The story ran in every national newspaper. They all had me marked down as a cynical chancer who had got too big for his boots. The twenty million, already an inflated figure, was now being seen, certainly by the tabloids, as all for my pocket rather than as funds to cover the cost of making the programmes. The story led the Daily Mirror to run a feature under the heading ‘The Pig Issue – you decide’ in which they ruminated on who was the greediest person in the world. I won, with a ‘Snout Rating’ of ten out of ten. Imelda Marcos only scored six. To accompany the feature, the Mirror had mocked up a picture of me as Monty Python’s mega-fat, mega-greedy Mr Creosote. The article began, ‘Is TV comic Frank Skinner the greediest person in the world? That’s the question on everyone’s lips. after the BBC refused his demands for a massive £20 million pay deal.’ Within three days, I saw Chris Tarrant, Clive Anderson and Jack Dee all doing ‘greedy Frank’ gags on telly.
Mind you, I could hardly complain. I was topical, and newspapers and comics do topical stuff. Look at me, I live on topical stuff, especially on my chat show. When Richard Desmond, the owner of such soft-porn classics as Big Ones and Asian Babes, bought the Express Newspapers Group, I was quick to claim that he now wished to be known as Lord Beaver-book. For all I know, he may have found this extremely undermining. To me, it seemed acceptable. I can only go on my own judgement, and the subject of the gag doesn’t always agree. I was at a party once when Posh Spice came over to me and started complaining about how I’d done a gag on Fantasy Football about her having anal sex. She also said she was fed-up with me, as she put it, ‘caning’ her husband on the chat show. I argued my case by saying that her and David were big news and I didn’t feel I’d overdone it. I also pointed out that, while David Beckham effigies were being hanged at Upton Park as part of a national hate campaign against him because he’d been sent off against Argentina, I was defending him on Fantasy World Cup with a speech that described Becks, unironically, as England’s future. She wouldn’t have it. Fair enough. I like to see a woman defending her bloke. Even if she’s wrong.
I met Becks at a party not long ago. I had just recently played him in a sketch on the chat show. He walked up, looked at me, grinned, and said, ‘You must have a bloody good make-up department if they can make you look like me.’
Anyway, now it was the biter bit. And, of course, I felt hard done by. Comedy is my life. Before I walked on stage on December 9th 1987,1 had been a drifter. Like a lot of people, I just didn’t know what I wanted to do. Most of us, the great undecided, never find out. I got lucky. If anyone could be in my shoes when I’m doing stand-up, or when I’m duetting with Kylie Minogue or Eric Clapton, or riffing on some obscure theme during Unplanned, or leading 76,000 people in a chorus of ‘Three Lions’ at Wembley, they’d know why I’m in it. And it’s not for the money. I was an unemployed drunk going nowhere, and then comedy turned up. Here goes, I’ll actually say it. Comedy saved my life. Don’t tell anyone but I’d have done it all for nothing if I had to.
I didn’t even bother to find out what my manager was asking from the BBC because the cash really wasn’t a priority. He’s a good negotiator and I knew he’d get the best deal. He was very upset, felt he’d been totally misrepresented and was talking about taking legal action against the BBC. I wasn’t keen. I thought it was best to say nothing and let it blow over. The following night I went to Teatro, a club on Shaftesbury Avenue owned by actress Lesley Ash and her ex-footballer husband, Lee Chapman.
On the way there, walking up Charing Cross Road, some drunken bloke shouted, ‘Hey, Skinner, you asked for all that money and now you’ve got nothing.’ Not so much an insult, more a news report. Anyway, I just smiled. As soon as I got into the club a woman approached me. I recognised her from various media events but couldn’t put a name to the face. She went straight into it. ‘So, what are you going to do?’ she said. ‘You’ve got a PR mountain to climb. Everyone hates you.’ I suddenly felt a tremendous clarity come upon me. Now was the time for me to finally speak out on the matter. ‘Oh, fuck off,’ I said.
I had a couple of cranberry juices and mulled it over. It was the opinions of the quality papers that had really pissed me off. These sneering, toffee-nosed, modern-novel-reading arse-wipes, who’d got where they were by having a family friend at the Guardian or wearing a significant tie at the interview. How long would they last at a fucking comedy club? It’s no good quoting Proust and pretending to like football when two hundred people are screaming ‘Get off, you cunt’. It’s all very well them getting on their moral high horse about money when they’ve had it all their lives and never got their fingers dirty unless they were playing rugger. Fuck them. Yeah, fuck them. They could mind their own business, or lick my helmet.
