Frank Skinner Autobiography

by Frank Skinner

  I leave Caroline to more shopping and head back to watch the FA Cup Final on my stupidly big telly. When I moved into this flat three years ago, the first thing I bought was the big telly. I had that telly before I had tables and chairs. When I watched it, all I had to sit on was the box it came in. You can put up with a lot if you’ve got a really big telly.

  Oh dear, this next section is very bad timing as far as the book is concerned because I just got myself a bit upset about that dream and then the squiggly green line, and now it’s ‘Abide With Me’. Sorry if this is starting to get like The Champ.

  One thing my dad insisted on was that we all remained silent and paid attention during ‘Abide With Me’ which is, of course, the FA Cup Final hymn. Almost certainly Protestant, but my dad was prepared to make an exception for the Cup Final. In the old days, an elderly man in a white suit would stand on a high platform and lead the whole crowd in the hymn. Everybody sang it then. Then football fans changed and, more often than not, ‘Abide With Me’ was drowned out by people singing ‘You’re gonna get your fucking head kicked in’ and the like. Hymns very much modern rather than ancient. In recent times, though, it’s made a bit of a comeback. This year it’s being sung by two sexy birds known as the Opera Babes, one in Liverpool kit and the other in Arsenal.

  No matter. Whenever I hear ‘Abide With Me’ before the Cup Final, I think of my dad. I think of his influence on me. I think of how he taught me that football was special. I mean, he gave me a love for all sorts of stuff: singing, boxing, heavy drinking, arguing, but best of all he gave me a love of football. I remember Dave and me sitting watching a nondescript Monday night game on Sky once. We were both having woman trouble at the time, and the game was a backdrop to our morose, frustrated and embittered conversation. Suddenly, somebody hit an absolute pearler from about thirty yards. We both leapt up in the air and whooped with joy. When we sat down again, I turned to him and said, ‘Never mind, Dave. We’ll always have football.’

  ‘Abide With Me’ is still my special little moment with my dad. In recent years, I’ve been to a few FA Cup finals, usually as part of some sort of corporate jolly. The hymn has been tricky on these occasions. I don’t really want to be crying in front of David Mellor and Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart. I’ve just gone all quiet and stared at my shoes. Now, sitting alone in my front room (I can’t believe I call it that), I’m at liberty to cry, but I think the presence of the so-called. Opera Babes will take the edge off the moment for me. It doesn’t. I cry like a silly kid. Real proper sobbing. I’m trying not to think American-soap-opera thoughts like ‘Thank you, Dad’, but I do. The song ends, I have a drink of tea, I’m OK. Caroline comes home. I don’t mention the crying.

  The 7 o’clock Unplanned show is shit. I’m glad it’s ending tonight. A woman asks the same question three times: ‘Why is Frank really sexy but he’s not good-looking?’ I think there’s a very obvious answer to her question but I don’t have a bank statement with me.

  The post-show visitor is a film director called Mark Locke. I was going to be in a film he made last winter but I wasn’t available. I was pissed off. I really liked the script, about a seven-foot boxing shrimp. I was due to play its manager. I know Mark didn’t like the show because he doesn’t look me in the eye when he says he liked the show.

  Dave tells me that Douglas Adams died today. He wrote The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I was introduced to him once and I started singing ‘Bright Eyes’. He just looked at me. It’s a song from the film Watership Down, written by RICHARD Adams. Whoops.

  The second show was much better, but I’m still glad it’s all over. I’m knackered tonight. And now Dave and me have a ‘meet and greet’ in the bar. This is where you wander around chatting to people. In this case they’re either from the video company who are putting out the Unplanned Live video, or from shops who will sell it. They seem like a nice bunch but I start to get a bit dizzy. I think I’ve been smoking too much. So I slip out and sit on my own in the Royal Circle, watching our set being dismantled and put into trucks by big blokes in t-shirts.

