Frank Skinner Autobiography

by Frank Skinner

  The next night I repeated the ritual. It became something I looked forward to and told no one about. Then, after about three weeks, the man who lived next door turned up at our house and explained to my parents that, the previous evening, he had let his dog out ‘to do his business’ and had heard shouting. In the gloom, he could make out a small figure, with arms outstretched, standing at the top of our garden. My dad asked me about it. I said I just felt like shouting that night. He told me not to do it again. And I didn’t. So every night, the neighbour’s dog was encouraged to go out into the garden, to stand still in the dark and slowly empty himself while I sat indoors and watched the telly.

  I had a meeting with my publishers about the cover-photo for the book. Someone said that, rather than funny, we should go for sexy. I said, ‘No. It should definitely be a picture of me.’ This, to my disappointment, seemed to be taken as a serious comment. Worse still, I told this story to a colleague and they said, with no detectable irony, ‘If you have a long photo session, there’s bound to be something useable.’ Thanks. I hear that Robbie Williams is currently doing a book. I wonder if anyone said, ‘Let’s go for unsexy,’ and then sweated over the results of that photo session in case there was nothing ‘useable’. Perhaps I should have held out for ‘funny’. When I see the cover now, I can’t help feeling we fell between two stools. The picture, I think, begs the caption, ‘My life selling novelty slippers’.

  However, I very much like the photo-booth pics on the back. These were taken in September 1973, after I had been to see the Rolling Stones at the Birmingham Odeon. I queued with three mates for eighteen hours in the rain to get those concert tickets. We lay on the pavement in New Street and played pontoon with soaking wet playing cards, and laughed a lot about us deciding earlier that sleeping bags and waterproofs would be a waste of time. At 10.00 a.m. the box office opened and it was all worth it. We were going to see the Stones. They were still cool then. When those pictures were taken, minutes after the gig, I still had concert-ears (you know, that post-gig hissing sound) and, safely tucked into my wallet, the rose petals that Mick Jagger had scattered over the crowd towards the end of the show. I kept those petals for about twenty years, in the same box as the light ale bottle that Ray Davies of the Kinks gave to me at Birmingham Town Hall.

  As a symbol of how my life has changed, those photo-booth pics are very apposite. Nearly thirty years after that rainy night on the New Street pavement, I was with Caroline at a charity do for the Peter Cook Foundation. The guests included former Stones bassist Bill Wyman, and Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood. Ronnie’s son’s band provided the entertainment. The main event ended at about eleven but the band played on.

  Meanwhile, Caroline and I, hand-in-hand, went into the ladies’ toilets and had fantastic bang-bang sex in one of the cubicles. When we returned, hand-in-hand, there were only about twenty guests and a handful of waiters left in the room, at which point, two Rolling Stones decided to get up and jam. People began getting that I’ll-tell-my-grandkids-about-this look in their eyes. Then, even better, they started to play a Stones classic, ‘It’s All Over Now’. Ronnie Wood was on vocals, but halfway through admitted he didn’t know the words and asked if anyone did. When I was fifteen, I sang in a band that played a set which was about eighty per cent Rolling Stones. Of course I knew the words, but I couldn’t get up and jam with Bill Wyman and Ronnie Wood. I just couldn’t. Then, despite my fear, I could feel myself rising from my seat. It wasn’t a sudden burst of confidence, it was Caroline, literally pushing me to my feet. ‘Come on, Frank,’ called Ronnie. Suddenly, I couldn’t even remember what reticence meant. I did ‘It’s All Over Now’, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, and ‘Not Fade Away’, by which time I was sharing a mike with Ronnie for choruses and holding up fingers to let my fellow performers know when we were going to end, bring in a solo or whatever. We did ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘Johnny B. Goode’ to add a bit of variety. If only I’d had some rose petals! Yeah, it was a special night. I’d have queued eighteen hours in the rain for that, anytime. And jamming with Bill and Ron was pretty good as well.

