Frank Skinner Autobiography

by Frank Skinner

  Well, what’s all that about? Someone seems genuinely concerned about the possibility of the book being mistaken for a novel and all the ensuing chaos that might trigger. I might persuade my publisher to put something similar on the cover of this. Frank Skinner by Frank Skinner. Warning! This is not an A to Z of Leeds.

  We lived in a council house in Oldbury. 181 Bristnall Hall Road. Oldbury, as I remember it from my childhood, was a game of two halves. It had a lot of factories. You could smell industry in the air, from the acrid, eye-stinging vapours of the Albright and Wilson’s chemical plant, to the seductive, sugary scent of Parkes’ sweet factory. In the shadow of these factories lived the workforce, often in council housing, or in poky little terraces that the family had lived in for generations. But Oldbury also had some nicer spots with private houses and cars and caravans in the drive, the homes of the clerk and the middle manager. Bristnall Hall Road managed to combine both. Our side of the road, the council-house side, had barely a car parked on it; there was the odd motorbike and side-car and Mr Feraday’s massive lorry, but that was it. The opposite side was all private houses, with cars parked on the street, and in the driveways, where people had had their front gardens tarmacked over for that specific purpose. My dad couldn’t drive. He couldn’t afford a car so what was the point? I lived in Bristnall Hall Road into my late teens and I can barely remember even walking on that side of the road. I knew my place.

  My dad painted a big 181 on the wall of our house that is still there. The house had three bedrooms: my mom and dad’s room, my sister Nora’s room, and the room that me and my two brothers, Terry and Keith, slept in.

  Nora was the eldest, the big sister. She was seventeen when I was born and some of the neighbours thought I might be hers. She was a wild one in her teens, a hairdresser who went in for beehive hair-dos and tight skirts. I remember her practising the twist in the kitchen and getting told off by my dad for staying out too late at jazz nights at the Locarno Ballroom. She had long fingernails and would put a flannel over one and use it to clean my ears. It really hurt and it gave me a life-long aversion to ear-cleaning. I still have dirty ears now. When Nora married, in her early twenties, her husband, Frank, had a car, and they bought their own house. We all felt a bit intimidated. Now she is a member of Halesowen Conservative Party and is always telling me stuff like how she met that nice William Hague and that he was a real gentleman.

  Terry is my oldest brother. As a kid he loved drawing, and collecting birds’ eggs. He was a good-looking lad with a bit of the early Cliff Richard about him, and soon developed an eye for the girls. He would listen to Elvis and Roy Orbison and Jim Reeves, and worked on building sites as a carpenter. Nowadays, he’s a handsome bloke in his fifties. He doesn’t draw or go birdnesting anymore, but does impressive DIY and watches endless wildlife programmes. He also likes a drink, and has an endless supply of stories to tell.

  Keith is seven years older than me. He was a fat schoolboy and a lean teenager. I remember he caused quite a stir at my confirmation ceremony when he turned up with his long blonde hair and his swinging sixties suit. I once went on a trip from my mom’s work to see Danny La Rue in Coventry, and Keith and his friends got some real stares when they refused to stand for the National Anthem. Now he is a chubby, roll-up-smoking angler who has, as he always had, a funny line for almost every occasion.

  For the first five or six years of my life, Keith and me shared a double bed while Terry had a single. Thirty years later, when I got Keith a walk-on part in a sitcom I’d written, another extra, an elderly woman whose career highlight had been a stair-lift ad, asked Keith how he got the job. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I used to sleep with the writer.’

  With Keith seven years older than me and Terry five years older than Keith, I think the age-range kept us fairly separate. When I was six, I remember telling Keith that I’d fallen in love with a girl in my class at Moat Farm Infants. She was called Annette and looked a bit like a mousy Shirley Temple. I explained I thought about her all the time, and even mentioned her in my prayers in a ‘Make-Annette-fall-in-love-with-me’ kind of way. Keith was thirteen and I thought he could offer me some advice, sort of man-to-man. He said, ‘Don’t be so stupid,’ rolled over, and went to sleep. So I never told Annette how I felt about her. She could have been my soul-mate and made me truly happy. As it was, she seemed to develop a crush on Christopher, another classmate, who wore glasses for goodness’ sake. Wearing glasses is quite trendy now but in those days it was very shit. Often, a kid who wore glasses would have to wear sticking-plaster over one lens to encourage his weak eye to pull its weight. This seems very primitive now, as if the eyes were seen as riders on a tandem.

