When Keith was eleven he went to ‘big school’, as they called it: Bishop Milner’s Roman Catholic School in Dudley. I would have been pushing five when he walked up to the end of the garden to show me his new school uniform. My mom and dad had coaxed him into the full outfit to see how it would look on his first day. It being the summer holidays, I was messing about in the garden. There was a big metal bowl-like thing that my dad used to catch rain-water. He always said that rain-water was much better for the garden than tap-water. However, as we lived close to several factories that pumped out all manner of poison, I’m not sure, on reflection, if he was right. Anyway, at the bottom of the big metal bowl-like thing was a thick, black, unpleasant-smelling silt. The ingredients of the story are starting to come together, aren’t they? And guess what. When Keith arrived to show off his new gear, I had just scooped out some of the smelliest, blackest stuff with my little rubber multicoloured bucket. Before me, in pristine blazer, white shirt, cap, tie, grey trousers, the lot, was my brother. In my hand, a bucket of smelly, black nasty stuff. All these years later, I still have a sense of that moment when I became aware I had a decision to make. I didn’t realise till quite recently how big a decision it actually was. The choice was only superficially about whether to tip the bucket over Keith or not. It seems to me now that I stood at the end of that garden at 181 Bristnall Hall Road and, for the first time in my life, I made the choice between comedy and the rest. I could have said I liked the uniform and carried on playing. Or I could have said I didn’t like it, or virtually ignored Keith and grunted something non-committal. Compassion, unpleasantness, indifference were all on offer, but somewhere in my head a little light had come on. I looked at this chubby schoolboy in his smart uniform. I saw how proud he was. And I thought, wouldn’t it be funny to tip the bucket of nasty stuff over his head.
The trouble with the comedy light is that it blocks out other things, like the consequences light, for example. It’s the same light that came on when Sylvia Kristel told me she was a film actress. It’s the same light that came on when I had a deep discussion with a close friend about the fact that he was twenty stone and smoking and drinking vast amounts. The conversation became heated and he snapped at me, ‘So what if I died of a heart attack? Would anyone really care?’ ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Especially if you fell on them.’ It was the same light that came on when a radical feminist woman that I actually quite liked came up to me at a party and launched an attack on my stand-up act. Parts of it, she said, were ‘verging on the offensive’. I should have tried to calm her. Instead I said, ‘There’s only one virgin on the offensive in this room . . .’ She never forgave me. Anyway, I stood there, and I made my choice.
Keith started crying and ran back towards the house. My laughter died down fairly quickly when I remembered that my dad was inside that same house. I stood like a statue and stared at the door that led into the garden. Half of me was thinking that maybe my dad would take the whole thing in the spirit it was intended and not come racing out of the house in a wild temper. The other half of me was toying with the idea of weeing myself with sheer terror. Still no movement at the door. I needed Jesus to appear to me in a vision and say, ‘Don’t worry. That comic impulse may get you into trouble this time but before you know where you are, you’ll be driving to a posh Brighton hotel with a dishy blonde draped over the passenger seat of your Bentley because of it. Oh, and don’t eat meat on Good Friday.’ Still no movement at the door. Perhaps Jesus had spoken to my dad and told him not to rein in my blossoming comic spirit. Perhaps he had cleansed Keith’s uniform, as he did the poor leper after the sermon on the mount. Then there was movement at the door. And my dad came racing out of the house in a wild temper. I stood still like a statue as he came closer. Come on, Jesus. What are you waiting for? My God, my God, why hast though forsa . . . ugh! My dad had surprised me by swooping low at the last moment and grabbing me by the ankle. When he returned to his full height, this turned me upside down and dad was able to return to the house, smacking my legs and arse as he went, without being slowed down by me stumbling and dragging my feet on the floor. It was like a hawk falling upon a sparrow. All down the garden, he smacked and I just hung there. Truly, my world had been turned upside down. From laughter to tears in an instant. I don’t know if being upside down does something to your lungs or vocal cords but I was very disappointed with my crying. It sounded breathless and strangled, not at all plaintive, so there was no chance of awakening his fatherly compassion with it. As we reached the house, he flung me through the open door and I landed with a horrible cracking sound . . . on Keith’s guitar. You remember, the one with the circular picture of Elvis in the little frame? It snapped like a carrot and Keith’s crying went up another couple of octaves. There is a habit, not necessarily a nice habit, that some comedians have. If you make a joke, no matter how funny, they’ll try and top it with a slightly better one. I even catch myself doing it sometimes.