  The shows have been great to do. We’ve had some mega laughs and the old Baddiel and Skinner chemistry has been really bubbling, but I wonder if we’ve taken Unplanned as far as we can take it. The problem is that it really is unplanned. Only the other night in the pub, some bloke was going on about how we must use plants in the audience or work out some stuff between ourselves beforehand, but we are very puritanical about it. When I sit on that sofa, I have no idea what we’re going to talk about, and I’m sure it’s the same for Dave. For TV, this is pretty unique. There are a few ‘spontaneous’ panel shows on the telly where the teams spend the whole afternoon with the questions and a team of writers. I’m not saying this is bad, especially if it turns out a funny show, but Unplanned is totally free-fall, and that makes it balls-on-the-chopping-block stuff.

  The great thing about this is that the show requires no preparation whatsoever. The bad thing about it is that you can’t improve it by working harder. Everything I’ve done professionally, stand-up, the chat show, acting, whatever, I’ve improved by working harder. It frustrates me that I don’t have this option with Unplanned So we’re moving on a level plain, and I need something to climb. I haven’t told Dave any of this yet. No one here knows, but they might be dismantling the Unplanned set for the last time.

  Jonathan Ross and his wife, Jane, are among the post-show visitors. As are Gerry the Mess-Stick man, and some of his family. All lovely people, but I go home early and wiped out. Tomorrow is the big one. West Brom versus Bolton in the first leg of the play-offs.

  Sunday. 13th May 2001. I arrive at the Hawthorns with Phil. He’s producing and directing a documentary about Japanese and Korean football which is my next work-project after this book. Outside the ground, a middle-aged woman is selling Baggies Bonanza tickets. There’s a draw at half time and you can win a grand or so on a good week. She tries to sell me one. ‘I don’t need the money,’ I explain. It’s a slightly dodgy response, I know, but she takes it in the spirit it’s intended and smiles. We get inside the ground and I bump into another mate, Lee, who’s an Albion fanatic. His friend is explaining how his little boy came home in a Manchester United shirt and wanted to go and play football in it. In the end, Lee’s mate had to pull the shirt off the kid, who then headed for the football in tears. Lee’s mate said he felt like a heel. I told him he was a hero. He hesitated, then agreed.

  However, this triggered off a worry in my mind. I’ve always felt that you should support your local club and that’s it. As I’ve said before, football teams should be chosen with a ruler and an A to Z. There are no other criteria. But if I have kids, they’ll probably be born in London.

  Shit.

  I won’t bore you with a match report. We are two goals up with ten minutes to go. The crowd are loud and joyous. It’s like the old days when we were a top club. No one can stop us now. Final score: 2–2.

  On the way back to London, in the back of the car, I get changed into my evening suit ready for the BAFTA ceremony. I get a phone call from Robyn, the producer of Unplanned. I know the ceremony has started. I know she’s there. ‘Congratulations,’ she blurts out excitedly. I’m stunned. We’ve obviously won the BAFTA.

  ‘What for?’ I say, trying to remain calm.

  ‘Two–nil,’ she says. Women have no concept of the phrase ‘Latest Score’.

  As I arrive at the Grosvenor Hotel, the red carpet laid for the arriving VIPs is still down, but the metal barriers that hold back the excited crowds and the banks of paparazzi are piled up for collection. A couple of stewards sit smoking outside. ‘You’re a bit late, Frank,’ one of them says. I notice that the red carpet is slightly turned up at one corner. I walk into the quiet hotel and follow the signs to the awards ceremony. As I get nearer I can hear distant applause and cheering. I reach the doors of the Great Hall. There is a monitor on the wall. I’m on it. It must be our category. I walk into the hall and walk across to the balustrad
e at the top of the grand staircase. I can see the floor below, packed with dozens of tables of evening-suited blokes and glamorous-frocked women. It occurs to me that if we win, I can enter the hall down the staircase, like Jimmy Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy, and just continue to the stage in one sweeping movement. We don’t. I hold back on the stairs, and watch Ali G go up to get the BAFTA. He’s very funny but, of his genre, not quite as funny as Benny Hill playing the Chinese bloke.

