returned. The flat was full of videos, but I presumed they were just old movies and tapes of Dave’s TV appearances, so I didn’t bother watching any of them. Little did I know that my flea-proof fortress was surrounded on all sides by tape after tape and hour after hour of relentless hardcore pornography.

  To be honest, I hadn’t seen that much pornography in my life. Years earlier, a friend in Birmingham had dragged me along to the Taboo Cinema Club, where you had to sign a membership form stating that you were not a member of Her Majesty’s police force or The Festival of Light, but it wasn’t long before my mate regretted taking me along. As soon as I saw the first film’s title, I started giggling. It was called Stuffed Arseholes. ‘Is this the menu?’ I said, loudly, expecting to get laughs, but getting only a hard elbow from my mate. For the rest of the programme (the films showed from midday to midnight, but you were given a ticket with a time on it, and only allowed to stay for an hour), I couldn’t stop giggling. My mate said, in a bit of a huff, that he would never take me to a pornographic cinema again.

  Now, I’m not one of those blokes who pretend they only watch pornography for a laugh. That’s not true. I only watch pornography in order to masturbate, and as I couldn’t really pull that off, so to speak, in the crowded Taboo, I was forced to watch the films as if they were, well, films. If you do that, they soon become ridiculous. Dave, however was a connoisseur. He would no sooner have suggested that we watch pornography together than fly in the air. We worked out a very civilised rota system. It gave Dave the lion’s share of the viewing time, but that only seemed fair, considering that he owned the property and, indeed, the pornography. However, when we discussed the various films, Pissing Party, The Bottom Dweller, Buttman’s Moderately Big Tit Adventure, usually at meal times, we made a remarkable discovery. Dave and I liked exactly the same moments in each movie. When I watched a new batch of porn, I could tell instantly what tapes Dave would like, and what bits on those tapes he’d like best, and the reason I could tell was because his views tallied so exactly with mine. It was slightly scary.

  If you think this sounds like a commonplace, get a friend to watch a pornographic film that you have already watched, and I bet you differ on what bits you like best. Hold on, this could be the new Mr and Mrs.

  Incidentally, even when I used porn for its proper purpose, it could still, occasionally, make me laugh out loud. In, for example, the aforementioned film, The Bottom Dweller, featuring Roscoe Bowltree, there is one great piece of dialogue:

  ROSCOE: Hey, Marty, I’ve got my finger in your wife’s ass.

  MARTY: Try not to get anything on the carpet.

  When, six months later, Dave announced he was moving to a very posh flat in Tanza Road, Hampstead, me and the porn and, unfortunately, the cat, moved with him.

  Meanwhile, I managed to fit in another couple of TV series, this time for BBC1. Like my three Channel Four efforts, they bombed. I think my appearances on The Brain Drain and Have I Got News for You? had led people to think that a panel show was the right vehicle for me. I was re-united with Terry Wogan on a prime-time moral dilemmas show called Do The Right Thing. Terry hosted and I was his naughty sidekick. Two guest panellists and me would be shown a short film depicting someone facing a moral dilemma, and we had to say what we’d do. I, of course, always kept the money and shagged my best friend’s wife. The show got a second series, but I didn’t fancy it so I jumped ship.

  Then I did another prime-time panel show called Gag Tag. Devised by my mate Tracey McLeod, the idea was to break down the barriers between mainstream and alternative comedy by having teams combining comics from both schools and getting them to complete various comedy tasks. So, we might be given a classic gag-format, and then have to produce some examples.

  I’d get a line like ‘I wouldn’t say my wife was ugly but . . .’, and then I would say, ‘. . . she walked on to the set of All Creatures Great and Small and Christopher Timothy put his arm down her throat’; or ‘. . . she lay down in the garden and the cat buried her’.

