Frank Skinner Autobiography

by Frank Skinner

  If you can’t tolerate football, feel free to skip this bit. I have a certain amount of respect for people who don’t like football. Even though, as you know, my dad always said, ‘Never trust a man who doesn’t like football,’ I prefer such a man to the dabbler. You know, the one who watches the odd England game and usually claims to support Arsenal. He who hates football is a man who must have experienced football in an emotional way or it would not have triggered such a strong, albeit negative, emotion. The dabbler is a man who has experienced football in a third-gear, quite-like-it kind of a way. This is beyond me. To encounter football is to meet with something big. It requires love or hate. Anything in between is an insult. I hope you will have, up to now, found me to be quite a genial, mild-mannered chap. I think this is a fair summing-up of my general demeanour, but football tends to bring out the mouthy git in me.

  Anyway, West Bromwich Albion are in the Division One play-offs. We’re only three games away from the Premier League. Trust me, this is massive. We play Bolton Wanderers at the Hawthorns, West Brom’s home ground, next Sunday. Sunday is also the BAFTA Awards ceremony, in London, of course. Let me make one thing absolutely clear. If there is a choice between Dave and me winning a BAFTA for Unplanned or West Brom winning the play-offs, it’s a no-contest. West Brom, or Albion as I would normally refer to them, are the great love of my life. I’ve loved them literally as long as I can remember. I care about them. I was at a home game against Coventry City in the late seventies when Albion’s veteran midfielder, Tony ‘Bomber’ Brown, stuck one in from thirty yards. I rose to my feet with fists clenched and I remember very clearly thinking to myself, ‘This is as happy as it’s possible to be.’ Of course, women and work have made me elated, but always that elation is slightly scarred by fear of losing, or betrayal, or humiliation or the burden of responsibility. You know, the usual stuff. But Bomber’s goal was joy in its simplest, purest form. Forgive me for sounding like Mr Showbiz, but, as I sang on the B-Side of ‘Three Lions ’98’:

  Waiting and wondering till we score,

  Then scream at the sky above.

  So much bigger and better

  Than grown-up games like love.

  On the other side of the football-coin, I cried like a baby when Albion got relegated to Division Two. We haven’t been in the top flight for fourteen seasons. In all the time I’ve supported them, they’ve won two major trophies, the last one in 1968! I don’t often use an exclamation mark, but that last sentence really deserved one. If any job had put me through the misery that Albion have, I’d have walked years ago. If any woman had done it, I’d still be in prison. But I remain totally loyal to them. I do not even lust after other teams and commit adultery in my heart. There is a chant that begins, ‘We’re Albion till we die . . .’ This is one of the few opinions I hold that I know I will hold forever. There is another chant that goes, to the tune of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, ‘We will follow the Albion, over land and sea, and water.’ This one, I’ve never really understood.

  Despite all this, I was quite a late starter as far as actually going to the games was concerned. I didn’t see Albion play live till I was ten. It was December 1967, the Saturday before Christmas. We were playing Southampton at the Hawthorns and it pissed down with rain from start to finish. My brother Terry took me and sat me on the wall at the front of the Smethwick End of the ground. I had my legs tucked behind an advertising hoarding but I still got drenched, totally, utterly drenched so that my vest was stuck to my back and the blue dye from my overcoat had run into the white cuffs of my shirt. What’s more, it was a goalless draw. And, guess what. I was hooked. It remains one of the most exciting days of my life, the best Christmas present I ever had. I became a regular after that and although I miss some games because of work, I’m a season ticket holder thirty-four years later. And counting.

  Unfortunately, we live in the age of the celebrity fan, many of whom are phoneys who couldn’t, at gunpoint, name three members of the first team. They turn up in the Directors’ Box twice a season and get interviewed before the Cup Final to discuss ‘their team’. I pay for my season ticket and sit in the stand with ordinary fans like myself. Mind you, before I sound too purist, I love a freebie at away games. Why put money in their pockets?