  Incidentally, going back to Robbie Williams, I recently took Caroline to see him in concert. Like all other women in Britain, Caroline fancies Robbie Williams. He is, I have to admit it, an excessively good-looking man. I’m not. I am, on a good day, of very average appearance. I have convinced myself over the years that appearance is only part of the package, and that I can make up a lot of the shortfall with charm and wit, or, in later years, with money and celebrity. The charm and wit supplement has been, at best, a bit hit-and-miss. I have often heard it said that it’s possible to laugh a woman into bed, like laughter was some sort of morally acceptable date-rape drug. It just isn’t true. Before I started doing comedy professionally, the normal process was I’d meet a girl, make her laugh until she was doubled-up and breathless, and then, when she had composed herself again, she’d say, ‘Well, I’ve had a fantastic evening, now I’m going home with this physically attractive bloke.’ The whole ‘laugh them into bed’ thing is a myth invented by ugly blokes who think they’re funny and women who want to pretend that they can see beyond mere physical attraction.

  When I was at university, I knew a guy called Mike. He was a really remarkable human being. He was very funny, and so intelligent that other universities were trying to poach him to do a Ph.D at their place. He was a rare combination of very clever and really nice, and not unpleasant in appearance. I once watched him chatting to a girl on a bench in the university grounds. He was turning on the charm to the point where I was nearly falling for him myself. Behind where they sat, there was a bloke digging a hole. He was wearing those jeans and boots that workmen wear. The ones that look as if cement was part of the original design. I mean, he was digging a hole, for fuck’s sake. In soil. There was no cement, except on his jeans and boots.

  Workmen wear this cement-chic so they can walk into pubs and sandwich bars and greasy-spoon cafes, or sit on the side of the pavement, or buy a can of Coke and a tabloid, and say to everyone there, ‘I’m a workman. I am strong, fearless and uncomplicated. Men should fear me and women should worship my muscular lower abdomen.’

  The man digging the hole had no shirt on. The man digging the hole had tattoos, largely of the Rule Britannia variety. But the girl on the bench was clearly not swayed by Dr Johnson’s contention that ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’. As Mike became more and more interesting, she became more and more transfixed by cement-chic man. She just wasn’t listening. Why be laughed into bed when you can be shagged behind a greenhouse by a man who owns every Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown video? I watched as Mike lost heart. After he’d done his ‘Anyway, I’ll see you around’, and wandered off, the workman began his monosyllabic courtship. Now she laughed. I didn’t stay till the end. I imagine they had quick, insensitive sex half a dozen times over the space of a week, he wouldn’t use a condom because he considered it unmanly, she fell pregnant, he said it wasn’t his problem, her promising academic career was cruelly cut short and her life wholly fucked over. Well, I hope so anyway. And before you ask, yes, of course I was ‘Mike’.

  The money and celebrity supplement has been much more successful. Back in Birmingham when I was still Chris Collins, I saw myself as being in the top half of what would now be Nationwide League Division One as far as fanciability was concerned. Maybe even in one of the play-off positions on a good-hair day. But certainly not Premier League. Consequently, I sought out women who I felt were in a similar league position. But since the arrival of wealth and fame, I got promoted and I’m holding my own in the top flight. In truth, I don’t really need to hold my own anymore. And, incredibly, there are still people who think I’m in show business for the money! The only slight drawback is that I think every woman is just after me because I’m on the telly. I despise them for their shallowness and lack of self-respect and rant at them because they have sold their heart for the dubious rewards of the mercenary. Then I forgive them and we have se
x.

  Oh, shut up. I’m joking. No, really.

  Robbie Williams gives very good concert. Caroline gazes at the big screen with a wistful look and I console myself with the thought that good looks are a positive disadvantage to a comedian. The comedy writer and excellent performance-poet Henry Normal once said to me that he felt my act was greatly enhanced by the fact that I looked like ‘I’d been kicked about a bit’. Very good-looking people can never really be funny. Their life is too charmed for them to ever need to develop that wry outlook so crucial to the comedian. If Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy had looked like Paul Newman and Robert Redford they would have been shit. When good looks come through the door, comedy goes out the window. I turned to Caroline to explain this theory but she didn’t hear me because she was laughing so uproariously at Robbie’s between-song banter.