  Christopher would sometimes, with the teacher’s full approval, entertain the class by doing Freddie and the Dreamers impressions, with himself as the lead man Freddie Garrity, and his stupid, puffy friends as the Dreamers. Freddie was about the only pop star I knew who wore glasses. Annette would gaze adoringly at the speccy git jumping about at the front of the classroom and singing ‘You Were Made for Me’ or ‘Who Wears Short Shorts?’. Whatever happened to the old saying, ‘Freddie Garrity breeds contempt’?

  Number 181 had garden front and back and we all lived in the kitchen so that the ‘front room’ could be kept for ‘best’. It was empty ninety-nine per cent of the time. I remember it being used on one occasion when Keith brought a girl back. I don’t remember her name but Linda rings a bell. She had long dark hair and, most excitingly, wore a see-through blouse which revealed a white bra underneath. My mom, the kindest and most sweet-natured woman I ever met, wrote her off as a slut within about fifteen minutes, an opinion confirmed when she asked the girl what time she had to be home and was told, ‘Oh, any time really.’ Mistake. She might as well have added, ‘because I work quite late as a common prostitute’. But I really liked the white bra. I studied the straps with their metal adjuster-bits, the delicate cut of the cups, the tantalising shadow of her cleavage.

  I was about eight at the time. In fact, I was so impressed by Linda’s bra and its contents that I was beginning to wish I hadn’t carefully taken out the twisted-up newspaper that had been placed in the fire-grate in anticipation of a coal-fire, and mixed in a few fireworks that had been left over from Bonfire Night. (Incidentally, I never celebrate Bonfire Night any more because, with the benefit of education, I have come to recognise the whole thing as a celebration of British anti-Catholic bigotry. Still, more weird religious stuff later.) Keith came out of the front room looking a bit flushed, having lit the fire. Apparently, the effects of the fireworks were, in the context of a council house front room, quite spectacular. I remember him turning on me and snarling, ‘Someone could have been blinded.’ I must admit I hadn’t considered that, but surely it would almost have been worth the pain to have spent the rest of one’s life being referred to as Linda ‘who lost an eye in a courting-accident’.

  The bathroom was next to the kitchen on the ground floor and, for some reason I never worked out, contained not only the bath but also the gas cooker. This wasn’t quite the problem you might expect because bathing was not really a big deal in our family. It was certainly not a daily, and for most of us not even a weekly, occurrence. Most of the time the bath was just full of old newspapers and clothes waiting to be ironed. My mom and dad bathed about three times a year. Having a good old wash in the sink was the order of the day. My old man would stand at the sink with the washing-up bowl full of hot water from the kettle. (We had to light the coal-fire to get hot water from the taps. Always a pain-in-the-arse if not in the eye.) He would also have a mug of boiling water for sterilising his old army-issue t-bar razor. He would rub his shaving brush on his little block of shaving soap and then get stuck in. All this was done in a strange sumo-like stance that stopped his trousers falling down, because he had slipped his braces off his shoulders so he could have a good go at his armpits. I’m not sure whether deodorant existed in those days but, if it did, we didn’t have any. My dad’s only c
oncession to men’s toiletries, or ‘puff-juice’ as most local males called it, was his use of Old Spice after-shave. To be honest, he was actually quite dapper by local standards, my dad. We weren’t rich, but he always had a couple of made-to-measure suits on the go. A man called Sammy would come round the house and measure him up and then, after the suit was delivered, Sammy or his son, Sammy (yes, Sammy), would turn up every Friday tea-time for his five bob a week repayment.

  Everything was bought by this method, except food. Mom got stuff out of the catalogue, or would buy stuff from a shop and be given a card which the shopkeeper filled in as she made each payment, or she’d use the Provident cheque method. Certain shops accepted Provident cheques, a sort of voucher that you paid for by regular instalments to the Provident man, who also came on a Friday to collect his five bob.