  The great thing about being a season ticket holder is that you end up sitting with the same people every week. Some you speak to, some you don’t. There is an ageing ex-marine who sits next to me. He goes up for every header and crunches in to every tackle. At first, this got on my nerves. Sometimes he virtually pushed me out of my seat, but I’ve grown to like it. It reminds me of watching boxing on the telly with my dad. He threw every punch and sat bobbing and weaving on the sofa till the fight was over. I once grabbed a towel and started fanning him between rounds. He laughed, but I’m not sure he was actually aware of his synchronised shadow boxing. It came from somewhere deep down, a dim echo of some three-rounder in a school hall in West Cornforth. A forgotten dream that he could have been a contender.

  I think it’s the same for the ex-marine. With the right breaks, maybe he could have worn the blue and white. Then there was the old guy to my left, who I once heard shout of an opposition striker, ‘I’m glad we didn’t have him on the five-inch mortars.’ A heckle he’d probably been using for some fifty years. Or the guy two rows in front who always leaves twenty minutes before the end, regardless of the score or the significance of the match. Or the bloke I was next to, leaving the ground after we’d lost 2–0 to Nottingham Forest, following the tannoy announcement: ‘We have a message for Mr Martin So-and-so, your wife has just given birth to a baby boy in Sandwell District Hospital.’ The bloke next to me said, ‘Poor bugger. He’s had to sit through this lot and now he’s got to go home and make his own tea.’ Or the bloke behind who must have read a coaching manual or something similar. He once shouted out, ‘Come on, Albion. They’re getting us on the second phase pick-up every time. And quite rightly.’ I’m all for the first part of this. I mean the ‘come on’ bit. I can get through a whole match’s shouting with just ‘come on’ said in various intonations: angry, pleading, plaintive, excited – it’s so versatile.

  Sadly, the rise of the celebrity fan means that it’s almost impossible for people like me to talk about football without sounding like a bandwagon-jumper. That hacks me off. The only advantage of Albion’s poor record over the last ten years or so is that no one ever accuses me of glory-chasing. Well, not the only advantage. It’s also much easier to park.

  The much discussed rise in football’s popularity reminds me of a similar turnaround in 1977. Before the August of that year, the only other Elvis Presley fan I knew was my sister-in-law, Joyce. At school, my Elvis obsession had me marked down as a bit of a weirdo. Suddenly, he dies and they’re everywhere. And telling me they always loved him. Yeah, sure.

  As a football fan, I should, of course, be pleased that the game has become so much more popular over the last ten years. Bullshit. When I first started watching Albion, our average attendance was around 32,000, now it’s around 16,000. Ergo, football is only half as popular as it was. Full stop. Any other statistics are irrelevant to me.

  Anyway, I warned you I might get a bit angry-young-man about this. The fact is, I’ve grown up with football. I’ve watched it grow too. For example, when I first went to the Albion there was no segregation of fans. I would stand behind the goal Albion were attacking and then use half time to wander round to the other goal, so I’d still be close at hand if they scored. Not that I saw many goals. Oh, we scored them. Quite a lot. But I only saw about twenty per cent of them. When administrators go on about the safety aspects of terracing, and the supporters’ organisations go on about the atmosphere, I really wish someone would mention that the chief characteristic of terracing is that you can’t see a fucking thing. As a kid, this was particularly true. Lots of schoolboys brought milk crates to stand on or special little platforms knocked up by their dads, with handles for carrying to and from the game. I used the ti
p-toe neck-stretching method which is, of course, fatally flawed because everybody tip-toes and neck-stretches at the same time. Thus, the relative heights remain the same. We, the great unsighted, might as well have all made a pact to rest on our heels, relax our necks, and accept our miserable lot.

  The game was different then. It was only just starting to become the modern game. When a player got injured in those days, or there was any kind of long stoppage, the other players would lie on the grass and relax while the matter was being attended to. I miss that. I miss lots of stuff. But football nostalgia has also been hijacked by a lot of researcher-assisted Johnny-come-latelys who write stuff about funny haircuts and those little tabs that Leeds used to have on their socks, so I’m leaving it there. Anyway, all I really miss is Albion being in the top flight. The next three weeks might sort that out.