I was too young to know it, but this was a sign that God and me had something in common. Despite the fact that there is virtually no laughter in the Bible, God must like a gag. I had done the bucket-over-Keith joke and He had topped it with the guitar.
Tonight, Dave and me opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in the West End of London. I say the West End of London because some readers may not know the Shaftesbury. Or there may be another Shaftesbury Theatre in another town. My point is that too many people in London think that everyone knows about London or, at least, wants to know about London. I live in London now and I really love it. I get a tingle when I drive over Westminster Bridge at night or stroll through Hampstead on a sunny day, but when I lived in the West Midlands I thought London was an over-priced cesspit full of mouthy tossers trying to sell you fruit or unsatisfactory beer. When I hosted a comedy club in Bearwood, just outside Birmingham, I saw a crowd turn very nasty when a comic began by saying, ‘Y’know when you’re on the tube . . .’
‘No, we fuckin’ don’t,’ some bloke shouted. The comic never really got over it.
Anyway, we opened at the Shaftesbury in the live version of Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned. (I think alphabetical order is the safest bet.) This show has a strange history. In 1998 Dave and me went to see the film Boogie Nights at the Odeon, Swiss Cottage (yes, in London). The movie was OK but me and Dave got far too many of the writer’s in-jokes about pornography and had several moments when we were the only people laughing in the cinema. We soon became identified as not the sort of people you want to share your popcorn with. After the movie we went for a drink in a nearby bar. The most notable feature of this place is that it used to be a Barclays Bank and they’ve sort of crossed out the ‘clay’s Bank’ bit to make the transformation absolutely clear. So we were in this bar talking about the Edinburgh Festival. The room was crammed with the bright young things of North London nightlife. We were going on to each other about how we loved a lot of the things about appearing at the Festival – the performing, the socialising, the girls – but how we hated some of the other stuff, well, just writing the show, really.
So Dave said why don’t we do a show that isn’t written. Just turn up and do forty minutes, with us sitting on a sofa chatting to each other, and to the audience, about anything that crops up. We could do it at lunchtime, when not much else is happening and expectations are low, and also charge only two quid. Most Edinburgh shows are between eight and ten quid. That way, if it failed horribly, we’d still have ‘Well, sorry, but it was only two quid’ to fall back on. We both got very excited about the idea.
When you’re a stand-up, you inevitably end up doing the same gags over and over. On a bad night this can seem like a long, over-familiar road stretched out before you. Sometimes it’s hard to let a routine go, especially one that’s at the top end of the laughter-volume scale. A really strong bit will serve a comic for years but you have to fight this temptation to hold on. It’s like children when they reach a certain stage – you have to let them go. If you hold on to a gag too long, you sta
rt to forget how to tell it; to forget why it’s funny. It becomes stale. The words feel awkward in your mouth. This is the great skill of the stage actor: to say the same words night after night and make them feel fresh every time. There were people doing the Alternative circuit who did the same twenty-minute act, year after year. I’d hear them in the dressing room, complaining about how they’d got bored with stand-up. To the slightly over-excited new boy, it sounded like blasphemy.
I was, at the time, regularly hosting in Bearwood, and other places like the Fleece and Firkin in Bristol and Cheltenham Town Hall. London dubs tend to have quite a large turnover of audience because there are so many places to choose from, but out-of-London comedy clubs get the same crowd in every week so I had to write about twenty-five minutes of new material for each weekly show, otherwise there’d be cries of ‘Heard it’ after each familiar punchline. This is why it’s much easier to be a singer than a comedian. Frank Sinatra never walked on stage to the ‘My Way’ intro, sang ‘And now . . .’ only to be cut short by someone calling out ‘Heard it’. I remember one comedy club in North London where the regular host never changed his act. After each gag, people would shout ‘Again’. I couldn’t be having that.
