Frank Skinner Autobiography (4 page)

The next day I gave Dave a lift to Birmingham in my Citroen AXGT that I'd bought off Steve Coogan. So there's me and Dave driving down the A38 in the thickest fog you could imagine. The sort of fog I thought smokeless fuels had seen off for good. The sort of fog you only usually see in black and white films about Jack the Ripper. The sort that is all around when James Stewart gets into that aeroplane in
The Glenn Miller Story
and says ‘It's a little soupy, ain't it.' As we crawled through the gloom past bashed-up cars abandoned on the hard shoulder and distant police sirens, we just talked and talked. The literary merits of John Updike (his favourite) and Samuel Johnson (mine); The Smiths, The Ramones, being Jewish, being Catholic, American comedians, the films of Woody Allen, Kathy Lloyd, the London comedy clubs, Winona Ryder, Dave's parents, having a girlfriend, marriage, Kathy Lloyd (we talked about her twice), all imaginable aspects of football, the Marx Brothers,
Steve Wright in the Afternoon, Monty Python's Flying Circus
– and fog, in all its manifestations. Get on, that's what we did. But I never thought that, in the not-too-distant future, we'd spend five years as flatmates. I was married, for goodness' sake.

Anyway, that conference call. You know, the one I mentioned at the beginning of this section. It turns out that me and Dave are going to be doing our ITV show,
Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned
, live in London's West End. That could be interesting.

Apparently, my mom was told she shouldn't have any more babies. She had lost twins a couple of years before she had me and once told me that she spent weeks having to sit with her legs raised to combat haemorrhaging. Anyway, she had me against doctors' orders. There's a picture of me aged one, sitting on our front lawn in a knitted all-in-one thing. Chubby and smiling with a shock of yellow hair and my hand on my private parts, although as a child, I don't recall them being particularly ‘private'. Hey, that's a thought. Do porn stars still refer to their genitals as their ‘private parts' long after they've ceased to be in any way ‘private'. There could be stand-up material in there somewhere. Mmm . . . maybe not.

That smiling child with his hand on his nob, is he trying to say to the world, ‘I find genitals funny, and thus shall I make my living'? I think so. The die was cast. By the way, my hair was yellow because they didn't really have colour photography then – well not in Oldbury – so they'd take the picture in black and white and then the photographer would colour it in. I look like a fucking Andy Warhol painting.

My first memory is . . . actually, one thing that particularly pisses me off about autobiographies is the ‘my first memory' bit so I'll keep it brief. My first memory was of me sitting on the edge of my bed saying, ‘Well, I'm four today.' Now, unusually for a first memory, the nature of the utterance makes this one fairly easy to put a date on. All the evidence points to it being the 28th of January 1961. Unless, of course, it wasn't my birthday at all, and I was saying it as a gag, just to throw my parents.

My sister's husband, Frank, tells a story of me as a little kid. He was invited to my mom and dad's house by my sister, Nora, so that he could go through one of those nerve-racking meet-the-girlfriend's-parents experiences that all boyfriends must eventually face. He turned up at our little council house in Oldbury, drank tea, and was quizzed by my parents, chiefly my old man. Then I appeared, aged about four or five, wearing a full cowboy oufit and carrying a small plastic guitar. Six Elvis songs later, my future brother-in-law was starting to get a little bored. I couldn't play the guitar, and it wasn't tuned and it wasn't what you'd really call a guitar. My brother Keith had a really nice acoustic guitar with a little photo of Elvis in a sort of circular picture-frame on the front, but I wasn't allowed to touch this. Also, my voice was a little kid's voice, y'know, too high and with a big, audible breath between each line. Apparently, my ‘Old Shep', an Elvis song that tells the tale of a dying dog, was particularly mournful. And, worse still, if anyone spoke or even looked away mid-song I cut them down with a look that would stop a charging elephant. Eventually, I allowed a short interval. My brother-in-law moved on to that safest of working-class male subjects, football.

