‘Yeah, OK, just get your bra off.’
Obviously, some shrink-type could read this book and start going on about my relationship with my father and my need to get approval from others and my thinly disguised self-loathing. You buy the book, you can do what you like with it. Use it for a door-stop if it makes you happy. I’d actually prefer that to the psychoanalysis thing, but it’s really up to you. I’m not very bothered if people watched the doc and thought I was a bit of a mentaller, but I’m very wary of celebs who are desperate to be seen ‘warts and all’ on documentaries, like Elton John in Tantrums and Tiaras. Actually, that was probably the only ever TV doc to be ‘warts and all’ and a puff-piece.
Anyway, the meeting ended with us saying we’d all go away and think about it. I asked Paul how much he would have liked to have filmed this meeting for the documentary. He said, ‘A lot.’
The next day Paul phoned my manager and said, in the light of the meeting, he was now twice as interested in doing the documentary. He wants to see the first ten thousand words of this book. Oh, what to do?
When I first arrived at Moat Farm, I had my hair in a long fringe. Two kids from the second year, called Martin and Vincent, decided that it would be fun to call me Beatle, and generally rough me up and make me sing Beade hits and the like. Martin was a short, mouthy kid with bags under his eyes and a dark crew-cut. Vincent was fat, rosy-cheeked, and very much the brighter of the two. When I arrived in the morning or when I went out to playtime, my stomach would be knotted up with the dread of meeting Martin and Vincent. They were always arm in arm and would approach me, smiling and laughing before going into bully-mode. I had to do a Scouse accent for their entertainment. I loved showing off and entertaining kids but not when it was for all the wrong reasons. It’s a feeling I still get today, every time I do corporate entertainment.
One morning I pointed Martin and Vincent out to my mom and she warned them they’d be in trouble if they bullied me again. They looked scared and I was very relieved. The next playtime, I got a double dose for telling on them. I suppose, in reality, this lasted for a couple of months, but to the little me it seemed like a lifetime. But thank God it ended when it did. Shortly afterwards, the Beatles went into their Sergeant Pepper phase, and Martin and Vincent would have killed me because I couldn’t grow a moustache. It was a horrible time for me, but it is interesting that, in 1965, I was being forced, against my will, to live the life of a Beatle whereas, up in Liverpool, Pete Best was being tortured by exactly the opposite experience. I should think that bullying has rarely been so ‘of its time’ as it was in my case. If there are any short-haired albino kids reading this who are being forced to do Eminem numbers every playtime, they have my deepest sympathy.
As I moved up a year or two, the school bully, David, began to take an interest in me. Being bullied by the ‘school’ bully gave me a certain credibility, but it was still pretty unpleasant. David’s approach was fairly standard bullying stuff, arm up the back, Chinese burns, dead-legs, with none of the originality of Martin and Vincent’s enforced Mersey-moptop regime. But David was big and, like most big strong people, he had no sense of humour. Everything was done through narrowed eyes and bared teeth. He was really scary.
At this time, I was obsessed with Muhammad Ali. My boxing-fanatic dad plus the whole family would gather around the telly for the Ali fights, and had done since they were Clay fights. I had Ali on my wall and I used to do an impression of him. He was everything I wanted to be – funny, good-looking, and capable of beating people up. Incidentally, I met him a couple of times in the nineties. On the first occasion, he was doing a book-signing (Oh, I’ve got all that to look forward to) in Sportspages on the Charing Cross Road. He sat behind a desk with his close friend, Howard Bingham. Because Ali’s Parkinson’s Disease had made his speech very hard to understand, he was muttering to Bingham, and Bingham would converse with the punters. I turned up wearing a Muhammad Ali t-shirt and Ali was clearly very interested in this. He opened his eyes ridiculously wide like he used to do when playing the fool in his glory-days, and grabbed my shirt for a closer look before muttering something to Bingham. ‘He didn’t get any money for this one,’ Bingham explained. Ali signed my book and my shirt (it hangs in a frame in my hallway) and I left feeling like I’d seen the face of God. A few months later, I went to a theatre show about Ali’s life at the Mermaid Theatre. Both Ali and his old adversary, Henry Cooper, were there. I was drinking in the bar before when Ali suddenly appeared at my side. I turned and said something that came out as ‘Mam mamblee mooha mamali mmmmmm . . .’. I fully expected him to offer me Howard Bingham’s business card.