Obviously, some of my weekly twenty-five minutes was piss-poor, but it also threw up some really good stuff. Law of averages and all that. My only problem was cowardice. After a few months doing the London clubs I had put together twenty minutes of stand-up that worked. So why risk taking some of that material out and replacing it with stuff that might not get laughs? It was just asking for trouble. One night I was on at the Comedy Store and Eddie Izzard had just watched my act. He had played Bearwood a few weeks earlier and asked me why I hadn’t done some of the stuff at the Comedy Store that had previously stormed it in Bearwood. I explained my fears and he gave me a bit of a speech about risk-taking in comedy.
The thing I admired most about Eddie, apart from the fact he was really funny, was his bravery. I had seen him as a regular host at gigs and his method seemed to be based on composing gags on stage. Just stand there and something will happen. So I started changing my act, sticking in new material, topical references, improvising, and chatting to the London audiences just like I did in the Midlands. I improved about five hundred per cent in just a few months. Good old Eddie.
On a stand-up tour, when I do about an hour and a half, of course ninety per cent of what I do most nights is set material. I can cope with the repetition for a few months, mainly because the buzz I get from the new or improvised stuff gets me through the rest. Not that it’s a chore. If it gets stale, I chuck it. It hurts, but it’s gotta be done.
What’s great about Unplanned from a performance point of view is that there is no set material to get through. Dave and I made a rule in that bar never to repeat a gag we’d done in a previous show (that’s why we get someone on stage to keep a note of the stuff we talk about. ‘The Secretary’, we call them), and that bits from our respective stand-up routines are not allowed. Only very rarely do we stray from these rules.
At the same time, from an audience point of view, I sometimes worry about the quality control in these circumstances. Virtually every performance of Unplanned has shit bits, those sections that one journalist described as ‘the moments between the trapeze’. When I look back on an Unplanned show, no matter how well-received, these seem to be the only bits I can remember.
So we decided to try Unplanned at Edinburgh 98. Not that it was called Unplanned then. The show was listed in the Edinburgh Fringe Programme as ‘Baddiel and Skinner return to the original spirit of the Edinburgh Fringe’. I had seriously wanted to call it This Might be Shit but Dave felt this was a bit too negative. Incredibly, the shows, on at lunchtime in the 300-capacity Pleasance Cabaret Bar, were stormers. We just turned up and chatted about any old bollocks and people liked it. One day, Dave announced he was off for a session in a flotation tank after the show. He explained that this meant floating in water in a closed container for about an hour. He said this worried him because he could not be in a confined space for an hour without ‘having a wank’. This, I explained to the audience, was why the show only lasted for forty minutes. We even had the cheek to dose with a song, chosen by a member of the audience from one of the song books we bought on arrival in Edinburgh. Dave sight-read at the piano and I sang. All I needed was my cowboy outfit.
The show sold out every day but, at two quid a ticket, we didn’t get too bigheaded. After a few days, various TV executives started appearing in the audience. The next thing we knew, there was talk of Unplanned becoming a TV series. I’ve never been sure if we made the right decision when we said yes.
The Edinburgh show had been a real lark. Now, suddenly, we were having meetings about set designs and which was the optimum size sofa for a wide-screen TV audience. It wasn’t really what we’d got excited about that night in the bar in London. To do a completely improvised show was one thing, to do it on national television, LIVE, was something else.
I remember the first show very well. This was it. Live TV and no script. Not even a general idea about topic-areas. Nothing. Dave and me were sitting around backstage and I explained to him that I was feeling a weird sort of stiffness in my joints, and I had a bit of an unsettled stomach. Dave explained to me that this was known as ‘nerves’. I hadn’t really had pre-show nerves since my very early days-as a stand-up. I’d forgotten what they felt like.