Football was, at that time, an almost exclusively working-class male thing. The terraces, when I was a kid, were all about bad language, the smell of Woodbine cigarettes, a blind passion for your team, and for football in general, in that order. I remember a bloke standing next to me calling one of our defenders a lazy fucker at fairly high volume. Another chap, just in front of us, turned and asked him to curtail his language because he had his young son with him. The swearing man said, ‘Look mate. I work in a fuckin' factory five days a fuckin' week, havin' to bite me fuckin' tongue all the fuckin' time in case I say too fuckin' much and get meself into fuckin' trouble. I come here to watch me fuckin' team and be meself and say whatever I fuckin' like so fuck off.' I only remember this speech so well because I've been quoting it ever since, originally because, like most eleven-year-olds, I thought swearing was really funny, but in more recent times because I think it says more about what football means to real football fans than any beautifully written hardback with a weeping Gazza on the cover. The father of the small child didn't look frightened or insulted. He just nodded as if he understood, and carried on watching the game.

So, anyway, my brother-in-law pointed at me, sitting in my cowboy suit, guitar at my side, easing my thirst with a dandelion and burdock before I bounced back for another three or four numbers. ‘Is he gonna be a footballer?' he asked.

‘No,' said the old man. He slapped the top of our ten-inch black-and-white telly. ‘He's gonna be on this.'

England are playing Spain at Villa Park tonight. In aid of Comic Relief, a handful of celebrities are taking a penalty each at half time. Each scorer gets a grand for the charity. I am one of these celebrities. Dave Baddiel is another. Tonight is Sven-Göran Eriksson's first game as England manager, and there's a full house of 42,000. As half time draws near we, the penalty-takers, are gathered behind the cluster of police in one of the corners of the ground. We wear the blue and white kits of the Comic Relief football team, The Sporting Noses.

I did a tour of West Africa with the Noses back in 1996. It was an amazing trip. I was shitting myself before we set off. I just thought I'd get malaria or go mad because of the side-effects of the anti-malarial tablets, or die of sunstroke or get taken hostage by guerillas or indeed by gorillas. I didn't want to go but I just kept walking until I was on a plane. I once read that Bruce Lee, when he was scared, would say to himself, over and over again, ‘Walk on, Bruce', and he would just keep going despite his fear. I walked on. It was worth it, if only for the fact that we all sat in the Sahara Desert one night, gathered around a birthday cake and sang ‘Hold me Close' to celebrate David Essex's forty-ninth birthday. David Essex didn't join in, he just smiled his cheeky smile. We played against a series of local teams from Burkina Faso and Ghana, culminating in a thrilling 4–3 victory in Ghana's national stadium in Accra, against the Ghanaian Post Office Ladies Team.

In all of these games, I was shit. In fact, it has always been one of the great regrets of my life that, despite the fact that I love football as much as anyone I've ever met, I have always been shit at it. I was my dad's last chance to produce an England international and I couldn't even get in the school team. In Africa, the locals were clearly insulted by my inclusion in the side. There were even some attempts to return rice and flour, but in the end I was substituted. As I stormed off, my retort to the crowd's catcalls, ‘Well, at least I haven't got flies on my face', earned me an official rebuke from Comic Relief.

Oh, shut up, I made up the last bit. But I
was
shit. That much is true. So at the end of the tour I hung up my boots for the final time. Until tonight.

As the half-time whistle blew, comedian Nick Hancock walked out with a hand-mike to explain the penalty competition to the crowd. He was loudly booed and a chant of ‘Who the fuckin' hell are you?' went up. There was a time when people who did stuff for charity were applauded, but this is a cynical age. Besides which, the average fan must be pretty pissed off with celebrities who jump on the football bandwagon and start going on and on about the team they love so much and never fucking watch. Unfortunately, this night, they chose Nick, a truly obsessive Stoke City fan, as their target. Maybe it was just a blanket ‘We hate anyone who earns more than us' approach. Fair enough, I suppose. When Dave Baddiel stepped up to take the first penalty, the booing, if anything, increased. Dave looked a bit edgy. He had confided to me as we stood behind the police that he was nervous. I, for some reason, wasn't. Despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary, I was totally convinced I would score. So, as the jeering got louder, Dave edged forward and put the ball over the bar. He put his hands to his face and the crowd switched to ‘You're shit and you know you are'. Merciless.