These were the calm, reasoned thoughts that went through my mind, sitting in the dark club as the chattering classes chattered on around me. Cranberry juice always makes me tetchy and inclined to generalise. Nevertheless, I felt better when I left. As I crossed Shaftesbury Avenue, two black blokes recognised me. ‘Hey, Frank,’ one of them shouted. ‘Go for that twenty million, man. Make them bastards pay.’
‘Yeah. Do it. Do it,’ the other one said. I really laughed as we shook hands. I hope they read this and realise how much they cheered me up that night. I think theirs was a very black attitude. I suppose it’s why successful rappers wear loads of gold and drive incredibly flash cars. Their black fans seem to love them for it. There’s a fantastic LL Cool J track called ‘Rock the Bells’, with a lyric that goes, ‘Some suckers don’t like me but I’m not concerned. Six G’s for twenty minutes is what I earn.’ Here was me feeling guilty about doing well, and there’s LL writing rhymes that positively celebrate his high wages. Respect.
I once heard an interview with an American baseball coach. The interviewer said to him, ‘You’re not a very popular man at the moment, are you?’ The coach thought this over, before his reply:
‘Y’know, you can spend your whole life trying to be popular but, at the end of the day, the size of the crowd at your funeral will still be largely dictated by the weather.’
Even when I try to mould my behaviour to please others, I often get it wrong. I used to drive a Volkswagen Polo and I remember turning up one day at my brother Terry’s house. I always made a point of not talking about doing TV shows or meeting celebs, unless I was asked. I don’t want my family to think I’ve gone all flash. I was chatting about not much and Terry was staring out of the window with something clearly on his mind. ‘Have you ever thought about getting another car?’ he asked. I looked at him, waiting for the pay-off. ‘It’d be really good if you turned up in something like a Cadillac,’ he said. And then the piece de resistance, and I swear this is true. ‘And maybe you could wear one of them silky cowboy shirts.’ I’d still blown it. Not flash enough!
At Unplanned tonight, someone asked how I could possibly justify getting three million a year. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you can’t put a price on laughter.’ They laughed. I think they found the whole thing as ridiculous as I did.
It was a wild night tonight. Someone asked a question about a recent, very grim news story about a man who was ritually sodomised by a bunch of blokes and then murdered. Not an obvious source of comedy, but we went for it. Someone in the audience went on about how many men had shagged him. ‘Yes, apparently,’ I lied, ‘when they opened up the body, he was like a Chicken Kiev.’ The laugh began as a scream of horror but then became the sound of people rejoicing in the sheer extremity of the image. I hate comics who try to shock. That’s easy, but to say funny stuff that is also shocking, I sometimes like that. It was the I-can’t-believe-you-said-that moment. And while the laugh was only just beginning to fade I stood up defiantly, punched the air and shouted, ‘That’s three million quid’s worth, right there!’ White-heat laughter.
What joy.
As a young kid, I was completely obsessed with Westerns. As I’ve already explained, I was no stranger to a cowboy outfit, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. There se
emed to be about twenty different Western TV series at the time: Bonanza, Have Gun Will Travel, Rawhide, Wagon Train, Cheyenne, Gunsmoke, and the rest. I watched them all. This was another strange aspect of my childhood. I never remember any pressure from my parents to go to bed early. It was with some surprise that I discovered at school that the other kids were all in bed for about 7.30. I was stopping up till about eleven on a regular basis. I wasn’t being disobedient. Disobedience wasn’t really an option with my old man. Nor was it, I think, a case of neglect. It was just that news hadn’t reached us that little kids went to bed early. I don’t think it’s had any real effect on me, except I’m the only person of my age group who remembers Legends of the West and The Braden Beat.
Anyway, in my Cowboy religion, these Western shows were my daily worship. And I had a Bible too. It was called Buffalo Bill’s Western Annual I read it every day. We didn’t have too many books in the house but I read like a wild thing. I started school at five and seemed to learn to read almost immediately. It is one of my few acquired skills. I can’t ride a bike, ice-skate or ski, and I’ve only just learned to swim and won’t go out of my depth, which also takes out water skiing and scuba diving. I’m a real funboy on holidays. But reading I could do.
