Frank Skinner Autobiography (2 page)

In fact, I have spent so much time going on and on about the subject on stage and screen that
The Guardian
once described me as the ‘Billy Graham of anal sex'. That may be stretching it a bit (to the anal sex enthusiast, something of an occupational hazard) but once, during a stand-up tour, I received a postcard from a man who told me that my lengthy sermon on anal sex at a gig he had attended had triggered a conversation between him and his wife on the way home. While still on the bus, they had resolved to ‘give it a bash' when they got back to the house and, after twenty-two years of marriage, they had anal sex for the first time. The experiment was, it seems, a tremendous success. I felt like I imagine a pop star must feel when he hears from grateful relatives that his music has aroused a loved one from a long coma. I have never quite worked out the significance, if any, but on the other side of the postcard was a very formal portrait of Major Yuri Gagarin.

People ask me why I became a comedian. Well, I've been making jokes for as long as I can remember. Not necessarily good jokes but jokes nevertheless. I get endless joy from this process. Whether it's on telly being watched by ten million viewers or small-talking to a stranger in a lift, my greatest joy is to crack a good gag and get the right response. When I still lived in Birmingham, I dated a stunningly attractive woman. I had been seeing her for about three weeks when I finally asked her where she lived. It turns out she dwelt in what was, at the time, a very rough block of flats called Bath Court. I said, in what I felt was a slightly Wildean tone, ‘The trouble with Bath Court is that the residents spend a good deal more time in the latter than they do in the former.'

‘Where's “The Latter”?' she asked. I knew then that our love could never flourish.

On another occasion, I was wandering around Speakers' Corner with a mate one Sunday morning and we stopped to listen to a bearded man singing the praises of the Muslim religion. Soon he switched to a pretty aggressive attack on Christianity. During this, a black man in a yellow cagoule arrived on a mountain bike. He dismounted and stayed at the rear of the crowd, leaning on the bike. Then he began heckling the Muslim speaker, correcting Biblical misquotations and challenging theological points. The Muslim kept beckoning the heckler forward but he was clearly quite comfortable where he was. Eventually, the exasperated Muslim stepped down from the stage and walked towards the heckler to continue the debate. ‘There you are,' I said to my mate, ‘if the mountain bike won't go to Mohammed . . .' If a son of mine had played football for England, I don't think I could have been more proud. My mate actually applauded.

This is why I became a comedian. And yes, these two stories show why I love that mate more than I ever could have loved that stunningly attractive woman.

I'm still trying to work out the best approach to this book. I thought I might try mixing the present with the past, so I can tell you what I did today and then chuck in a lump of golden memories. I was out shopping with my girlfriend, Caroline, this morning. When we got back to my flat, there was a man standing in the pouring rain with a big bunch of flowers and an even bigger camera. ‘I'd just like to congratulate you on your engagement,' he said. She took the flowers and he started snapping. Caroline is, I think, a very beautiful twenty-three-year-old. This, generally speaking, is a very good thing in a girlfriend. However, I am forty-four, so whenever we are photographed together, I always think of those pictures of Anna-Nicole Smith and her ninety-year-old billionaire husband, J. Marshall Howard: a terrible before-and-after nightmare of what goes wrong with the human face. (Incidentally, I once did a gag about Anna-Nicole, claiming that the film
Tomb Raider
was her life story.) So, any picture of me with Caroline is bound to make me look a bit wrecked. And, I suppose, make her look even prettier.

This, of course, is why prettyish girls often hang around with ugly girls. I remember seeing such a pairing in Samantha's nightclub in Birmingham, back in the seventies. I chatted to the Mr Hyde half of the combo and, after a while, she asked me why blokes always tossed a coin before approaching them. I hadn't got the heart to tell her. Well, not till after breakfast anyway.

Caroline and me have been together for just over six months. She is tall and green-eyed with short blonde hair and a smile that makes me forget to do stuff, like breathe, for example. Sometimes, when she's asleep, I lie and look at her face for ages without getting bored. But she's not willowy, and wet like some pretty girls; she's loud, funny and inclined to argue, especially with me.