Then it was my turn. I swaggered towards the penalty spot, and I mean swaggered. I ran the risk of dislocating both shoulders, such was the extent of my swaggering. The crowd had gone through the boo-ceiling. Not only a rich tosser off the telly but also a West Brom fan at the home of local rivals, Aston Villa. I threw back my head and held out my arms with upturned palms like I was in a warm, soothing shower. They booed even more. I pointed at the left-hand corner of the net to signify where the ball was going. I don't know where this arrogance came from. I just knew I couldn't miss. As I walked back to begin my run-up, I could actually see the ‘Skinner', on the back of my shirt, on the big screen in the corner of the ground. It was moving with my swaggering shoulders. I turned and began a short series of stretching exercises, just to wind the crowd up a bit more. It worked. The booing and abuse was really, really loud now. I jogged forward and stuck the ball exactly where I said I would. The crowd shut up very quickly. I ran with arms outstretched and stopped in a pose that was less football and more modern ballet.

All my life, I've been a bit of a wimp, really, always worrying about silly things and fretting about what might or might not happen. Strangely, this wimpishness has always been shot through with a mega-self-confidence, verging on cockiness, that gets me through. It's all a bit of a mystery, really. Anyway, this night, the cockiness rose to the surface. How can someone who's always been shit at football suddenly become a can't-miss penalty-ace? After all my shenanigans, if I'd missed that penalty, that crowd would have crucified me. So, I didn't.

When I was still a baby in a pushchair, my mom and dad took me and my brother Keith to Dudley Zoo for a bit of an outing. I sat in my pushchair, gazing wide-mouthed at all the wondrous new sensory experiences that surrounded me. I had on a pale blue cardigan and matching bobble-hat knitted by my mom. Keith, who was about seven at the time, was having a few ice-cream problems so my mom put my brake on to attend to his dirty face. The moment she left me, a chimpanzee bounded towards the bars of his cage, held himself tightly against them and stretched out like a big furry starfish. He quickly fixed himself in this position and then, with teeth slightly clenched in concentration, he pissed all over me. My mom suddenly became aware of the sound of ape-urine against hand-knitted cardigan and turned in horror. At first, apparently, I just gazed around me in confusion, looking, I suppose, to find where this sudden torrent was coming from, but then I began to cry. Either I had spotted the spreadeagled simian and become alarmed by the apparently personal nature of his attack, or perhaps it was just that my eyes had begun to react to the acidity of the steam. Either way, Mom came to the rescue, and although her horror was already turning into not-very-suppressed giggling, she released the brake and wheeled me out of range. She was too busy calming me down to take note of the chimp's reaction. I wonder if he just hung there, watching and dripping, watching and dripping.

Forty years later, I drove David Baddiel and his then girlfriend to Wool in Dorset to visit a monkey sanctuary called Monkey World. Dave likes monkeys and it was part of a birthday-treat weekend for him. The sanctuary takes in a lot of chimps who have been mistreated by Spanish photographers. I don't mean door-stepping and telephoto lens shots of them sunbathing. I mean tourists pay to get their picture taken with the funny monkey and the photographer keeps his little pet in check by burning him with a cigarette and other acts of cruelty.

New inmates of the sanctuary have to spend some time in a separate section with large windows until they get used to the idea of being with other chimps. When we three turned up we began our tour by peering into this new-inmates section at the slightly edgy-looking new boys. You could actually see the cigarette-burn scars on some of them.

Then one of the chimps began to stare at me. I mean REALLY stare at me. He moved closer towards the glass until we stood only inches apart, gazing into each other's eyes. It was so weird that I could hear other visitors comment on it but I didn't want to look away. Deeper and deeper into the chimp's eyes I peered. It was like gazing into the dark, echoing pit of evolution. Could this really be what my relatives looked like? It was certainly what some of them smelt like, but that didn't seem relevant at such a profound moment. And what was the chimp thinking? What instinct drew him towards me like this? I don't know how long chimpanzees live, but in a perfect world this story would end with me recognising the expression of gritted-teeth concentration on the face of the chimp and the whole tale would take on a Daniel-in-the-lions'-den-like feel and would eventually dose with me crying once more, for my lost youth, for my lost mother, for my lost innocence, as the piss streamed down the glass pane only inches from my anguished face.