  It was a good gig, there’s no getting round it. Handsome as he is, it’s hard not to like Robbie. There’s a brilliant song by Jacques Brel, called ‘Jackie’. In it, the singer goes on about all the fun he’d have if, for one hour a day, he could be ‘cute, in a stupid-ass way’. People who look like me and Jacques can appreciate what a gift that would be, but most people who are ‘cute in a stupid-ass way’ are too thick to know what they’ve got. Robbie knows what he’s got and he’s got it twenty-four hours a day.

  When I first met him he was in Take That. We were on the same bill at the Royal Variety Performance. Robbie was friendly and likeable and, even then, it seemed to me, totally aware that he was on a lucky streak and determined to make the most of it. I know because I have similar thoughts. I once gate-crashed a wedding do at a pub in Birmingham and ended up drinking free champagne with a couple of mates. Free drink was rare in those days so I should have been ecstatic. And I did have a great time, but it was ever so slightly spoiled by the fact that the bouncers occasionally looked over at us and I felt sure they were going to ask us for our invites to the party and we’d be in shit. So I drank quicker and quicker while I still had the chance. Ever since I got lucky in show business, I’ve had a very similar feeling.

  I remember giving Robbie a bit of a speech along those lines and telling him to ‘just enjoy it’. I suppose I thought the Royal Variety Performance was the perfect place to start talking like an old-school showbiz twat. God forgive me if I, at any time, referred to ‘the business’. That would be it. Next stop, the fuckin’ Water Rats.

  Robbie seemed to take it all in good heart, but if he’d placed any value on my opinion at all, it would have been all spoiled when he saw my performance. I died on my arse. I spent ten minutes cracking jokes to an audience that seemed to be mainly ageing gangsters and their wives. You’d think us nouveau riche would stick together but they hated me. Afterwards, I was in the line-up backstage to meet Prince Charles. As he made his way down the line, shaking hands with Shirley Bassey, Larry Grayson, Tony Bennett, I was thinking, ‘What the hell is he going to say to me? I died on my arse.’ Eventually, he reached me. As he shook my hand, he said, ‘Where do you normally work? Is it in the north?’ He said ‘the north’ with a pained grimace, as if it tasted like dog shit on his lips. I tried to defend my reputation but he’d already moved on to Billy Pearce.

  Anyway, like I say, it was a good gig, and then Robbie came on for his encore – and sang ‘My Way’! I mean, for goodness’ sake. I told Caroline that this was ridiculous; that you have to be a seasoned old campaigner to be able to sing ‘My Way’. She just shushed me but I was on a roll. Robbie had finally put a foot wrong and I owed it to ugly blokes everywhere to point this out. And I would have quite liked Caroline to take this opportunity to admit that Robbie wasn’t perfect after all, but she was too busy waving her arms in the air and getting the words of the song wrong. So I said to myself, not ‘My Way’. You really have to earn the right. What does Robbie think he’s playing at? Then, at the end of the song Robbie announced, ‘And I’d like to dedicate that song to Frank Skinner, who’s here tonight.’ I felt so guilty.

  I saw him backstage after the gig. We embraced. ‘Did you hear the dedication?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘and what a brilliant version of “My Way”.’

  Owls, as you may know, are nocturnal creatures. So it was a strange decision by my brother Terry, firstly to get a pet owl, secondly to keep it in a cage that would have been a tight squeeze for the average canary, and thirdly to keep that cage on top of the wardrobe in our bedroom. The owl almost certainly came from a bloke in the pub. In the West Midlands in those days almost everything could be got from a bloke in the pub. My dad’s favourites were trays of seedlings. These were the unofficial currency of the shed/greenhouse underworld: trays of soil with little green things growing out of them. He’d bring one home most Saturday afternoons in Spring. On Saturday afternoons, the streets of Oldbury were full of half-pissed blokes carrying trays of seedlings covered in newspaper or plastic bags. And, of course, on this occasion, Terry, with a big fucking owl.