By the way, I'm not engaged to Caroline, but I bought her a ring that she wears on that finger so I suppose tongues were bound to wag. Still, there we stood, saying ‘cheese' in the pouring rain, and me with my hood up looking, in my mind's eye, like the mummified head of Mary Magdalene I once saw in a glass case in a museum in Provence.

I didn't begin my comedy career until I was thirty. People had been telling me I should be a comic since I was about six but, in a way, I already was a comic. I used to perform in the classroom, then in the pub, the factory and now on telly. It's all the same thing: showing off and endlessly pursuing that holy grail, the laugh. You don't need a microphone or a camera. All you need is an audience. Mates, girlfriends, people on buses, anyone will do. It's like an addiction.

Just after my dad died, me and my two brothers had the task of clearing out his house: all his clothes and little trinkets, a lock of my mom's hair, his rosary beads, photographs, the lot. We were being brave about it, but it was a desperately sad process, all three of us frightened we might find the thing that would, without much warning, leave us broken and sobbing. My eldest brother, Terry, was clearing out a cupboard and took out the remains of a cheap ornament that my dad had had an affection for. Originally, it was a bird perched on a branch, but it had got broken and the piece that Terry held up consisted of only the base, a branch, and a pair of bird's feet still clinging on. No doubt, somewhere deep in the cupboard was the footless bird, both pieces put there by my dad with the intention of mending them one day. One of the thousands of loose ends left behind when somebody dies suddenly. I took the broken ornament from my brother, the little feet severed just above the ankle, if birds have ankles. He looked at me but didn't speak. Neither did my other brother, Keith. They looked but they didn't speak. I did. ‘Lot 16: Who killed Cock Robin?' I said. We laughed like we used to when we were kids sharing the same bedroom.

Those of you not familiar with the old song, ‘Who killed Cock Robin?', will just have to trust me on this one. I always think footnotes are a bit grand.

Anyway, though I feel I have always been a comic, I didn't actually make my stage debut till I was thirty. So, after putting it off for so long, what gave me the kick up the arse that finally made me do it?

If I'm not mistaken, that was this book's second rhetorical question and I'm not sure I enjoyed either of them. They've given the whole piece an ‘Anglican sermon' feeling, that I don't much care for. Those of you who enjoy a rhetorical question would be well-advised to make the most of that one. It could be the last. Nevertheless, I'm going to answer it.

It suddenly occurred to me one day that it would be a terrible thing to be a seventy-year-old man and wonder if I could have made it as a comic. To have tried and failed would be bearable, but to have
not
tried. To lie there, pondering what it would have been like, and to know that the chance had gone forever. Horrible! After having these thoughts, I had no choice but to give it a go. Ever since that day, I do a lot of my decision-making with the help of the ‘looking back when I'm seventy' test. This has led me to doing my first West End play, taking part in a completely improvised live TV series, and to contracting a venereal disease from a woman I met in a nightclub in Moseley in the late 1980s.

I won an award today. The Variety Club of Great Britain gave me its Comedy Award for 2000. This is fairly amazing because I've been nominated for, I think, fourteen awards in the last twelve years, but never won till now. Well, I won the Perrier Award in 1991, but more of that later. I was once nominated for a National Television Award, for Best Chat Show Host, but I was filming in Cardiff so I sat alone in my hotel room watching it live on telly. In short, I lost to Michael Parkinson. This, of course, is no disgrace. As a child, whenever I sat on the toilet, I would fill the time, not by reading comics or wiping bogeys on the wall, but by pretending I was being interviewed by Parkinson. ‘Of course,' Michael would say, ‘shortly afterwards you captained England to win the World Cup.'

‘Well, yes,' I'd reply with a chuckle, ‘but don't ask me about the three Brazilian girls in the jacuzzi.' (Audience laughter mingles with sound of toilet flushing.)

You'll notice I say ‘as a child', thus giving you the completely false impression that I don't do it any more.