At the end of the play, Ali stepped up from his front-row seat and began sparring with the actor who had played him. It was an astonishing moment. Ali staggered towards the actor with everyone fearing he might fall at any moment, then, suddenly, he did an Ali shuffle and his hands became a blur. It was as if the whole Parkinson’s thing had been some terrible hoax. The whole audience was stunned and started chatting frantically about what had just happened. Afterwards in the bar, Ali and Henry Cooper were posing for photographs with the punters. I had mine taken, standing between them. I was wearing a tuxedo and bow-tie but Ali and Cooper had ignored the dress-code and gone for ordinary suits. I was so proud of this picture that I sent a copy to Nora, Terry and Keith. After a few days, I heard from Jason, Keith’s son. Having seen the picture, with me in the middle in my bow-tie, he asked in all seriousness, ‘Have you started refereeing?’
Anyway, one afternoon, in the playground, David the bully approached me and started shoving me around. Out of the blue, I did what everyone should do at least once in their life, I took on the school bully. I hadn’t really done any fighting, I wasn’t that sort of kid, but I’d seen a lot of fighting, so I started to dance. ‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ is what Ali used to say, and that’s what I did. Kids gathered around to watch and I could hear them saying stuff like, ‘Why is he bouncing around?’ and ‘He thinks he’s Cassius Clay.’ I even remember including an Ali shuffle. David was confused and maybe, dare I say it, slightly afraid. For a few minutes there, I was Ali. I could almost hear the crowd. Thus, I beat the school bully, and as I walked away a friend said, ‘I think you need to do a bit of work on your footwork.’ But no one could spoil my special moment. I looked back at David. His face suddenly looked like he had a heart and a soul, just like I did. I didn’t hate him anymore.
I was in a pub ten years later when a bloke at the bar said hello to me. It was David. He was instantly recognisable. He’d grown big and muscular and, worryingly, he had a scar on his throat which suggested that someone had slit it from ear to ear. I decided, early on, that I wasn’t going to ask him about this. I shook his hand and smiled, already thinking to myself, ‘Don’t remember the fight. For fuck’s sake don’t remember the fight.’ After about two minutes of small talk he said, ‘D’you remember when we had that fight?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘You must do,’ he went on. ‘You beat me.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Yeah, you remember, you had really long nails and you sort of scratched me to pieces.’ There’s memory for you. I was definitely Muhammad Ali but he thinks I was Edward Scissorhands. Then he said, ‘I wonder who’d win if we had a fight now.’ I looked at him and wondered if I could still summon up the old Ali magic if it came to it. Before I could answer, though I don’t know what that answer would have been, an attractive woman approached us and put her arm around David. Saved by the belle. He introduced her as his girlfriend and I noticed she was pregnant. He became preoccupied with her and I took the opportunity to leave. I saw him a few more times but the subject never came up again. It spoilt things a bit, though. Special moments should end with a nice neat full-stop, not with an epilogue ten years later that just clouds the issue.
When I moved to the big school, bullying left me totally exhausted most days. Well, those first years took some catching. Yes, it’s a
terrible confession but it’s true: when I got into the second year at the big school, despite my previous experiences, I started bullying. I didn’t do much physical stuff because I was still as gyppo’s dog-like as ever. Generally, we would bully in packs, with me as some sort of sinister court-jester figure. I had a nasty streak in me which I’ve tried hard to erase as I’ve got older. I suppose I would spot a psychological weakness in a kid and then concentrate on that. It’s something kids often do to each other, but when you can turn it into gags, comedy songs etc, then you can really do some damage. In my defence, my main motivation was to make my mates laugh. The ugly, the fat, the spotty were just my raw materials. Everyone took the piss out of these kids, such is the way of the world, but I found I had a natural gift for verbal bullying, comedy-style. I don’t know whether the bullied hated me more than they hated the big kids who carried out the physical element of the bullying, but it must have seemed particularly unfair to be bullied, albeit only verbally, by someone who had trouble opening crisps. At least, as I found with David, if you’re being bullied by bigger kids there seems to be some sense of the traditional about it. Eventually, the bullying gang I court-jested for took to carrying thick lengths of electrical wire which we called ‘strops’. My own particular strop was known as the ‘Black Baron’. We’d uncoil these whenever an opportunity arose and let the bullied have it across their backs, arms and legs. This was the only physical bullying I ever really took to and, although it was fun, it didn’t fire me up like the comedy stuff.
