The first time I watched wrestling live was at Thimblemill Baths when I was about eleven. The star of the night was a bloke called Lord Bertie Topham, who arrived in the ring wearing a monocle, top hat and opera cloak, and this was a long time before Chris Eubank. Lord Bertie was accompanied by his butler carrying a crystal decanter of water on a silver tray. This was a brilliant act for a wrestler: class warfare. He sneered at the audience, called them common and complained about the smell, all in a plummy posh voice. To hammer this home, the opponent, an ordinary-looking bloke, wore his working-classness on his sleeve, and abused Topham in a strong local accent so that the lines were cleanly drawn. We were really desperate that Topham should be taught a lesson, shown that he couldn’t treat hard-working ordinary people like that. We were all screaming out ‘snob’ at the arrogant toff. And then, in a typical example of how the class war goes, Lord Bertie won by foul means. He held the poor Joe Nobody in a headlock while the butler battered his head with the silver tray.
We were outraged but it was too late. The referee, as always with figures of authority, sided with the representative of the upper classes, and Topham left the ring, arms raised in celebration, to a backdrop of loud booing and abuse. The sense of injustice and helplessness the crowd felt as they left that night must have seemed oddly familiar to a lot of people.
Still, the lure of live wrestling lived with me. I spent the evening of my eighteenth birthday at the Hen and Chickens, watching the wrestling. The Hen and Chickens’ bills were pretty experimental. They included women’s wrestling as a regular feature. I remember there was a big fat bird called the Black Widow, who would greet the crowd with the most elaborate V-sign I’ve ever seen. It started, fingers pointing downward, at ankle level, and in one fabulous sweeping motion ended with fingers held in the traditional thrusting V, high above her head.
But the women were often disappointing, stretching our suspension of disbelief to the very limit. Slaps clearly didn’t make contact, throws received far too much help from those being thrown. The crowd would get restless. I suppose we all knew it was fixed but we didn’t want our noses rubbed in it. They were letting the side down and lots of people were angry at being forced to confront the all-corrosive truth. Once the poison was in the well, we’d be lost forever. I remember, a few years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and wondered if my religious belief was based on a similar convention. It was a scary half-hour, but while doubt does hurt it also nourishes. I’m talking religious belief now, not wrestling. There’s no room for doubt in wrestling. With religion, I find doubt almost reassuring. It shows that I’m still thinking about my faith, still searching, involved in something not completed, but ongoing. But with wrestling, which offers you, at best, only a fragile truth, and is always switching, mid-bout, between real-life and theatre, you need a firm grip. Believe or leave.
The Hen and Chickens may have fucked up with the lady wrestlers but it continued its policy of cutting-edge entertainment by announcing one night that the next bill would include dwarf-wrestling. This had the crowd buzzing on the way out. Unfortunately, one problem with watching wrestling is that the night often begins with a series of apologies for people on the bill who couldn’t make it. The excuses were often, to say the least, cosmetic. My own favourite was ‘Sorry, Klondike Jake will not be appearing tonight, because he’s in Glasgow.’ Oh, I see. Fair enough.
However, when one of the dwarves doesn’t make it, the one who does is at a bit of a loose end. You can’t really stick him in with one of the big boys, so he gets paid for just turning up. I wouldn’t be surprised if the management toyed with the idea of pitting him against a big wrestler and staging a slingshot incident to produce a shock result, but, as it turned out, they merely introduced Tiny Tim, as he was called, to the disappointed crowd so we could, well, see a dwarf, I suppose.
Anyway, the next wrestling night they managed to produce the pair. On that memorable Tuesday night at the Chicks, Tiny Tim’s opponent was Little Beaver, ‘all the way from Chicago’. Well, it was good of him to make the journey, but strange that he’d picked up a broad Birmingham accent on the way. Little Beaver took off his coonskin cap and the fight began, but the crowd, now finally confronted with two half-naked dwarves, became sullen and ill at ease. Normally, the bouts were accompanied by all sorts of cheering and abuse, but now there was silence in the hall. All you could hear was the dull slap of dwarf against dwarf. Whether it was shock, pity, fear, horror, respect, or a mixture of these, I don’t know, but the silence was unbearable.