  I was one team captain, Bob Monkhouse was the other, and Jonathan Ross was the host. Jonathan was already a mate of mine, so I was looking forward to working with him, but Bob was an unknown quantity. A few weeks before we recorded the series, I met an old Birmingham mainstream comic called Dave Ismay. He said to me, ‘I hear you’re going to be working with the master.’ I thought I’d got a part on Doctor Who. Turned out he was talking about Bob. The following week, Bob invited me to have lunch with him at his club. He was totally charming, and when I told him I’d broken my watch by accidentally putting it in the washing machine that morning, he reached into his briefcase, took out a flashy gold Seiko, and gave it to me. I was well chuffed, not because it was a flashy gold Seiko but because it was Bob’s.

  He is a pretty rare thing in a British comic of his generation. He doesn’t do the ‘a bloke went into a pub’ type stuff. He is much more like his American contemporaries, clever and sharp, and making everything sound like It happened to him. Don’t be fooled by the crappy game shows, Bob Monkhouse is our Bob Hope.

  I was also really impressed with his knowledge of comedy. He had all the videos and tapes of my TV shows, knew all about the various alternative comics and their material, was a bit of an expert on silent film comedy, fifties American comedy, British comedy since the war and, oh, you name it, if it’s comedy, Bob Monkhouse will have three books, twelve tapes and thirty anecdotes about it. A journalist once asked me about the watch. I said it was like Bob: ‘The timing’s impeccable, but it’s gone a bit of a funny colour.’ I’m not sure that Bob took it in the spirit that it was intended. Mind you, he once introduced me as ‘a man that hasn’t let success go to his clothes’, so that makes us quits.

  Nevertheless, I didn’t feel that Gag Tag really worked, and I ducked out of the second series of that as well. I needed a TV hit and I needed it soon. The door of opportunity was starting to slowly swing shut.

  BBC Radio Five asked Dave and me if we’d each like to manage a fictional football team on a new show called Fantasy Football League, hosted by Ross King. The show was based on a postal game, where you picked a team of footballers from the Premier League. We did the show a few times, talking a little about our hand-picked teams but mainly just chatting about football.

  After a few appearances on the show, Dave and me became convinced that it was a good idea that would be even better suited to telly, especially if we were hosting it. We could still have ‘guest managers’, celebrities who liked football, but we could also have funny clips and sketches, and all sorts of things that wouldn’t work so well on radio. Most importantly, we could do on telly what we did every day in the flat, sit watching football and taking the piss. Accidentally, we’d been in rehea
rsal for this show for the last year.

  Dave knew a guy, yes, Jewish, who he felt could produce the show. He was called Andy Jacobs. We met up and Andy thought it was a great idea. The BBC gave us a small amount of cash and we made a pilot with guest managers Nick Berry and Shelley Webb, wife of the England international Neil Webb, and no set. The whole thing looked terrible, but it was funny. We showed the pilot to BBC2 and they said they liked it. Then they said they’d like eighteen episodes, and my latest attempt at making a good TV show was up and running. This time it was Fantasy Football League.

  I remember the pre-publicity for Fantasy Football League was all centred around Dave in a sort of ‘New vehicle for David Baddiel, also features Frank Skinner’ sort of a way. I felt this was fair enough. Dave, with Rob Newman, had had cult hits on TV with The Mary Whitehouse Experience and Newman and Baddiel in Pieces, and had sold out Wembley Arena with their live show. It was them that inspired Janet Street-Porter to say ‘comedy is the new rock ’n’ roll’. I was a good stand-up who did bad television. I think a lot of Newman and Baddiel fans saw me as a sort of Yoko Ono figure who broke up the band, but I reckon they would have split anyway. Besides, I thought it was nice for Dave to be the good-looking one for a change.