  So that was that. Every night, local owls would come and perch on the telegraph pole outside our house and screech stuff to our owl, tucked in his little cage-cum-corset. This would make our owl uneasy and inclined to flutter, had there been room to flutter, which was a little unnerving to a small child. I used to worry that he might escape from his cage, an unlikely event, a bit like someone getting a ship out of a bottle, and swoop down on me in my bed. I had nightmares about being carried out, like a small vole, for a midnight feast atop the telegraph pole.

  The owl was a dark mystery to me. Every day, Terry would go to the butcher and buy what was known as ‘lights’. These were some sort of unpleasant animal innards that even the local people, who were happy with brains, hearts and faggots, wouldn’t eat. The owl gobbled them down like there was no tomorrow. For any pet of ours, this was not a particularly far-fetched assumption.

  Eventually, fluttering wasn’t enough and the owl started to screech back to his friends on the telegraph pole, so Dad insisted that Terry release him. The cage door was flung open and, with wings close at his sides, the owl slowly squeezed out to freedom.

  It said in today’s Daily Mirror that I’m the highest-paid man on British television. Apparently I get three million a year from television appearances. When I read this, I laughed out loud for about twenty seconds. Not because it isn’t true. I mean, it isn’t true, but so what? If the people in the chart are all exaggerated at the same rate, that still makes me the winner. I laughed because there was something exhilarating about being top of the table. I still feel in my heart of hearts that no one’s got a bloody clue who I am, and yet, there I am, top of the raking-it-in league. They say that when the great British actor Sir Donald Wolfit heard that he’d been knighted, the normally sedate man sat on his garden swing with his legs in the air and said, in a cod Midlands accent, ‘Ooo! If me mom and dad could see me now.’

  I know it’s terribly un-English to be excited by money but sometimes it catches you unawares. I was on the dole in 1985, earning £24.70 a week. This works out at just under £1,300 a year. Five years later, I made my first Des O’Connor Show appearance and got two grand for eight minutes. Progress, or what?

  In fact, I’ve never really been the materialistic type, but of course it’s nice to have a few bob in your pocket. I’ll admit that I’d much rather be known as the funniest man on television than the richest, but you can’t have everything in life. Sometimes, though, the money-thing isn’t so funny.

  In the Autumn of 1999, my manager, Jon Thoday, was in negotiation with the BBC about renewing my contract with them. I had just completed the third series of my chat show, The Frank Skinner Show, and was keen to sign a contract that would give me a bit more long-term security. ITV were aware that my contractual obligations to the BBC were up and were also sounding keen. My initial inclination was to stay with the BBC, but ITV’s offer was well tempting. Part of this allure was financial but, more importantly, ITV’s contract offered a variety of projects as well as three series of the chat show, whereas the B
BC would only commit to two. So, I was thinking it over. Then something happened which I never would have imagined affecting my career. Des Lynam defected to ITV. The papers started saying the BBC couldn’t hold on to their talent and were becoming outdated and unappealing employers. Then the rumour started that I was about to ‘follow Des’ to ITV. In fact, I was still undecided.

  Then the BBC seemed to hit upon a very good face-saving idea. They suggested in a press release that, rather than losing talent because of cheapness or lack of commitment, they were being held to ransom by greedy egomaniac performers. It was a clever switch, and perhaps not wholly inaccurate, but unfortunately they chose me as the scapegoat. Meanwhile, unaware of all this, I was sitting in a cafe next to Wyndham’s Theatre in Charing Cross Road, London. I’d just finished a Sunday performance of the play Art and was having an iced coffee with some of the company when my mobile went. I stepped outside to take the call. It was Jon Thoday. The BBC had announced that it had broken off negotiations with my management because of their outrageous financial demands. A figure of twenty million pounds was being mentioned. Jon told me he had no idea where that figure had come from. I believed him. I went back and finished my iced coffee, wondering what all this really meant. The next day I found out.