The New Lads, like New Labour, were a sort of laundered version of that. They were middle class, under thirty-five, liked shagging women but only if they used a condom, and made it clear in advance that this was just sex so that no one was being exploited, playing football in a trendy ‘five-a side in the gym followed by a quick drink in a local bistro’ kind of a way, watching football in an ‘England matches on Sky, season ticket at Arsenal’ sort of a way, getting quite pissed on bottles of beer with slices of lime in the top, and fighting, but only in kick-boxing classes at their swish health club.
Despite this, I was often described as the archetypal New Lad. I was forty, nouveau riche, had a season ticket at an Endsleigh League Division One club I’d supported since I was in liquid form, couldn’t play at all, was a practising Roman Catholic teetotaller, and hadn’t had a fight since I stopped drinking ten years earlier. OK, I liked shagging, but one swallow doesn’t make a summer. (Mind you, it can certainly make an evening.)
Anyway, I must have been a New Lad because it was in all the papers.
The third series of Fantasy Football, in 1996, was extra-special because it was tied in to the whole ‘Three Lions’ thing. But just before Euro ’96, after years of taking the piss out of footballers, something happened that we hadn’t seen coming. On May 22nd, the headline on the back page of the Sun was ‘Skinner and Baddiel wrecked my career’. It was an interview with Nottingham Forest striker Jason Lee, who claimed that our jokes about him on the show had destroyed his confidence, created an unfairly negative view of his abilities, and inspired an open season of scorn and abuse from football fans wherever he played.
We had done a sketch, earlier in Series Three, which had me playing Lee’s club manager, Frank Clarke, and Dave playing Lee himself. The sketch included clips of some terrible botched goal-opportunities by the player, and the main comic thrust was that Jason missed everything. He missed a tea cup with a sugar cube, a waste-bin with some rolled-up paper, and so on. It was typical Fantasy Football stuff. Dave’s make-up included a hair-do that incorporated a pineapple. Jason’s tied-up dreadlock-style hair looked a bit like a pineapple. I believe a chant pointing this out was already doing the rounds of Premiership grounds where he played. So that was it. We did the sketch, it went well, we forgot about it. But the audience didn’t. We got a massive response from viewers. Week after week they sent in pineapple-based sculptures, a photo of a pineapple-roofed house they’d seen on holiday and so on. So Jason Lee, with his crazy hair and his inability to score, accidentally became something of a running gag.
But we made one large mistake. It’s one thing to take the piss out of Peter Beardsley, or Gazza, or Alan Shearer. These were extremely talented players, with massive self-confidence, who couldn’t give a shit about leg-pulling, but Jason Lee was different. He wasn’t, by Premiership standards, quite good enough. This, I suppose, must have led to all sorts of doubts and insecurities and so the running gags, to him, must have felt like a cruel vendetta.
Dave and me felt bad about Jason being so hurt and we wrote to him to make friends and invite him on the show, if he fancied it. We never got a reply. The papers were full of it that week. We’d overstepped the mark, they said: when does comedy become cruelty? There was even a vague hint by one broadsheet journalist that the jokes, or at least the ones about his hairstyle, were racist. John Barnes, God bless him, defended us on this charge, but did say that the continued ribbing of Lee probably did go a bit far.
A few months later, a documentary called Footballers’ Wives showed Jason and his missus watching tapes of the show and generally slagging us off.
I have never deliberately tried to upset anyone with my comedy, well, not professionally, anyway. I was genuinely sorry Jason took it so badly. Mind you, when he eventually shaved his hair off, he was photographed in the Sun, holding a pineapple just above his shaven head and talking about his new look as a ‘kiwi-fruit head’, so I think he learned to cope.
Some of you might ask what gave me, a self-confessed shit footballer, the right to take the piss out of any player. Well, I’m a football fan. It’s my job.
The fourth series, I can’t bring myself to call it the last, saw some drastic changes. We had switched to ITV, the show was centred around the World Cup rather than the Premiership, we were on three or four nights a week, and we were live. It still seemed to work, maybe even better, but I missed the domesticity of the old show. The World Cup is lovely, but British club football is what I really like.