As the fight continued in this vacuum, Little Beaver, who had set himself up as the bad guy, probably because he was slightly taller than Tiny Tim, gave Tim a totally unprovoked kick up the arse. I never thought I’d go to my grave knowing what sound it makes when a dwarf kicks another dwarf up the arse, but I will. However, the injustice was more than I could handle. ‘Pick on somebody your own size, Beaver,’ I hollered. A big laugh went up and suddenly the floodgates were open. ‘Come on, you short-arsed bastards,’ called a black bloke in a smart grey suit to my left. The taboo was broken and soon everyone was joining in. It was the most mediaeval night of my life. At the end, both wrestlers got loud cheers as they passed under the ropes.
I didn’t tell Shelley McManus any of this. She was a pretty girl and Dave and me did a bit of comedy-flirting. Shelley said that if it came to a passionate encounter, she couldn’t decide which one of us she’d choose. I suggested Dave and me could operate as a tag-team. Just think, if I had told the Hen and Chickens story the Little Beaver jokes would have been thick on the ground.
It was the day I nonchalantly sang ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ in the kitchen that my dad resolved to get me a transfer to a Roman Catholic school. ‘Listen to him,’ he said, ‘singing that HYMN.’ Never before or since have I heard the word ‘hymn’ said with such disgust. As far as Dad was concerned, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ was a Protestant battle-cry, and Moat Farm Infants had taken me as far as they could. It was time to learn about my religion, to take the three C sacraments (Confession, Communion, Confirmation), to recognise that I was part of a spiritual and cultural minority that had been beaten, burned and beheaded by various representatives of the British establishment, but had somehow survived, battered but unbowed. It was time to get Catholic.
I’d been going to Catholic church on Sundays and stuff, but the real combat training had been on hold until now. So, aged eight, I started at St. Hubert’s Roman Catholic School on the Birmingham New Road. This was the main road between Birmingham and Wolverhampton, usually referred to as The Wolvo. You couldn’t really miss the school because it adjoined St. Hubert’s Roman Catholic Church, my family’s regular place of worship, which had an incredibly tall steeple adorned with an enormous white cross painted on the brickwork. At that time the parish priest was Father O’Doherty. He was, as you might guess, Irish, but he might as well have been Lithuanian for all you could understand of him. No, actually, that’s a bit unfair. You could understand about one word in twenty, so his homilies went like this: ‘Ar bara baba baba baba Jesus sappa passa papa, ar bara bara the apostles ba bara baba . . .’ and so on. To make things worse, he was not of the opinion that brevity is the soul of wit. His homilies were long. I mean long. My dad always said that Father O’Doherty had to have ‘his pound of flesh’. You see, I’m not the only one in the family who liked to quote Shakespeare.
Speaking of which, many years later, just a few months after I’d started driving, I had my first car crash. I inched out of a side-road in my 1967 Vauxhall Viva and slammed into some bloke’s Nissan. He leapt out and started going on and on about how I’d nearly killed him and his wife. I explained that he was driving too fast and thus turned my safe manoeuvre into a dangerous one. He went on and on. I was on my way back from Halesowen College where I had just given a lecture on Hamlet to a group of mature students. (How did the seven-year-old with the piss-bucket get to be lecturing on Hamlet? Stick around.) As the Nissan driver wittere
d on, my mind wandered back to the Prince of Denmark. The Nissan driver’s wife eventually wound down the window and joined in the attack. ‘He’s right,’ she said, sticking up for her husband, ‘you did pull right out.’ Almost to myself, I muttered, in the words of Hamlet, ‘How all occasions do inform against me.’
‘Look,’ said the Nissan driver, ‘there’s no need to inform anybody.’
So anyway, I went to St. Hubert’s. The school had a house system. Most schools did then. You were put into what they called ‘houses’, which just meant that each pupil was allocated to a group or house and won ‘house points’ for good behaviour, good work, promptness or sporting achievements. At the end of each year, the points were added up and the winning house was, well, the winning house. We wore badges with our house names on and it was good early practice for losing and letting other people down.
The houses were all named after Catholic martyrs like More, Fisher, Campion etc. School trips tended to be to Harvington Hall in Worcestershire, where we could squeeze into the ‘priest holes’ and play at being persecuted. Here, brave Catholic priests were forced to hide out from Protestant oppressors out to get them just because they were saying Mass on the quiet. This might sound like indoctrination to you, but so what?