  So, there’s a weekend in my life, in some ways unusual, in others very typical. Well, I don’t often miss Mass on a Sunday. I’m not saying that would have affected the BAFTA result, but two goals in the last ten minutes? I think that could have been avoided with a quick candle.

  One of the big changes I noticed when I switched from Moat Farm Infants to St. Hubert’s Juniors was the games we played. At Moat Farm, we did a lot of role-playing games. This led to all sorts of problems on the casting front. For example, if we played cowboys and Indians, more often than not, kids weren’t exactly queuing up to be the redskins. OK, you got to whoop and do that thing when you pat your open mouth with the flat of your palm, but that was about it. I always got in a major strop if I couldn’t be a cowboy. I took the acting element particularly seriously and wouldn’t come out of character, even if kids who weren’t playing in the game came and spoke to me. I remember a kid approaching me in the playground and asking if I’d written ‘Wolves are Shit’ on his duffel bag. I smiled ruefully and said, ‘No one said life out here was gonna be easy.’ The kid took this as a ‘yes’ and dead-legged me. Admittedly, this put a damper on my galloping for the rest of playtime, but I cowboyed up and put a brave face on it.

  Perhaps I should point out, at this juncture, that the Wolves I refer to are Wolverhampton Wanderers, Albion’s local rivals. I was at an Albion – Wolves game once when the guy next to me explained that he would rather do the double on Wolves (if you’re not into football lingo that means beat them, home and away) than have Albion win promotion. I don’t get this, but when I object, Albion fans tell me it’s because I live in London. If I had to live with the Wolves fans every day, I’d understand. But I spent thirty-four years living with them and I never understood it then either.

  I know this is getting a bit Albion-hardcore but bear with me. One thing that pisses me off is the amount of Albion chants that are about how much we hate the Wolves rather than how much we love the Albion. I think it’s shit if you can only define yourself by your relationship to someone else. It makes them sound more important than you. The General Election campaign is going as I write this and that lot are just the same. Labour can only slag off the Tories and vice versa. If the blurb on the back of this book said, ‘Much better than Suzanna Leigh’s Paradise, Suzanna Style,’ you might be inclined to question my confidence in the product.

  Anyway, the Albion–Wolves thing does have its lighter side. Former England manager Graham Taylor managed Wolves for a bit. He spent a small fortune on players, still made a terrible job of it all, and ended up back at his old club, Watford. When Albion played at Watford shortly afterwards, our fans sang, to the tune of the old hymn ‘Rock of Ages’ (y’know, the one that was always ‘We’ll support you evermore’), ‘Graham Taylor, Graham Taylor. Thanks for fucking-up the Wolves. Thanks for fu-u-u-cking-up the Wolves,’ and, to his eternal credit, Taylor waved and smiled in acknowledgement. In fact, I think I might have even detected a glimmer of pride in a job well done. In an instant, I completely forgave him for his performance as England manager. Respect.

  A few years ago, when Albion were playing at Wolves, the Hawthorns staged a closed-circuit broadcast of the game on a big screen for the Albion fans who couldn’t get tickets. Unfortunately, some Wolves fans got in as well and there was trouble. The Albion chairman was so outraged that the club’s efforts to stage the screening had been soured, he threatened to stage any further closed-circuit screenings ‘behind closed doors’. I’m not sure that he’d completely thought this through.

  Meanwhile, back at Moat Farm, I remember causing real problems during one game when I had been forced to play a Red Indian. When the cowboy kids captured me and threatened to kill me, I said I thought it would be a bad idea. When they asked why, I explained, ‘Because I am . . . (Yes, I left a pause for dramatic effect. I remember the moment as if it was yesterday) Simon Templar.’ I even looked up above my head for an imaginary halo. The cowboys were fucked. They couldn’t complain without coming out of character. Suddenly, they’d gone from star turns in a playtime-length Western epic, to bit-players in an episode of The Saint. And where was Equity? Nowhere.

  As I say, the move to the Catholic school threw up a whole bunch of new games, one of them ‘Burn the Heretic’, conducted completely in Latin. Just kidding. Anyway, the role-play games disappeared. (The next serious acting I did was twenty years later, when I performed a fortnightly series of fist-clenching, tear-filled monologues about my search for work for various members of staff at the local Job Centre.) The St. Hubert’s games could be put into four categories: dangerous, life-changing, very life-changing and incredibly life-changing.