Still, Fantasy World Cup did produce my favourite-ever headline. On June 14th, 1998, the front page of the Sunday Sport led with ‘Three Lions stars hire lesbo porn girl’. Unfortunately, it was just a reference to the fact that one of the guests on the series was Emmanuelle star Sylvia Kristel.
The series opened with a bang, but one that was much more enjoyable for the viewers than it was for us. Brigitte Nielsen, the big-titted six-foot blonde from Denmark, Sylvester Stallone’s ex-wife, was one of the guests. I don’t know if she was pissed or what, but she was wild as the wind. As soon as she came through the door, she grabbed me in a massive bear-hug. Then she started shouting in Danish and attacked Dave with a Danish pastry. Dave asked her if the silicone had gone to her head. We were under siege and the gloves were. off. Brigitte grabbed Dave’s hand and stuck it down her top so he could check if her tits were silicone or not. He was really going for it by now. He asked her why Sylvester Stallone had divorced her. She said why don’t you ask him. I had a little gadget I often used on Fantasy Football, a button under the coffee table that, when I pressed it with my foot, made the phone ring. When Brigitte suggested we ask Stallone why he divorced her, I pressed the button, and picked up the phone. ‘Yeah,’ I said to the imaginary Rocky star on the other end, ‘we guessed.’ But there was no stopping Brigitte. In the end, as she stood waving her arms and shouting at the audience, you could quite clearly hear me say on air, in what Dave described as ‘the most complete breakdown of accepted chat-show etiquette ever seen on British television’, ‘Oh, sit down, Brigitte. You’re making a twat of yourself.’
Dave and me wrote and starred in seventy episodes of Fantasy Football After five failed attempts, I finally got my hit TV series. If only I’d lived closer to Arthur’s Seat.
The success of Fantasy League on BBC2 rekindled BBC1 interest in me. I was keen on trying a chat-show format, having enjoyed my time on Late Night with Wogan.
The Frank Skinner Show began in the Autumn of ’95. It was produced and directed by Marcus Mortimer, a highly experienced comedy director who had a sort of aristocratic playboy manner about him, and who looked unnervingly like the golf legend Jack Nicklaus. Marcus had been engaged to the posh-totty sex symbol Fiona Fullerton but, unfortunately, wouldn’t give me any of the details.
I wanted the chat show to be different from the usual Hollywood-star-plugging-his-film type of affair, so we combined famous names with non-celebrities, or ‘people-guests’, as chat-show bookers call them. Thus, on the first show, we had the Sheriff of Nottingham (yeah, the real one), the late Charlie Kray (brother of the more-famous twins), Buzz Aldrin (the second man on the moon), and Neil Armstrong (not the first-man-on-the-moon one, the giant-leek-growing one).
It had its moments. When Charlie Kray explained that he’d done several years in prison for disposing of Jack the Hat, I said, in a journalistic tone, ‘Charlie, when you say you went to prison for disposing of Jack the Hat, let me just clear up one thing for the audience. Jack the Hat wasn’t just a hat, was it? It was actually a bloke.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ replied Charlie, taking me totally seriously. ‘He was a bloke, not a hat.’ I could have hugged him.
The show lasted half an hour and began with five minutes of stand-up from me, and also had a couple of sketches. There were six shows in that first series. The guests included Ivana Trump, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Myra Lewis Williams (the woman who had married her cousin, Jerry Lee Lewis, when she was thirteen), a dog psychiatrist, a couple who’d trained a
chimpanzee to do sign language, and Drew Barrymore’s mom.
To be straight with you, although that first series had its moments (the three ‘Best Of . . .’ compilation programmes were great), I wasn’t really happy with it. I was writing the stand-up and the sketches and planning the interviews and editing with Marcus, so I had to take the blame, but it just wasn’t right. Still, the BBC thought it showed real promise and commissioned a second series.
Marcus went off to do the very successful BBC comedy-drama, All Quiet on the Preston Front, and I had a new producer, or rather two – Jilly Hafenrichter and Juliet Rice, the sister of Anneka. They were from a documentary background, having made those Hollywood Men, Hollywood Women and Hollywood Children films for ITV. They were the kind of slinky brunette, slinky blonde combo that had worked so well for Abba, but they were much more than just pretty faces.