I remember my dad relaxing with the News of the World once and I started reading out loud over his shoulder, a story of how sex cinemas were becoming more and more widespread, which included a description of one or two of the films doing the rounds. I was halfway through a synopsis of Sex in the Park before my dad realised where the voice was coming from. He’d had a drink and I think he’d assumed it was him who was reading out loud. When he finally worked it out, the combination of lewd detail in an innocent child’s voice must have been quite scary.
Buffalo Bill’s Western Annual, with its colour plates of Daniel Boone killing a bear at point-blank range with an old musket, and a bowler-hatted Bat Masterson gambling on a Mississippi riverboat, was much more appropriate. I quote these examples, but I lost my Buffalo Bill many years ago and am relying totally on memory. It’s surprising what lingers in the memory, though. Writing this book has opened doors in my subconscious that would otherwise have probably stayed locked forever. Writing the description of my garden-screaming, for example, was quite harrowing. It was like I could actually feel now what I felt then.
I remember the first time I tried magic mushrooms. I guess I was about twenty-five. I was at a friend’s house in Edgbaston, Birmingham, and had already been drinking cider and smoking dope all day, which gave me the courage to try the mushrooms. Their effect manifested itself in two specific ways. Firstly, in my head I got a very clear image of an old black-and-white photo from a children’s encyclopedia that was knocking around the house when I was a kid. That night, twenty years later, I could see it before me in all its detail. It was a photograph of some sort of microbe-type thing, all circular and emanating light. Up until that point I had forgotten the existence of the encyclopedia, let alone the microbe picture, but I sat on my friend’s bed and tried to describe this vision to my mates. For some reason, they were absolutely fascinated. I’ve been in show business for thirteen years, but I’ve never had an audience as captivated as they were that night. I believe someone actually said ‘Wow!’
The second effect was that my friend played a Fripp and Eno album, and I decided it was the best thing I’d ever heard. I stayed the night at the flat and made the major mistake of listening to it again the next morning. Let’s just say I revised my opinion. It is for this same reason that one-night stands are always better if you know the number of an early-hours cab firm.
About five years after that mushroom-crazed night, I came across a copy of the children’s encyclopedia in a second-hand bookshop in Quinton. This was remarkable, not just because it involved the re-discovery of a very old, out-of-print book, but also because the merest idea of being in a second-hand bookshop nowadays fills me with horror. For some reason, second-hand bookshops, classical music and Radio 4 all make me think of death. Anyway, there I was. I opened the book, and, after flicking through a few pages, there was the microbe, almost exactly as I had remembered it. Except that it was a picture of the solar system. The circles, the light, all there but scaled down rather than up. I thought this mis-remembrance was really interesting but I never got round to buying the book. The reason for this was even stranger.
As I stood looking at the ex-microbe, I heard a man’s voice from the other side of the bookcase. He was chatting to the shop’s owner about Nazi war atrocities. He said he had a massive collection of books on this and related subjects, and went on to say that he had been at a party at someone’s house recently and their collection was even ‘better’ than his own. However, he explained to the attentive shop-owner, this ‘better’ collection was very much enriched by books about Vietnamese war atrocities. He had now resolved to move his collecting in this direction and told the shop-owner to keep back any such books and he would buy them. I was starting to feel a bit uneasy when the conversation was suddenly interrupted by a distorted man’s voice, clearly coming out of some sort of radio or walkie-talkie. No, it couldn’t be. I peered through a gap in the books. It was true. The war-atrocities book collector was a fucking copper.
Anyway, what I do remember about the Buffalo Bill’s Western Annual was that I loved it, as I loved all things ‘cowboy’. I had a cushion folded over the arm of the settee, which acted as a saddle. I straddled the settee-arm and rode the prairies of my imagination. It sounds tossy but I can’t think of a better way of putting it. My mom got very confused when the little girl next door asked her if Davy Crockett was coming out to play. It was the first time I had given a girl a false name. My dad must have been very proud of me – after all, it was a lot more inventive than Len. And I bet he’d never convinced one that he’d died at the Alamo, either.