Anyway, I hate to admit it, but I got really pissed off about not winning the chat show award. That's the trouble with being nominated. You start wanting it. I'd rather they just left me alone. So, in a fit of luvvie petulance, I turned the telly off and had a bit of a brisk walk around and around the hotel room. When I'd calmed a little, I put the telly back on. As I rejoined the broadcast, they'd moved on to Best Sitcom and were showing a really hilarious clip from
Friends.
Brilliant. Then they cut back to the host, who said, ‘And the winner is,
Last of the Summer Wine.
' Suddenly, I felt a lot better.

Being an un-nominated neutral observer at an awards ceremony can be a bit of a laugh, though. I was at the Brits once when Eva Herzigova was presenting the award for Best New Band. She strode onstage in a fantastic low-cut dress and opened the envelope. ‘Smashing Pumpkins', she said. ‘Hear! Hear!' I shouted. I liked to think that somewhere in the far reaches of eternity, Benny Hill smiled.

Presenting awards can also be interesting. Once, at the British Comedy Awards, in a hall packed with top comics, comedy-writers and producers, I presented the prize for Best New Comedy Show. I was taken aback by the size of the laugh I got from the line, ‘I never watch new comedy shows because I hate that part of me that wants them to be shit.' I believe this is known as the laughter of recognition.

Anyway, the Variety Award for Comedy is just, well, awarded, without any of the nomination nonsense, so I knew I'd won before I turned up. I accepted the award from Dale Winton and explained to the crowd that people once thought me and Dale were engaged, but only because it said so on the door. I felt obliged to do at least one engagement joke because the story about Caroline and me, including photo, was on the front page of this morning's
Daily Express
.

When the show was broadcast on BBC1 the next day, they followed each of my gags with a close-up of Caroline laughing uproariously. It reminded me that a journalist from
Loaded
once asked me to describe my perfect girlfriend. ‘A good audience with nice tits,' I rather laddishly replied. It's a funny old world.

Those photographs in the rain appeared again the following day, this time on the cover of OK magazine. I didn't look quite as bad as I thought. Nevertheless, there was still more than a suggestion of Princess Diana being hugged by W.H. Auden.

Here goes with a bit of autobiographical information. I was born Christopher Graham Collins, on the 28th January 1957 at 5.15 in the afternoon. My mother, Doris Elizabeth Collins, a slight, dark-eyed teetotaller from nearby Oldbury, gave birth to me in what was then called Hallam Hospital in West Bromwich, Staffordshire, about five miles north-west of Birmingham. My birth certificate says I was born in the town of West Bromwich, in the area of West Bromwich, in the County Borough of West Bromwich. So when people ask me why I support West Bromwich Albion Football Club, I explain that my decision was based on the only criterion anyone should ever use when choosing a football club – geography. You sit with a pencil, a ruler, and a map, identify the nearest professional football club to your place of birth, you buy a scarf with their name on it and that's that.

My dad was John Francis Collins, a heavy-drinking, sports-mad amateur pub singer, with a big chest and a bald head, who came from West Cornforth, County Durham. My dad always told me that he came down to West Bromwich to play for the non-leaguers, Spennymoor United, in the third round of the FA Cup in 1937, when he was nineteen. I'm not sure he actually made the final eleven that day but West Brom managed to win 7–1. That night my dad and some of the other Spennymoor boys sought out a local pub and got invited to a party by a bunch of Oldbury boys. My dad-to-be decided that these boys were a bit dodgy so decided to give them a false name, Len. At the party, he saw this pretty dark-eyed girl and asked one of the Oldbury boys if he knew her. ‘Yeah, it's my sister,' he said. ‘I'll introduce you.' And my mom called my dad Len till her dying day.

Of course, the upshot of this story is, if it wasn't for West Bromwich Albion, I would never have been born.

When my dad approached that eighteen-year-old girl at that Saturday night party, he couldn't possibly have known the effect his appearance would have had on her. A few years earlier, as my mom maintained to her death, she had had a dream. She was in her bedroom when she heard heavenly music and opened the windows to hear more clearly. As the sun streamed in, she began to make out a group of angels in the distant sky. They seemed to be carrying a young man. As they got nearer, she could clearly see the man's face. It was no one she knew, no one she'd ever met, well, not until a slightly drunk amateur footballer said hello to her at a party a few years later. Shortly after they married my mom sent this story into a newspaper and won two shillings for the Letter of the Week.