  One particular memory of Moat Farm Infant School seems nondescript but is, I think, very significant. We had a thing at home – I don’t know if it was a family saying or a bit of local street-talk – but if anyone seemed stupid we’d say he was ‘as saft as a bottle of pop’. ‘Saft’, I presume, was a bastardisation of ‘soft’. Who knows? Anyway, I was in the classroom at Moat Farm, and we were doing painting. Some kid had a cuddly toy he was showing to me. I dismissed it by saying he was as saft as a bottle of pop and got a big laugh from the surrounding kids. It’s the first audience laugh I ever got, and I really liked it. I think I was six.

  The more pedantic reader might suggest that, as I (judging by the cowboy-suit story) was something of a show-off, I probably got audience laughs before this, but I just don’t remember them. Well, believe me, when it comes to audience laughs, I’d remember. Soon the word went round the class. The phrase was repeated by other kids and got secondary laughs. Soon a crowd of children gathered around my desk, wanting me to say it again. They knew exactly what it was, they just wanted to hear me say it, preferably over and over. It was like being Harry Enfield.

  There must have been fifteen kids around my desk. It was the first sense of celebrity I ever got and I really liked it. I said it again, they all laughed. Soon the teacher came over to see what all the fuss was about. She could hear laughs and see I was at the centre of it but couldn’t work it out. The desk was covered in newspaper because of the painting, and I had turned some of the letters in the headline words into silly faces, just as. an unthinking doodle, no more. She said, God, I remember it so clearly, ‘Oh, I see. He’s made funny faces out of the letters.’ I was outraged. It was the first time I was misunderstood by a critic, and I didn’t like it. There I was, setting new standards with my ground-breaking ‘saft as a bottle of pop’ material, and she thought I was dealing in stupid cartoons. I hit her with my new catchphrase. The kids all laughed. I think someone whooped but I may have embroidered the moment a little. The teacher tried to force a smile but couldn’t see what was funny. I remember the expression on her face. I’ve had two-thousand-seater theatres rocking with laughs, but there’ll always be one face in the crowd who has the same expression as that teacher. And what I hate is that all the laughing faces blur out of focus and the only face I can see is that one.

  I said at the beginning of this book that I didn’t like autobiographies or biographies that went on about the subject’s childhood. I hope I’ve sugared the pill a bit by talking about current, showbizzy stuff as well. It’s just that now I come to think about these incidents from my early days, I start to think that stuff about ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you a man’ is more real than I thought. I now recognise a lot of current themes in my life that, on reflection, seemed to have been planted way back then. Of course, it could be that I’m looking back at insignificant incidents and then imposing meaning on them that was never really there. Why don’t you decide?

  In the Unplanned show, we have an audience-member on stage to document the topics we cover on a white board. As I’ve said, we call them ‘The Secretary’. It’s a comedy device, obviously. If the secretary is an interesting character it gives us a whole new avenue for laughs. Tonight’s secretary was called Shelley. Turned out that her uncle is Mick McManus. In case you don’t know, Mick McManus was one of the most famous wrestlers in Britain in the sixties and seventies. He was one of the bad-guy wrestlers. I didn’t realise it until I read an essay by this French writer called Roland Barthes a few years back, but wrestling is a modern-day morality play. It has good guys and bad guys and, most interestingly, the bad guys win quite a lot. Wrestling comes from the same school of realism as Mr Parkes. It would’ve been easy enough to make good triumph all the time in the wrestling ring, but apart from the predictability factor, it just wouldn’t seem true. I know it seems odd to talk about wrestling and truth in the same sentence, but even allowing for the audience’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, it still needs to be kind of, well, real.