  There used to be a fashion for finely detailed ornamental china human heads. They were usually things like old sailors or evil-looking Arabs but my mom bought me a pair of these heads which were representations of Laurel and Hardy, and very good ones at that. This was many years later when I was fourteen. I still have the little dub card, as they were called, that the shop supplied her with to keep the record of her weekly instalments. The heads cost £1.50 and she bought them over a space of six weeks at twenty-five pence a week. When I think of her making the journey, about six stops on the bus, to that shop, every week, to pay her twenty-five pence, it makes me feel like crying.

  When things got a bit desperate, we had to resort to the money lender. He was a fat bloke with a pig-like face, thick glasses and a trilby. His name was Butler. I don’t know much more about him than that. But I do know that in the bad weeks, when for some reason or other the money was short, the others got missed but Butler always got paid. Maybe my old man was worried that mom would end up with her head in the gas oven. Imagine the headlines, and having to read them every time you walked past the bath.

  All this is true, although I worry that my honesty about my upbringing won’t go down too good with my brothers and sister. It’s all very well some well-off celebrity going on about how he’s risen from rags to riches, but his family might feel all that stuff should be kept quiet. I know our Nora will say I shouldn’t be telling everyone our business and ‘showing us up’. When I was on This is Your Life, my brother Terry got cajoled into telling the story of how, on those occasions when we got the electricity cut off due to non-payment, we managed with candles. My dad would shout at us if we went anywhere near the window because, if the neighbours saw candlelight, they’d guess we’d had the ‘electric’ cut off and we’d get talked about. Now I live in a posh area of London where everything happens by bloody candlelight and the neighbours take it as a sign of sophistication!

  Anyway, Terry told the story and my sister and her husband got upset with me about it, even though I had no idea how the story came out in the first place. I know Nora felt embarrassed, but I was innocent. Her husband, Frank, said I should keep quiet about the poverty thing because I never went short and my mom would have gone without food in her mouth to buy me some silly toy or other. All this is true but, at the same time, working in television and theatre has shown me that most of the people who get on in these professions are middle class and from the south-east. Now I can’t help noticing that I had mates who worked as dustbin men or lathe-operators who, as far as I could tell, had much more natural intelligence and common sense than a lot of these privileged southerners. I know from my own experience that it’s very easy if you’re a working-class person from the provinces to write yourself off as far as achieving anything a bit unusual is concerned. Showbiz and all that stuff seems like another planet, something that ‘other people’ do. It isn’t. If you’re running a mile, starting fifty yards behind a lot of the competitors makes it harder but not impossible. My point is, I don’t want to shame my family, but I think it’s important that people realise that any half-soaked fucker with a bit of luck can end up strolling down red carpets at film premieres and doing TV shows with his name on the titles. You don’t have to have a nice accent and a background that involves Enid Blyton, fish knives and rugby union.

  So, piss-buckets in the bedroom. Shortly before he became Prime Minister, I interviewed Tony Blair on my chat show. We were discussing working classness and I explained my theory that, of course, when it came to criteria for identifying someone as working class, profession, accent, education, and leisure interests were all important, but the best rule-of-thumb definition is, if you grew up with a bucket in your bedroom, you’re working class. Mr Blair looked puzzled. ‘Bucket in the bedroom? What for?’ I explained that as most council houses had an outside toilet, people slept with a bucket or similar receptacle in their bedroom to piss in during the night, rather than have to go downstairs and outside. I wasn’t trying to cast doubt on his socialist credentials but he seemed a bit edgy about this.

  Afterwards, Mr Blair’s public relations man, Alastair Campbell, asked if we’d take that bit out but we refused. Fair play to Mr Blair. He didn’t ask for any veto before he did the interview, and when he turned up, he was accompanied only by Mr Campbell. No fancy entourage, minders or starry demands. I really liked him, and I’d still vote for him, piss-bucket or not. 181 Bristnall Hall Road has an inside toilet now but I remember when the idea to install one, as part of a local council modernisation programme, was first mooted. I suppose it was the late seventies. I remember the bloke from the council sitting my dad down and explaining to him that they were going to put the toilet inside the house. A very serious look came over my dad’s face. ‘Isn’t that a bit unhygienic?’ he asked.