Catholics are different and there’s no getting round it. Go to a Catholic church on a Sunday and you’ll see a very special mix of people. Of course there’ll be that solid mainstay of all organised religions, the very old, scoring their own house points before the ultimate end-of-term count-up. But then there’ll be the special Catholic elements: the chunky skinhead in the Glasgow Celtic shirt; the beautiful dusky maiden of Spanish or Italian descent; the old Irish man with red face and gnarled hands, still smelling of drink from the night before; the trendy young oriental couple in ripped jeans and clubbers t-shirts, the black family with the incredibly cute kids. They’re all there. Of course, this doesn’t mean that they’re all necessarily operating on a higher spiritual plane than other Christians, but they just seem to have more balls about them than the C of E congregation down the road, where bad skin, acrylic fibres and badly chosen spectacles seem to be the order of the day.
Not that anyone in the UK with Christian beliefs could ever consider themselves fashionable. I know it got trendy to wear t-shirts with Mary or Jesus on, or big crucifixes and so on, but that’s just externals. (Generally speaking, I’m not keen on this religious-iconography-as-fashion-item thing, but I saw a brilliant t-shirt that had a Renaissance portrait of Jesus on it and said underneath, ‘Jesus is Coming. Look busy.’ Funny, but also sort of true.)
I tell you, in a society where all manner of once-smirked-upon behaviour like wearing crystals and Feng Shui has become acceptable, only Christian belief can definitely guarantee you the label ‘weird’.
I recently spent a week in Italy with a Catholic mate of mine. It was really liberating to be able to cross yourself in the street and kiss statues and stuff without getting stared at. If I’d been with a Protestant mate, I don’t think we’d have had as much fun. Besides, how could he have coped with the fashion demands of being in Italy?
In 1990, I went on a whirlwind tour of Sweden with Eddie Izzard, doing stand-up to people whose English was good but not quite good enough to understand stand-up. On our way home, Eddie and me were chatting on the plane and he said he was planning to use his stand-up act to talk about the fact that he was a transvestite. He said he thought it was really important to talk about stuff that’s true to you when you’re doing stand-up. I agreed with this. It’s why I’ve never been so crazy about character-comics. You know, people who just play a part on stage. I know it can be really funny but, personally, I like to know the person who’s up there. I want their opinions and attitudes. It’s like Wordsworth said about the poet, he should be a ‘man talking to man’. Or woman, obviously. If I want characters, I’ll watch a play.
So, we talked about how an audience would react to a comic telling them he was a transvestite and then doing gags about it. We agreed maybe not at the Circus Tavern, Purfleet, but generally speaking, a so-called alternative comedy crowd would probably be fine with it. So Eddie asked me if there was anything close to my heart that I hadn’t yet tackled as part of my stand-up act. I suggested Catholicism. We both sat in silence for a bit, mulling it over. Transvestism, yes, but Catholicism? We agreed it was a no-no. They’d never go for that. Too weird. I think lapsed Catholics can get away with talking about Catholicism in retrospect, but only if they take a negative, ‘How stupid was that?’ approach. Still, I’d rather lose Catholicism as a stand-up topic than burn in hell as a betrayer.
So, St. Hubert’s. The teaching staff included two nuns, the older of which was the headmistress, Mother Mary Adrian. My brother Keith had been to St. Hubert’s four years earlier and had warned me about Mother Mary. He told me she was the strictest teacher he’d ever known. Mind you, he also told me that he’d put lighted Roman candles under the Nazi soldiers’ beds during their occupation of Oldbury.
One day, me and my mate Jeffrey were walking down the school corridor arm-in-arm, singing some current chart hit, when Mother Mary Adrian emerged from a classroom. She was so hacked off she was almost growling. How dare we sing in the corridor? She told us to wait outside her office. We stood there, terrified, underneath the enormous dark-brown wooden crucifix on the wall. Jeffrey looked up at this cross and said, ‘He’ll help us.’ And he meant it. The real, deeply felt, uncomplicated faith of the small child. He liked wrestling as well. So we waited . . . for ages. Soon, Jeffrey was aching for the toilet, but we both knew that if Mother Mary came back and Jeffrey wasn’t there, well, we just knew it was a bad idea. So we waited. Maybe she forgot. Maybe Jesus had helped us, although we hadn’t seen any lightning or heard a loud bang and resulting scream.
