Frank Skinner Autobiography (10 page)

The owl was a dark mystery to me. Every day, Terry would go to the butcher and buy what was known as ‘lights'. These were some sort of unpleasant animal innards that even the local people, who were happy with brains, hearts and faggots, wouldn't eat. The owl gobbled them down like there was no tomorrow. For any pet of ours, this was not a particularly far-fetched assumption.

Eventually, fluttering wasn't enough and the owl started to screech back to his friends on the telegraph pole, so Dad insisted that Terry release him. The cage door was flung open and, with wings close at his sides, the owl slowly squeezed out to freedom.

It said in today's
Daily Mirror
that I'm the highest-paid man on British television. Apparently I get three million a year from television appearances. When I read this, I laughed out loud for about twenty seconds. Not because it
isn't
true. I mean, it isn't true, but so what? If the people in the chart are all exaggerated at the same rate, that still makes me the winner. I laughed because there was something exhilarating about being top of the table. I still feel in my heart of hearts that no one's got a bloody clue who I am, and yet, there I am, top of the raking-it-in league. They say that when the great British actor Sir Donald Wolfit heard that he'd been knighted, the normally sedate man sat on his garden swing with his legs in the air and said, in a cod Midlands accent, ‘Ooo! If me mom and dad could see me now.'

I know it's terribly un-English to be excited by money but sometimes it catches you unawares. I was on the dole in 1985, earning £24.70 a week. This works out at just under £1,300 a year. Five years later, I made my first
Des O'Connor Show
appearance and got two grand for eight minutes. Progress, or what?

In fact, I've never really been the materialistic type, but of course it's nice to have a few bob in your pocket. I'll admit that I'd much rather be known as the funniest man on television than the richest, but you can't have everything in life. Sometimes, though, the money-thing isn't so funny.

In the Autumn of 1999, my manager, Jon Thoday, was in negotiation with the BBC about renewing my contract with them. I had just completed the third series of my chat show,
The Frank Skinner Show
, and was keen to sign a contract that would give me a bit more long-term security. ITV were aware that my contractual obligations to the BBC were up and were also sounding keen. My initial inclination was to stay with the BBC, but ITV's offer was well tempting. Part of this allure was financial but, more importantly, ITV's contract offered a variety of projects as well as three series of the chat show, whereas the BBC would only commit to two. So, I was thinking it over. Then something happened which I never would have imagined affecting my career. Des Lynam defected to ITV. The papers started saying the BBC couldn't hold on to their talent and were becoming outdated and unappealing employers. Then the rumour started that I was about to ‘follow Des' to ITV. In fact, I was still undecided.

Then the BBC seemed to hit upon a very good face-saving idea. They suggested in a press release that, rather than losing talent because of cheapness or lack of commitment, they were being held to ransom by greedy egomaniac performers. It was a clever switch, and perhaps not wholly inaccurate, but unfortunately they chose me as the scapegoat. Meanwhile, unaware of all this, I was sitting in a cafe next to Wyndham's Theatre in Charing Cross Road, London. I'd just finished a Sunday performance of the play
Art
and was having an iced coffee with some of the company when my mobile went. I stepped outside to take the call. It was Jon Thoday. The BBC had announced that it had broken off negotiations with my management because of their outrageous financial demands. A figure of twenty million pounds was being mentioned. Jon told me he had no idea where that figure had come from. I believed him. I went back and finished my iced coffee, wondering what all this really meant. The next day I found out.

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 seemed 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.