  It was decided, by Jon Thoday, BBC2 and us, that we wouldn’t do loads of publicity to promote the show. It was felt that it would be better to leave our new project to quietly find its feet, to be a slow-burner. That’s a luxury you can afford when the series is eighteen episodes long, three times longer than most new comedy series. This took the pressure off us while we found our way around the format. The director was Peter Orton, who’d done The Last Resort with Jonathan Ross and Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out with Reeves and Mortimer. We recorded the shows on Thursday nights at Capital Studios in Wandsworth, edited through the night, with Dave and me in every edit, and the show went out at 11.15 p.m. on Fridays. Fantasy Football League’s theme tune was an instrumental version of ‘Back Home’, that first single I’d bought twenty-four years earlier.

  The set became a crucial part of the show. It was based loosely on our living room at Tanza Road, with football books and memorabilia, the adjoining open-plan kitchen where Statto dwelt, and, of course, the sofa, and I soon felt as at home on the set as I did in the flat. Well, except we never worked out a rota.

  The guest managers on that first series included Peter Cook, Bob Mortimer, Sue Johnston, Lennox Lewis, Roddy Doyle and Basil Brush. Basil, then operated by Ivor Owen, was, as you may know, a puppet, which posed problems we didn’t have with the other guests. Ivor, now, sadly, dead, had been with Basil from the beginning. It was strange to meet this frail old man, who spoke with what was basically Basil Brush’s voice. In rehearsal, it was discovered that the hole that had been sawn for Basil in the kitchen work-surface wasn’t quite big enough, so we rehearsed with Ivor’s old man’s hand sticking up eerily out of the counter. As Ivor could still be heard doing Basil’s voice, it made the whole experience a bit unnerving. When we finally got Basil fitted in place, Ivor got uncomfortable in the box under the table that he was hidden in, and withdrew his hand. I had grown up with Basil Brush, and watching him now, minus Ivor’s hand, slowly imploding before my eyes made me feel like crying. When we finished the recording that night, poor Ivor was in agony. His knees had locked as he knelt in his box, and four of the crew had to lift him out. It was like carefully unpacking a sculpture that’s arrived at an art gallery.

  We soon made one of the major discoveries about Fantasy Football League: football people will do stuff you never thought they would do. There was a famous old football moment, captured on TV, when Luton Town narrowly avoided relegation, and their manager, David Pleat, ran on the pitch in his seventies beige suit and did a funny little skipping, running dance. We got Andy Jacobs to phone David Pleat and ask him if he’d come and recreate that dance in the studio. He not only said yes, but that he still had the exact same outfit in his wardrobe and would be happy to wear it. On the night, we showed the old clip of Pleat’s dance and it got a good laugh, then we moved on to something else. Ten minutes later, the doorbell went. We opened the centre-stage front door, always a scene of much coming and going, and Mr Pleat skipped in. He did a complete circuit of the studio, past the bemused guests, and then skipped out through the door again. It absolutely brought the house down.

  One interesting thing about this is, when I describe Pleat’s dance as a ‘famous old football moment’, I mean famous amongst hardcore football fans. It was hardcore football fans who were our target audience. We never talked down to them or bothered to explain an obscure football reference. If you didn’t know about football, that was tough. But the amazing thing was that loads of non-football fans watched it. People would stop me in the street and say, ‘Well, I’m not really into football, but I love your show,’ and I’d say, ‘But don’t loads of the gags go over your head?’ and they’d always reply something like ‘Oh, yeah, but it doesn’t seem to matter.’

  Andy Jacobs was our secret weapon. He was only a little man, with glasses and a moustache that gave him a slight Groucho Matx appearance, but his knowledge of sport, acquired partly from working in sports TV and partly from just being obsessed with sport, was phenomenal. Football, however, was his speciality. He would watch the games and football-related programmes on the telly and spot the most obscure and wonderful things. He’d put all these moments on one VHS tape and then bring them round the flat for me and Dave to see. We’d pick the ones we liked and they went into the show. We’d also spot the odd clip ourselves, but Andy was the man, and not only in the clips department. He’d come up with ideas for guests, subjects for the aforementioned ‘Phoenix from the Flames’, and discovered Statto. Me and Dave were the star strikers, Statto and the soon-to-be-recruited Jeff Astle were the creative midfielders, but Andy was the midfield dynamo, the boiler room, the Jewish Roy Keane.