My behaviour at that time was very unpleasant in lots of aspects. At one stage, I acquired the nickname Sir Snide. I didn’t like that very much. Like my own verbal attacks, it’s the true ones that really hurt. During my whole bullying period, I guess it lasted from about twelve to fifteen, I never remember thinking back to how I felt when I was the Beatle boy, or was being terrorised by David. A couple of kids at the big school got transferred to other schools because of the bullying. I wasn’t directly involved in either of these cases, but I was a key part of the general bullying environment that existed there.
I sometimes wonder how those kids, who I ridiculed and insulted, feel when they see me doing well on the telly and stuff. Are they outraged by the cruel injustice of it all? I must admit, it doesn’t seem very fair to me either. Still, payback time for me could always be just around the corner. I believe it’s called panto.
I just went away with Caroline for a weekend in Venice. This is, of course, traditionally the most romantic city on earth but the trip is a bit of a risk for me. I’ve taken three different women to Venice over the years, and I split up with all of them within three months of getting back. And these were not short fly-by-night relationships. In fact, one of them was my wife. But Caroline and me risked it. We had an idyllic smoochy ride in a gondola and sighed at the Bridge of Sighs and it was lovely. We did have one big row, about whether or not we should have flowers on the balconies at the new house, but we survived. We do argue a bit but we put it down to passion, and, goodness knows, she has a lot to put up with.
For example, I went into pun-overdrive when we got to Venice. The ruler of Venice was known as the Doge. When we learned that there was no longer a Doge of Venice living at the Doge’s palace, I sang ‘Who let the Doge out’ about fifty times before I got it out of my system. When we saw an incredibly fat woman sitting on the steps next to the Bridge of Sighs, I said that she looked so miserable because she had misheard and was expecting the Bridge of Pies. Even on the flight back, when the captain announced that if we looked out to the left, we would be able to see Luxembourg, I was soon singing ‘Pass the Duchy on the left-hand side’. (If you’re under thirty, just trust me that that’s funny, and ask your mom who ‘Musical Youth’ were.)
Caroline and me were once walking down Hampstead High Street when a girl from Greenpeace approached us for a please-join chat. I went into joker mode and after about five minutes she looked at Caroline and said, ‘How do you put up with him?’ Caroline took some imaginary cotton wool out of her ears and said, ‘Sorry?’ I pissed myself laughing. I think the Greenpeace girl got her answer.
When we got to the top class at St. Hubert’s, we had to try out for the school choir. I quite fancied being in the choir. I loved singing and as, traditionally, ninety-five per cent of the top class got selected, I had to fancy my chances. We all lined up at one end of the class and started singing ‘Soul of my Saviour’. Mrs McGee wandered up and down the line, listening closely to each kid in turn. When she came to me, she listened for a while and then put her hand on my shoulder. ‘We’re not American,’ she said. I’d blown my chance. She obviously wanted sweet, angelic children’s voices and I was trying to be Elvis.
In fact, I’ve spent most of my life trying to be Elvis. There was a time when I wouldn’t have bought an article of clothing unless I could imagine Elvis wearing it. Luckily, white flared jumpsuits were fashionable in the West Midlands right up to the late eighties. I’ve spent too much of my life with my hair swept back into a quiff, even though it doesn’t suit me because my head is shaped like a light-bulb. I’ve spent too much of my life with sideburns that start about an inch below where my hair stops, leaving a stupid gap at the top. During my last attempt at sideburns, in 1998, the make-up person on Fantasy World Cup used to colour in the gap with mascara. Whatever music I dance to, my dancing always comes out like an under-rehearsed parody of Elvis’s ‘Jailhouse Rock’ routine. Every school exercise book, pencil case, duffel bag, even my First Communion card, had ‘Elvis’ written on it.