The second series was, in the main, much better than the first. Guests including Eddie Izzard, Tony Blair, and heavy-metal legend Ozzy Osbourne, but we still stuck with the non-celeb idea and included a woman from Birmingham who’d streaked at a televised snooker match, a Japanese inventor who’d invented biscuits with holes in the middle for watching telly through, and a man called Paul Sayce.
Paul was heavily tattooed, mainly with images of significant people and places from his life. He referred to his body as his ‘inky diary’, and agreed to have a tattoo of me put on or near his bicep. He still had the bandage taped over his sore arm when he walked on, but when it came off, there I was, next to his ex-wife. I sometimes wonder if people from my past ever think of me. I bet Paul Sayce fuckin’ does.
The BBC had extended the series to nine shows, but half-way through we hit problems. The broadcasters felt that the show was straying towards bad taste. Firstly, in the stand-up. It had been in the papers that charities for the deaf were not getting their fair share of lottery money. I claimed that a spokesman for the lottery had said, ‘Well, if they don’t answer the phone. . . .’ This got several complaints. Secondly, in the sketches. There was, at the time, a TV advert for IKEA in which several housewives threw floral-patterned curtains and furniture out of their windows and dragged them into a skip as they sang a song called ‘Chuck out the Chintz’. I parodied this, but with them singing ‘Chuck out the Chimps’, and including several scenes of chimpanzees flying out of bedroom windows and even, in one case, being finished off with a baseball bat. This got a lot more complaints and, in fact, a spokesman for the BBC was asked to defend these items on a Right to Reply-style TV show. He just apologised and said it wouldn’t happen again.
I was pissed off. There had also been several complaints about the Japanese inventor, all along the lines of ‘I don’t know how you could have one of those people on after what they did during the war’. Were we also supposed to apologise for that? One of the problems about having a public-funded broadcaster is that anything you do can be described as a waste of licence-payers’ money. On ITV, it’s not like that. When did you ever hear anyone complaining about a waste of advertisers’ money?
Everyone who buys a licence has the right to an opinion. Fair enough, but the only people who ever bother to phone in are, in the main, angry and confused sex offenders who live alone in desolate high-rise flats, or terrified, valium-popping old spinsters, whose dead pets lie decaying all around them. Are these the people whose opinions programme-makers should be listening to?
Anyway, it got worse. On the show that followed the ‘Chuck out the Chimps’ controversy, I apologised profusely for the sketch and then said, slightly under my breath, ‘Thank God I didn’t do that version set in Chinatown.’ Then I sat down and introduced the first guest, ‘No stranger to controversy herself. Ladies and gentlemen, Rose West.’ The band (I’ll come to them in a minute) played ‘Go West’ and the audience applauded. I pissed myself. Not only did they believe that Rose West was coming on, but they applauded her! I sneaked through the under-the-breath remark, but the Rose West bit was cut. On the next show I interviewed a married couple who were swingers. Y’know, they went to fetish clubs and bondage parties and had group sex with other like-minded couples. We had no graphic details and no swearing, but it still had to go. Then there was Mr Methane.
Mr Methane, a very tall thin man in a tight lime-green lycra body-suit and a lime-green mask, was a stage-farter. At the end of the show, I launched into the Phil Spector classic, ‘Da Do Ron Ron’. When it got to the bit where they sing ‘Da Do Ron Ron’, the camera cut wide to reveal, on a table at my side, his legs raised high, Mr Methane. He provided the ‘Da Do Ron Rons’ as only he could. Yes, he farted them. As this duet continued, the audience were, many of them, literally in tears of laughter. We played it totally straight, which, of course, made it even funnier.
Admittedly, I had cracked up earlier, but only because while we waited to begin, Mr Methane did an enormous, completely unrestrained and tuneless fart, in the same way, I suppose, that an operatic tenor might clear his throat just before he begins to sing. I wasn’t expecting this and I just lost it. The BBC insisted that the duet was cut, and I was on my final warning. The headlines in the paper included ‘Clean it up, comic warned’, ‘Frankly, who needs good taste’, and ‘Beeb pulls plug on bum notes’.
Now, I am aware that even if I worked for days, honing and polishing a joke until it was technically flawless, it is impossible to create anything deliberately that is as intrinsically funny as a loud fart. However, I have always felt that jokes about farting are almost always unfunny. Even to hear a comic use the word ‘fart’, for some reason, always makes me cringe. I don’t even like reading it here. But Mr Methane was pure music-hall, like a sword swallower or a contortionist, and the audience, still my editors-in-chief, absolutely loved him.