  Our rock-solid, vastly experienced central defender was Peter Orton, the director. Pete was only in his late forties, but he’d worked on everything from Blue Peter to Penn and Teller, and had an air of done-it-all confidence about him. Sometimes this was frustrating. Dave and me would have an idea and Peter would look at us in a ‘now let me explain something’ kind of way and I used to get well wound up. But whatever we asked Peter for – special effects, spoof styles, unusual camera-shots – he always delivered. His direction deliberately gave the show a live feel, that rough edge that made it feel slightly chaotic, but he still managed to catch every unexpected, unrehearsed moment on camera. Peter and me argued about almost everything at first. When he was pissed off he looked like Michael Douglas on vinegar, but I soon came to respect him and his solid, steadying influence on the show.

  The audiences were unbelievable. They came from all over Britain, to Wandsworth on a Thursday night, wore footie shirts, waved scarves, chanted for Statto, and, most importantly, laughed. They were a real supporters’ end, our Kop or North Bank.

  On Show Sixteen I closed with a song. It was nearly the end of the football season and Albion had three games to avoid relegation. I stood up as we neared the end of the show and sang a version of ‘I Believe’, which explained why I loved the Albion and how I still had faith in them. It could have been embarrassing, but it was from the heart and our football-mad audience understood and went with it. At the end of it there was massive applause, and three Albion fans I hadn’t even noticed in the audience ran out and hugged me like we were all family. It was a special moment for me when some fans turned up at the next Albion game with a banner that said, ‘Frank Skinner. We believe.’ A girl at the refreshments stall that day told me her dad had cried when he heard the song. And no, not because he was a musician.

  All previous football TV programmes had offered the opinions of ex-players, or journalists, but now it was the fans’ turn. For years, football supporters had laughed at bad players, enjoyed horrible tackles, and developed a weird nostalgia-based folklore, but it had remained strictly an oral tradition. Then, in the e
ighties, football fanzines rose up, putting these gags and alternative, fan-based views of the game on paper. Now football fan culture had a voice on national television. David Thomas, in the Daily Telegraph, described the show as ‘one long celebration of the free-masonry of football fandom’.

  The second series stuck with the same format as the first, but introduced Jeff Astle as our close-the-show crooner. The new set of guest managers included Elvis Costello, Jo Brand, Nick Hancock, Paula Yates, Patsy Kensit, Alan Hansen and Nick Hornby. Nick Hornby, of course, was the writer of Fever Pitch, a book about the life and times of an Arsenal fan, which had become a bestseller. Some journalists were saying that Fever Pitch and Fantasy Football League had both made a significant contribution to football’s new mega-popularity, particularly among Britain’s middle classes. Dave, Nick and me, all university graduates, had suddenly made it OK for the Hampstead set to talk about Francis Benali instead of Francis Bacon, and write about Paul Gascoigne instead of Paul Gauguin. Obviously, I felt terrible about this. I never expected to be blamed for football going posh, a phenomenon I was, and am, incredibly suspicious of. Only recently, I had started to think that maybe the old days of football hooliganism weren’t, in fact, such a bad thing. At least the boot-boys kept posh people and, of course, girls away from the grounds. Now, it seemed, I was ushering them in.

  The other thing that always came up when Fantasy Football League, or just Fantasy Football as everyone now called it, was discussed was the phrase ‘New Lads’. I had first heard this term used about Newman and Baddiel a few years earlier. Again, it was a case of the middle classes hijacking something which had always been largely associated with the working classes. Traditionally, lads, as in ‘lads’ night out’ or ‘one of the lads’, referred to someone who was male, working class, under thirty-five, and liked shagging women, playing and watching football, getting pissed and fighting.