I kept an Elvis scrapbook, forced my mom to buy his latest single, learnt the words to all his songs, and not only went and saw all the dodgy movies like Clambake, Speedway and, of course, Paradise, Hawaiian Style, but whenever the Oscars rolled around, I was outraged when Elvis didn’t get a nomination. I really believed in those movies. I really thought life was like that. I thought I could get a job as a barman or a pool-attendant (once I’d learned to swim) and then hang around the club at night until someone asked me to get up and sing a song. Then, within seconds, the whole place would be rocking, and people, instinctively clapping along, would turn to each other, smile and nod. When I left school, it wasn’t quite like that.
I went through a wanky poetry-writing stage when I was seventeen. Here’s the opening of one of my least wanky efforts:
I’ll get you for this, Elvis Presley.
I’ll get you for all of those lies.
Where are the women you promised me?
Where are those singalong guys?
It all started because Terry was a bit of an Elvis fan. I slightly hero-worshipped Terry. I remember once copying what order he ate his dinner in so I could be like him. Consequently, I got into Elvis through his influence, but then I became much more obsessive about him than Terry ever was. The big thing that tortured me was that I was blonde, well, blondeish, whereas Elvis’s hair was black. This, I believed, was the only significant difference in our physical appearance. My mom wouldn’t let me dye my hair and so my non-Elvis colouring plagued me for years. I was thrilled when Elvis wore a blonde wig to play his own twin in the film Kissin’ Cousins, but I knew, in my heart of hearts, it was only temporary. It sounds stupid now, but this hair thing was a major concern of mine as a child. Many years later I discovered that Elvis’s hair was the same colour as mine but he dyed it black. Another interesting life-lesson for me: don’t yearn for what other people seem to have because they might not have it at all. The other man’s hair is always blacker.
My Elvis obsession continued through my teens, at a time when my friends were all into heavy-metal bands like Sabbath and Zeppelin. Eventually I admitted defeat on the quiff and grew my hair like it is on the photo-booth picture, but I still loved The King. Then, when I was twenty, I got home from the pub one night to find my mom and dad waiting for me with deep concern upon their faces. ‘We’ve got some bad news,’ my mom said. ‘You’d better sit down.’ I was already thinking death in the family. My dad looked an
xious but said nothing. ‘What’s up?’ I asked, finally.
My mom took a breath. ‘Elvis is dead,’ she said.
I didn’t say anything. Funnily enough, I was going through my punk stage at the time. I looked down at my multi-zipped jeans that my mom had customised for me. Punk was about rebellion and turning your back on the oldies. (Unless they had a sewing machine.) I hadn’t played an Elvis record for about four months. I don’t think I’d ever gone four days without playing one before. It reminded me of a rabbit called Chubby Checker I owned when I was a kid. My mom and dad were always going on about how I didn’t look after him properly, never cleaned him out, missed his meal-times and so on. I went to feed him one day and found him dead, lying in about an inch and a half of his own piss. I felt guilty as hell. Now I had neglected Elvis and he had died too.
I had a cup of tea but rejected the idea of supper. My parents went to bed and I put the telly on to try and get some details, but this was in the days when the telly finished at about midnight. They used to have a thing called Closedown, which was usually a photograph of something like ‘Sunset on the Norfolk Broads’ with a bit of classical music over it. Then a voice-over would come on and say goodnight. The National Anthem was in there somewhere, as well, but I can’t quite remember the sequence. Anyway, tonight, Closedown was a bit different. They showed a picture of Elvis, I think it was from the sleeve of Greatest Hits Volume 4, and they played him singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. I never much cared for Elvis’s version of this but I cried like a baby. The tears ran down my face and onto my jacket, the right sleeve of which was held on only by safety pins. That’s my 1977.
If they’d shown a picture of my rabbit and played ‘Let’s Twist Again’, I think I would have had a breakdown.
Frank Skinner Autobiography Page 14
