Frank Skinner Autobiography (40 page)

Anyway, I'd like to finish my act . . . and who wouldn't?

When the Pie Factory gig was totally full, Malcolm and me still lost fifty quid a week each. So, after a couple of months, we knocked it on the head, and headed for Scotland.

Edinburgh '88 was not a massive success for me, box-office-wise, but it was a major turning-point in my career. I did two weeks at the hundred-seater Calton Studios, from 12.45 to 1.45 p.m., at two quid a ticket and, on August 18th, 1988, I got the following returns (I know because I have kept the Return Form to this day).

It was, to be fair, my only blank sheet of the run, but my record attendance was only twelve, and over the two weeks I averaged about four. The show before me in that space was a kids' show. They got two people in during the whole week's run, and they were close friends of the cast. Every day, when I arrived, they'd be sitting around in clown outfits and jolly-face make-up, moaning about how much money they were losing and trying to work out how the rot could be stopped. It couldn't.

I got two reviews during my two-week run. A newspaper called
Review '88
said, ‘He is a very ordinary, lad-next-door type of character, with a fairly sound repertoire of jokes, but he desperately needed an atmosphere to get himself and the audience going – something which a dingy bar upstairs in the Calton Studios doesn't provide at one o'clock in the afternoon. Stick him in the corner of a busy pub, heaving with drunken revellers, and I'm sure he would go down a storm.'

And the
Festival Times
said, ‘His inexperience as a performer lets him down slightly. He never manages to move far enough away from the nice bloke approach to bring out the best in his material. He's worth watching though, and with a bit more experience and slightly bigger audiences, he could be very good indeed.' Not bad for an hour-long show from someone who'd only been doing comedy for nine months. Meanwhile, the ‘nice bloke approach' was about to go out of the window. The Students' Union building at Edinburgh University had a venue known as the Fringe Club. Acts of all types, musicians, poets, comics, would go there and do a bit of their Edinburgh show for free, as a sort of a taster so that people who liked it would go and pay to see the full show at a later date. The crowd could be very horrible, pouring beer on the acts from above, throwing paper aeroplanes, and generally being abusive.

When I turned up for my spot, that's what they were like. Acts were leaving the stage in a state of shock. I was shitting myself. As it got to my turn, I could hardly breathe, I was so scared. Then, thank God, that which I like to call my ‘Oh, fuck it' factor kicked in. I asked a friend for a cigarette, I hadn't had one since I'd stopped drinking, and walked on stage with an expression not a million miles away from the one that Jack Nicholson had when he chopped down that door in
The Shining.
Though, I say it myself, I was fuckin' unstoppable. I was belting out my usual stuff with a swagger that gave it new life, improvising, having a go at people in the crowd and dealing with hecklers like I'd been doing it for years. I wanted to be a comic, and these fuckers weren't going to get in my way. And after a while, I realised they didn't want to, they just wanted to hear me being funny. I fucking stormed it, got my first-ever encore and left the stage a new man. I had found my point of view: Mouthy Brummie, who couldn't give a fuck. It was a slightly distorted version of my personality, but I can't say it was a totally false one.

Funny, isn't it? Just remembering that gig seems to make me swear more.

I'm worried you're missing the journal bits. I figured that now I've actually become a comic in the story, you wouldn't need my regular showbiz injections to keep your interest. I know playing to zero people in a bar in Edinburgh isn't, strictly speaking, what you'd call ‘showbiz', but bear with me and we'll see how it goes. To be honest, I'm worried that I took too long to get you to this point, too much wilderness years and not enough razzmatazz. Oh, fuck it. You might as well finish it now you've come this far.

When I got back from Edinburgh, I found that my Equity membership had come through. An Equity card was still quite a prestige thing in those days, but there was one problem. I had to change my name. There was already a Chris Collins in Equity, a northern club singer, if I remember rightly, and they didn't allow two members to have the same name. So, just as I was starting to think Chris Collins was finally becoming a comedian, I had to stick him in a drawer and find a new identity.

To be honest, this was not such a big deal to me. My parents, for some weird reason, always called us kids by our second names. At school I was known as Chris, my first name, because that was the name on the register. So when mates called for me, they'd say to whichever of my family opened the door, ‘Is Chris in?' and the answer would be, ‘Yeah, I'll call him. GRAHAM!' So another name here or there didn't make much difference. The question was, what name should I choose?

At first, I fancied ‘Wes Bromwich' but I thought this might be a bit too parochial. Thank God. How would you have fancied going into a bookshop and asking for a copy of
Wes Bromwich
by Wes Bromwich? I don't think so.