  It’s not a bad question. The bucket-in-the-bedroom method was ‘a bit unhygienic’ for all sorts of reasons. For a start, sleeping in the same room as an uncovered bucket of piss does tend to get on your chest a bit, and this isn’t helped when your two elder brothers go through their ‘discovering alcohol’ phase.

  The most common problem of sharing a piss-bucket with a drunk is that, more often than not, they can’t be bothered to pick the bucket up, thus making it a much more difficult target. The end result is a wet carpet, not ideal in a room where you spend a lot of time walking around in bare feet (a phenomenon that could be described as ‘beyond the pail’), and, more problematically, a wet bucket-handle, which, it has to be said, is not a pleasant start to the day.

  On one occasion when I was about ten, I picked up the bucket to have a nocturnal piss. One of my brothers had been on the beer and the bucket was heavy with about four or five pints of urine. I picked it up, essential in the circumstances unless you have a night-sight fitted, but the handle was soaked. A five-pint-wet-handle combo is deadly, and no sooner had I raised the bucket to waist height when it slipped out of my grasp. Obviously, the spillage potential was enormous but, by what seemed at first a stroke of good fortune, the bucket landed firmly on its base and remained upright. Then came the second tremor. The impact of the bucket landing with such a thud caused the liquid to surge up into a sort of tidal wave and fire a ball of piss full into my unsuspecting, ten-year-old face. Meanwhile, almost certainly at that same moment, some unknown chappie who was born in the right place to the right class of family was using exactly the same principle to create a tequila slammer in a Soho bar.

  When I was about five, Terry got very drunk one night and was violently sick into the bucket. The smell of this caused Keith to vomit into the bucket, and the combined smell caused me to vomit into my pillow. I believe scientists call this the domino effect. Sadly, none of us were familiar with the phrase or we could have had quite a lively seminar about the evening’s events.

  Today is Good Friday. The day we remember that Jesus Christ died a slow, painful death, nailed to a wooden cross so that people like me can gain forgiveness for my endless catalogue of weaknesses, ingratitude and malicious misdemeanours. As a Roman Catholic, I am encouraged by the church to treat this day as one of abstinence and meditative prayer. I must also fast, or at least refrain from eating me
at until tomorrow.

  This morning, a man from the Bentley car company delivered a midnight blue giant of a car that does seventeen miles to the gallon and retails at £149,000 brand new. I’m not buying the car, or even hiring it. Bentley just wrote to me and asked if I’d like to borrow a Bentley for a few days. It goes back on Tuesday. The idea is that I won’t be able to bear parting with it and so they’ll make a sale. Essentially, it’s what some people call ‘a freebie’. In the last few weeks I’ve had a free video recorder, a free pair of shoes, about a dozen pairs of tickets to music gigs, four free CDs, three free books, and an all-expenses-paid free trip to the UEFA Champions League Final in Milan. A national newspaper even offered me a free holiday to Barbados with my girlfriend on the understanding that their photographer would be allowed to take photos of us in beach-wear and then claim that they had snapped us unawares. That was a bit of an eye-opener. Call me stupid, but I said no. Anyway, such is the life of a celebrity. I lived my first thirty-odd years on the poverty line and no one ever gave me a free anything. Now that, according to the Sunday Times, I’m number thirty-six on the list of the country’s highest showbiz earners, people are falling over themselves to give me stuff.

  I picked up my twenty-three-year-old girlfriend from her job at the BBC and we drove down to Brighton for the weekend. The Bentley handled like a dream and pretty soon we were checking in to our £700-a-night suite at The Grand Hotel. (I had to pay for that.) The room had a very nice bathroom. It was en suite. It’s the rich person’s version of the bucket-in-the-bedroom.

  Maybe I should feel guilty that this is the kind of lifestyle I have now. I don’t. I just feel lucky.

  Anyway, I didn’t eat any meat today.