I am not a ‘dangerous’ comic. Like I’ve said, I have no desire to be shocking or controversial, just funny. I’m not saying I was right in all of these instances, but I do think my duet with Mr Methane should have stayed in.
Anyway, the series still did pretty well without him, I learned my lesson, and the BBC forgave me and commissioned a third series.
Some months later, I got an e-mail from a friend of mine, Janet McLeod, who lives in Melbourne, Australia. She had been watching an awards ceremony on Australian TV, where Phil Spector was getting a ‘Lifetime Achievement’ award. Halfway through his speech, the famously eccentric Mr Spector suddenly started going on about the shabby way that ‘artists’ were treated nowadays, and launched an attack on ‘the British comedian, Frank Skinner’ who had, Speco explained, taken a work of art and desecrated it by turning it into a duet with a stage-farter. Listen, Phil, you have your ‘Wall of Sound’, I’ll have mine.
When Lianne Croft, the snooker streaker, was on the show, she said, ‘I drove up to the tournament in my knackered old Maestro. Oh, am I allowed to say “knackered old Maestro”?’
‘I should think it’s alright,’ I said. ‘I’ve got four of them over there.’
I was referring, of course, to my house-band, ‘The Skinnerettes’. These four ageing musicians, Bob Rogers on guitar, Ken Penney on keyboard, Ron Seabrook on bass, and Ronnie Verral on drums, were the great discovery of Series Two. They were put together (Yes, they’re a ‘manufactured’ band, like The Spice Girls) by my musical director (Oh, I love being able to say ‘my musical director’) Richard Thomas, and they have been on the show ever since. They accompany any songs, play the guests’ walk-on music, and appear in sketches playing everything from Eminem’s homeboys to, well, The Spice Girls. Not bad for four blokes with a combined age of nearly six hundred.
The songs they play to get the guests on are all carefully chosen. (My favourite combination was Aled Jones coming on to the Manics’ ‘If you tolerate this, then your children will be next’), but the Skinnerettes always make them their own.
The drummer, Ronnie Verral, is something of a legend. As well as playing with loads of big jazz and TV stars over the last fifty years, he was also the man who played the drums for Animal on The Mup
pet Show.
But what I love best about the Skinnerettes never makes the screen. In rehearsal, whenever there’s an enforced break, I’ll start singing, usually an old standard, maybe Glenn Miller’s ‘Chatanooga Choo Choo’ or Frank Sinatra’s ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, and, gradually, I’ll hear the Skinnerettes working out the key and smoothly gliding in underneath my vocal. Y’know, if there was no Frank Skinner Show, I’d happily pay them to come round my place, and we could spend the whole day just doing that.
Shortly after that second series of The Frank Skinner Show, Dave hit me with a bombshell. He announced that he was going to live with his girlfriend, Sarah, and it was time for me to move out. I always knew this day would come, but it still hurt. I had lived with Dave for five years. I never managed to live with any woman for two. My marriage only lasted ten months. In our time as flatmates we only really had one nasty row. In a game of Trivial Pursuit, I asked Dave what Elizabeth Taylor historical epic had lost so-and-so millions at the box office. Dave said, ‘Antony and Cleopatra.’ I said this was wrong. The film was called, simply, Cleopatra. Dave protested. After some debate, I explained that if Dave didn’t want to play the fucking game by the fucking rules then he could stick the fucking game up his stupid fucking arse. Dave walked out of the room and there was a terrible silence for some time. In case you’re thinking that I over-reacted, I should point out that it was a ‘pie’ question.
There were, inevitably, rumours that Dave and me were gay. Two single blokes, over thirty, sharing a flat, people are bound to talk, aren’t they? On one occasion, I was leaving The Ivy, a very celeb-heavy restaurant just off the Charing Cross Road, when I bumped into a gay television celebrity. We chatted and he said, ‘You know, I always thought that you and Dave were an item.’ I explained that this was not the case. ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘I always thought you were. In fact, I’ll be honest with you, I’ve had more than one wank on the strength of it.’
Frank Skinner Autobiography Page 37