Then she came back. We were tight against the wall like butterflies pinned to a board, looking up at her as she towered over us. She was about four foot ten. I took the initial verbal attack, then she turned to Jeffrey. ‘And as for you . . .’ At this point, a long jet of urine came through Jeffrey’s short grey trousers and Mother Mary had to jump, feet together, out of the way. If this was Jesus’s attempt at a struck-by-lightning scenario, it was a bit lame. Mother Mary screamed at Jeffrey but it was too late. Yes, the floodgates were open. Her initial protest was abandoned. In fact, there was a strange moment when she actually waited, in impatient silence, for the piss to stop. She looked at Jeffrey, then at me. I looked at Jeffrey. He was already beginning to cry. For goodness’ sake, how much liquid could a small child produce? At last the jet of urine began to curve downwards and stopped. I recall a small after-jet, then silence. And then dripping. And then Mother Mary resumed her attack. He was a dirty little boy and he could keep those trousers on all day and then maybe he’d learn how to behave himself. When we went back to class, the teacher suggested that Jeffrey should change into some PE shorts, but we explained what Mother Mary had said, and the teacher, who didn’t look very happy, told us to sit down. And Jeffrey kept his wet trousers on all day.
It was a cruel thing to do to Jeffrey. Even as a little kid I realised that. But like my teacher at the nativity play, Mother Mary got embarrassed and lashed out at the source of her embarrassment. And anyway, in the current social climate, circa 2001, a little old lady being cruel to a schoolkid is quite a refreshing turnabout.
Unplanned has been going pretty well at the Shaftesbury. The crowds have been good and the front of the theatre looks fantastic: two massive photographs of me and Dave, and, in between these, our caricatures above the words ‘Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned’, all done in neon. This weekend is the end of the run and it’s all been worth it, if only for that theatre-front. I don’t think of myself as a vain man, but the other night I nearly got myself run over, standing in the middle of the road so that I could see us all over the theatre and reflected in the glass-fronted building across the street.
One night last week, someone from the audience asked me what my favour
ite TV programme was. It’s a toughie, but Columbo would definitely be up there. At this point, Dave pointed out that Columbo had a glass eye. I said that it was Peter Falk, the actor who plays Columbo, who had the glass eye. Dave looked confused. To be honest, I had no idea where I was going with this, but on I went. I put it to Dave that, while Peter Falk does indeed have a glass eye for the purposes of the role, the glass eye plays the part of a real eye. This triggered off a debate in the crowd that I overheard still going on in the pub afterwards. I think that’s great.
The next night, someone asked if we could have any superpower what would it be. Dave suggested that X-Ray vision would have its advantages. He started talking about those adverts for X-Ray specs that you used to see in comic books. The advert showed a kid in these specs, staring at his hand and able to see all the bones inside. I confessed that I had discussed this years before in my stand-up routine. I had concluded then that if I owned genuine X-Ray specs, within a couple of months, EVERYONE would be able to see the bones in MY hand.
I went on to say that, best of all, I would like to be able to fly, but if I did I wouldn’t do it like Superman. I don’t like the one-arm-raised flying style, or even the less common two-hands-raised version. I’d fly, perhaps with my hands folded behind my head, or maybe on my hips, with legs crossed, if I felt so inclined. I demonstrated these various options. Oh, I love my job.
The library at St. Hubert’s included a book called Born Free, you know, about the woman with the lions and stuff. One day a classmate of mine called Stephen told me and another couple of kids that the book was a must-see. We made our way into the library and stood looking puzzled at each other while Stephen flicked feverishly through the pages. Then he stopped. He looked at us, then at the book, then he showed us. It was a full-page black-and-white photograph of an African tribeswoman shot from the hips up. She stood staring at the camera with a slightly unfriendly air. Stephen was grinning. His eyes had widened. Yes, we’d noticed. The tribeswoman was bare-breasted.
Frank Skinner Autobiography Page 10