It was a twenty-five-minute show with a commercial break. I’ve never watched it back, I just couldn’t, but I remember the first half as one of the worst pieces of television I’ve ever been involved with. We sat like rabbits in the headlights, trying to remember what funny meant. It was essentially eleven and a half minutes of nothing. And this was the beginning of a twelve-part series. The show was to go out Sunday to Wednesday for three weeks. When, after what felt like about a day and a half, the commercial break finally arrived, I could sense out of the corner of my eye that Dave was looking at me. I didn’t look back. I started messing around with the audience; taking the piss out of people, flirting, cracking one-liners, the works. I had one minute ten seconds to remind myself of what it felt like to be funny. Dave sat still and let his usually invulnerable self-confidence raise itself up again to its full height. I did what I needed to do – show off. When the second half started, we were alright. We said funny things, they laughed. The chemistry was there again.
We’ve done two series of Unplanned. It just recently has been nominated for the Rose D’Or and the BAFTA for Best Comedy. Now we’re opening in the West End. But if the second half of that first show had been as bad as the first, ITV might have pulled it on the spot, or we might have lost our nerve. Thank God for that commercial break. I knew I was right to move to ITV.
Autobiographies of performers always mention a stage debut, usually with the future classical actor playing a sunflower in a school dramatisation of The Tales of Beatrix Potter. My own stage debut was so disastrous that it didn’t even take place. I was playing a shepherd in the Moat Farm Infants nativity play. Better still, on the morning of the dress rehearsal, the teacher who was directing the production made me Head Shepherd. When you’re five that’s quite a big deal. Especially when Annette, the mousy Shirley Temple, was playing the Virgin Mary. This was a real chance to impress her.
The dress rehearsal was going pretty well. I saw to it that my boys watched their flocks like there was no tomorrow. And when the angel turned up we were genuinely taken aback, partly because, in a childlike way, we were aware of her profound religious significance, but also because she knocked a tree over.
Then the scene switched to the stable. Mary and Joseph were sitting by the manger and we were to march on and do a bit of adoring. As head shepherd, I was to lead the other shepherds. The teacher whispered in my ear, ‘Go on, and kneel around the baby Jesus.’ I passed this on to the boys and then gestured to them to follow me on with a little turn of my head. This is where it started to go wrong. The baby Jesus wasn’t actual
ly in the manger for the dress rehearsal. He had just got haloed-up with a bit of wire and some crepe paper and was letting his glue dry in a big crisps box at the back of the set. Lots of people wouldn’t have even noticed him back there, but I did. I headed towards him like a homing pigeon, my fellow shepherds following my lead straight past a confused Mary and Joseph until we reached the back of the set and knelt in adoration around the crisps box.
It was an easy mistake to make but the teacher went ballistic. Strangely, she used an identical line of attack to the one my dad had employed after the bucket-of-slime incident. She grabbed me by my ankle and swung me upside down, causing my tea-towel to fall off. However, she had badly misjudged the arc of my swing. As I spun upside down, my outstretched right hand went right up her skirt and touched an area of warm clamminess that can only have been her gusset. The panty-hose was still in its infancy, so inevitably, she was wearing stockings. I could actually feel the springiness of her pubis pressing against her knickers. It was all over in a second but she became scarily upset and began smacking my legs and calling me stupid, over and over again. In a fit of what I realise now was chronic embarrassment, she dumped me down on the floor, told me I was no longer in the play, and then walked out of the rehearsal looking close to tears. Before you ask, this is not where the phrase Shepherd’s Pie comes from.
I was confused and upset as I sat on that floor. I could understand why she took my captain’s armband, but to kick me out of the play felt harsh. Also, Annette was looking at me as if I was vermin. If I ever had a chance with her, it had gone. But, most confusing of all, I had handled my first-ever female genitals. I had an awareness, fuelled partly by the teacher’s reaction, that this was significant but I wasn’t sure why.
This, then, was my first sexual experience – upside down with a woman forty years my senior, and me close to tears because my tea-towel had fallen off. You know, that last sentence wouldn’t be a bad quote for the cover of the book. I believe it could be what they call ‘a teaser’.
Frank Skinner Autobiography Page 5