  The dangerous games were mainly British Bulldog and pile-ups. British Bulldog, as you probably know, was basically splitting into two teams and then trying to get from one side of the playground to the other while the other kids tried to stop you with sheer brute strength. This game wasn’t exactly tailor-made for me. I was always one of the skinniest kids at school: bulbous head too big for my body, arms that joined at the neck, and a chest like a thigh. As a mate of mine said to me a few years later, ‘You’re built like a gyppo’s dog, all prick and bones.’

  Pile-ups was a more elaborate game with a carefully considered set of rules. One kid lay flat on the playground, and then about thirty other kids piled on top of him. And that was it. You’d just lie there thinking stuff like ‘shouldn’t that kid’s rib-cage be on the inside of his blazer’ or ‘I wish I hadn’t got a frog in my pocket’. Then we’d all get up, dust ourselves down, and start breathing again.

  The life-changing game was football. Nowadays Premiership clubs seem to be signing kids shortly after they develop fingernails, but I don’t remember kicking a ball until I was eight. By the time I got to about nine, it was every playtime, and then I’d play after school until it got dark. I continued this regime until I was sixteen, and during that whole period I never noticed any discernible improvement in my game. I played, of course, at the back, which was where shit schoolboy footballers always played. The idea is that if you try really hard and run around a lot, you can spoil it for the talented players.

  Some particularly shit schoolboy footballers got so obsessed with spoiling things for the talented players that they trained to become referees. Have you ever seen a referee kick a ball? They look like they’ve never played in their lives. In truth, they have spent their childhoods stuck at the back, building up enough anger and resentment to last them into their late forties. But, regardless of all this emotional baggage, it is amazing that though they spend so much time in close proximity to a football, it still seems like an alien thing to them. In this respect they are like goalkeepers. Goalkeepers, with one or two exceptions, always look like they would be worse outfield players than any fat woman on crutches. When the ball comes to them in open play, they have to run away from it so that they have space to take a little run-up before slicing it into the crowd.

  When I first started playground football at St. Hubert’s, we played on the netball court in the middle of the playground. I played football on that court morning playtime, dinnertime (there was no such thing as ‘lunch’ in the working-class West Midlands), and afternoon playtime, over a two-year period, and only ever scored one goal. One goal in two years of playground football, where the scores were often stuff like 17–15. Of course, I remember the goal in some detail. There was a thin coating of snow on the court. I was about four feet from the goal line at the far post. I stuck out my right foot and the ball went about eighteen inches inside the post. It
was such an occasion that I told my mom about it that same night: ‘I’ve had a good day today. I scored a goal at school.’ Her reply will live with me forever. ‘Ooo! That was lucky.’

  Alan Hansen was never crueller, or more accurate.

  When you moved up to the top two years, you became eligible to play in the school team. This was my dream. I was hoping to play for the Albion when I grew up. I figured it would be a lot easier to become a professional footballer if, at the interview, I could let it slip that I’d been in the school team at junior school. It would be some sort of seal of approval. The school team at St. Hubert’s was picked by the only male teacher in the school, Mr Hartley. We were playing football in PE one day (Oh, yeah, that’s another extra three games a week that I didn’t score in) when Mr Hartley suddenly appeared. The buzz went round. All the kids were whispering that this was our chance to give him a positive image of our abilities a few months before we became eligible for the school team. Suddenly, the ball was booted high into the air by one of the opposing defenders and I ran to meet it. I don’t recall ever heading the ball before so it would have been a big thing anyway, even without the presence of Mr Hartley making it a potential crushed-butterfly moment. The ball seemed to be in the air for ages. I braced myself for the thrusting impact of my headed clearance. The ball hit me in the face and I fell over. Mr Hartley stood looking for a few seconds, and then moved on. If I hadn’t been stunned, I would have probably, as a last resort, started looking up for my halo.