However, I made the mistake of showing the girl next door my Daniel-Boone-killing-the-bear picture. This sounds like a gag but it’s absolutely true. She never brought teddy out into the garden again. Not that I had a musket, but I did carry quite a tasty white plastic rifle. This was where Mr Parkes came in. Mr Parkes lived next-door-but-one where he spent all day sitting outside his garden shed (he only had one!) watching the world go by. Whenever I was out with my rifle, Mr Parkes would stick a matchbox on top of the open shed-door and invite me to shoot it off. I rarely missed. Only quite recently did I work out that he was tapping the door with his foot when I shot. However, what was brilliant about this was that every so often he’d have me miss. I suppose he was trying to give me an early lesson in life.
The little girl who lived on the other side of my house was not really party to my cowboy world. I didn’t have much to do with her until one day when she was standing on the fence that separated the two gardens. Land, I had learned from the cowboys, was special. Special enough to kill or be killed for. I told her to get off the fence. She wouldn’t. I told her again. Nothing. Couldn’t she see the rifle? The first shot was over her head. She laughed. So I fired twice, straight at her. Somehow, I missed. Then I saw a half-housebrick lying in my garden. Half-enders we called them. I put down the rifle and picked up the half-ender. I threw it as hard as I could. Suddenly, she was covered in blood. There was silence, more than you’d expect, and then tears – from both of us. She needed stitches. There were arguments. I was very scared.
But what if I’d killed her? Imagine how different my life would have been. I guess I was too young for prosecution but I’d have been marked for life. Do you think you’d be reading the autobiography of a much-loved, successful, highly paid entertainer who’d killed a little girl when he was five? I don’t think so. Even if I’d got that far, the tabloids would have made mincemeat out of me once the story filtered out. Do you really want to laugh at the evil killer freak-kid? Do you want to watch the cowboy murderer pretending he’s cured now? My stomach is churning just writing this. She was fine, not even a scar, but what if the half-ender had caught her a bit differently?
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Is that what life and death are all about? Who knows which decision is going to be the one that changes your life forever, for better or worse? Like when Roger Milford didn’t book Gazza for that first challenge in the 1991 FA Cup Final and Gazza was crippled on the second challenge and England didn’t qualify for the 1994 World Cup, or when Jeffrey Archer wrote in his diary: Monday – Stayed in and chatted to my lovely wife, who I’m very loyal to. Tuesday – Spent the whole day definitely not giving money to a black prostitute. Wednesday – Bought this diary.
You never know when you’re picking up the half-ender that will change your life. It’s a scary thought. My dad never hit me for throwing that stone. He could see how terrified I was. But justice took many forms in the Wild West Midlands.
One night, a few months later, I was playing in the street outside my house. Some of the bigger kids were taking part in this game, which involved leaning a flat stick on the edge of the kerb, placing a stone on the lower end, and then stamping on the raised end to make the stone fly high in the air. I thought I’d give it a go. In fact, I was so enthralled that I stood directly over the stick to get a really good view. I stamped on the stick as hard as I could. There was a loud thud and my mouth hurt. The Wife of Bath, in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, had a gap between her two front teeth, which, the poet says, is a common sign of wantonness. Suddenly, that night, I went wanton. The stone smashed into my teeth and created a gap at the bottom which is there to this day, though it’s now more of an upward slant than an actual gap. My lips almost instantly swelled up to about five times their normal size and the kids started calling me Mick Jagger. I walked into my house, holding back the tears. Sticks and stones . . . and Stones.
I suppose my don’t-cry policy was based on the cowboy thing as well. Every Western seemed to have a scene where the hero had to grit his teeth while a bullet was prised out of his hide with a Bowie knife. Pain was there to be borne in silence. My teeth weren’t really fit for gritting but I stuck with it. Thirty-five years later I was on a ranch holiday in Montana. Yes, the old urges were still there. I’d swapped the settee-arm for a real American quarter-horse and a small group of us were inching our way down the side of a canyon, a steep and scary ride where we had to relax the reins and trust the horses. The genuine cowboy who was leading the party was keeping his eye on stuff. My horse stumbled and was propelled into racing downward through a narrow gap between two trees. My leg was forced against a thick branch which eventually snapped under the strain. The pain was pretty severe and I yelled out in agony. ‘Frank,’ said our still-totally-cool party leader, ‘cowboy-up a little.’
Frank Skinner Autobiography Page 8