  I used to watch wrestling . . . hold it. I need to make something clear here. When I talk about wrestling, I mean British wrestling in the sixties and seventies. Wrestling that was on ITV’s Saturday afternoon World of Sport programme and also on most Wednesday nights on the same channel. Wrestling that was commentated on by Kent Walton. Wrestling that included stars like McManus, Jackie ‘Mr TV’ Pallo, Les Kellett, Billy Two Rivers, Johnny Kwango, Honey Boy Zimba and Adrian Street. What I do not mean is American wrestling in the eighties and nineties, where everyone looks like a cross between a body-builder and a heavy-metal star. The mainstays of the wrestling I love were middle-aged rough bastards with beer-bellies and dirty fingernails. The sort of blokes you could see bashing someone’s head against a bus stop on a Saturday night in any northern town. To the young me, these men were gods.

  Anyway, I used to watch wrestling at two main local venues, Thimblemill Baths and the Hen and Chickens pub. The Hen and Chickens also had a country-and-western evening on Thursday nights which attracted a lot of divorced older women. Younger men, in search of, amongst other things, a nice breakfast, would go there to meet the divorcees. It was known locally as Grab-a-Granny night.

  Thimblemill Baths was a great place for all sorts of entertainment, including swimming, obviously. I remember Keith got arrested there once after a dance. The police claimed he was half-way up a lamppost, calling out encouragement to his fellow rioters. Keith always said he was stitched up. The headline in the local newspaper, the Smethwick Telephone, was ‘Youths swarm like locusts’. Whenever the word ‘youth’ appeared in a headline, it usually meant trouble. Terry got arrested for wiping several glasses off the bar in a pub that refused to serve him. The headline was, of course, ‘Youth has smashing time’.

  Incidentally, one thing I never worked out was how the Smethwick Telephone got its name. I imagined the editorial staff, all gathered round a large table, looking at the newspaper, saying stuff like, ‘Well, it’s definitely some form of communication. Maybe it’s a telephone’, followed by lots of nodding and muttered agreement. The staff at the Telephone were certainly firm believers in the old adage that every picture tells a story. In fact, I wondered if they believed that their readers couldn’t actually read at all. For example, I once read a story in there about a man who was retiring from his job in a tube factory. The accompanying picture showed the man, standing outside the factory. Behind him stood several people in overalls, all looking at him and waving, and next to them was a much smaller group in suits and ties one of whom was proffering a large carriage-clock. The non-clock-carriers were also waving. At the front stood the man, waving with one hand, and holding a large tube in the other.

  In another story, a girl had passed her A-level geography, and they had her in a mortar-board hat, giving a big double thumbs-up over a map of the world.

  However the Telephone’s finest hour was when a woman from nearby Rowley Regis claimed that a flying saucer had landed in her garden and two little aliens had got out. In the front-page story that resulted, she said she had spoken to the little green men and they had understood exactly what she said. If you’ve ever m
et anyone from Rowley Regis you’d know how unlikely this was. Anyway, she told a Telephone reporter that she had taken the little men into her house and given them mince pics (it wasn’t even Christmas) and then they had left. I know this all sounds like nonsense, but I’ll remember the last sentence of that article if I live to be a hundred. It said, ‘She watched as the alien craft rose into the morning sky and disappeared, towards Dudley.’

  Anyway, I developed my taste for wrestling by watching it on the TV. My number one hero was a bloke called Les Kellett. He always looked about fifty and had a fair old belly on him, but the great thing about Kellert was that he was funny, I mean really funny. One of his favourite bits was to make like he was dead on his feet with no chance of recovery. He would stagger around the ring with his eyes half-open and his opponent would go in for the kill, at which point Les would suddenly recover completely and give the shocked opponent a good hiding. He would also often spit at the referee while talking to him and then pretend it was an accident, or pat his opponent on the back so the man would think it was the referee’s signal to break, thus releasing Les from a tricky situation. You might suggest all this was a fix, but so what? If Les was on, I was there, watching his every move and doing impressions of him. If I had to pick my all-time favourite comics, Les would be right up there.