Then it hit me. When I was a kid, my dad was the captain of a local dominoes team (we were a very sporting family). Every week I'd watch him take a load of names, written on little bits of white card, from an old Strepsils tin, and pick his team. There was one name that always stuck in my mind. I used to go on to my dad about how much I liked it, but I'm sure he just thought it was little kid's nonsense. Now was my chance to take that name for my own. Thus, I became Frank Skinner. I'll never know why the name fascinated me so much when I was a child, but I've still got the tin, and the bits of white card.

A few years ago, someone sent me a photo of Frank Skinner's grave. I don't know if it was the same bloke, but the inscription reads ‘Peace after pain', which I like a lot. It's now on the cork-board in my kitchen, where all those pictures of Caroline and me used to be. Peace after pain.

Oh, for goodness' sake. I've got to stop being so bloody melodramatic about my split-up. I'm sorry, it's just that I'm at that odd, ‘What do I do now?' stage that people go through when they're immediately post-relationship. I just feel like a bit of a Billy No-Bird. But I'm desperately trying to avoid all those predictable things that just-got-single people do, stuff like joining a gym, phoning up your exes, and wanking so much that your cock drops off. Anyway, I won't mention it again. Back to the name-change.

And so it was that the next time I strode on stage and grabbed a microphone, I said, ‘Hello, my name's Frank Skinner, which, as some of you will have already worked out, is, of course, an anagram of ‘skunk fucker'. Well, it isn't quite an anagram of . . .'

Malcolm suggested I could run a comedy workshop at the college on Monday nights. If we could get a dozen people who wanted to be comics, and give them the benefit of my massive experience, then we could finish the course with a showcase performance, hosted by me and helped out by a couple of pros from the London circuit. He'd got the idea from a play he'd seen,
Comedians
by Trevor Griffiths, but the difference was that, in the play, the bloke who ran the workshop had been doing comedy for about thirty years. Our version was more a case of the near-sighted leading the blind. I justified my role as comedy-sensei by telling myself that these hopefuls would be better off with someone who could still remember his first, faltering steps into comedy, rather than someone who had left his early days far behind him. I mean, I'd be shit at running a comedy workshop now. If anyone showed promise, my advice would be ‘Do a couple of eighty-date tours and then get your own chat show.' Hopeless.

Anyway, we advertised the course and the response was really good, not only from potential students, but also from the media. All the local papers and telly were interested, and even the
Guardian
wanted to come and watch a workshop in action. We filled up the twelve places straight away, each of them paying £31 for the privilege. The theory was that stand-up is made particularly difficult by the fact that you have to do all your rehearsals in public. Actors have a few weeks, locked away with a director, to get it right before they show their stuff to a paying audience. This gives them the chance to leave a lot of the shit in the rehearsal room. The comic just walks out there and does it, and if it goes badly it's kind of awkward to ask the audience for a de-briefing.

Our plan was to get in a video camera so people could watch their own act and say what they thought about it. Then me and the rest of the group would offer our opinions, all done in a friendly and mutually supportive environment. And every week, the homework would be ‘Get funnier'.

Then, on the Saturday morning before the course was due to start, I picked up a nasty injury whilst washing my hair. I was leaning over the sink in the communal bathroom at my bedsit in Ravenhurst Road, when my back went. I mean really went. I was holding on to the sink to keep upright, and the shampoo was running down into my eyes and mouth. Lisa, who had moved in a few weeks earlier, mainly because there was no room for her at her mom's new place, just stood and looked at me. Four hours later, I was lying on the floor of my room, full of pain-killers, watching
Grandstand
. There was a sort of a newsflash. Apparently there'd been a bit of trouble at the Liverpool–Forest Cup semi-final at Hillsborough. I watched, still in agony, as the commentary team gradually realised that people were dying. Bodies were being carried on advertising hoardings, and laid on the pitch. Any human being that watched it would have been moved, but for a football fan, it was inexpressible. It was the first time I'd cried for years. But this was to be a big week for crying.

The next day, a couple of friends of our Nora's turned up at the door. (I didn't have a phone.) My mom had been taken to hospital. It sounded serious. My mate Paul drove me there. It was the hospital where my mom had given birth to me, thirty-two years earlier. The nurses gave me some injections for my back, and a walking stick. For five days, as the country was wrapped up in the aftermath of Hillsborough, I watched my mother slowly die. I arrived, each day, with my pockets full of Hubba Bubba bubble gum. If I thought I was going to break down, I just shoved a couple of pieces in my mouth and breathed through my nose, and it went away. I didn't want to cry in front of her, or my dad, for that matter. I did cry at home, suddenly, with no warning, mid-meal. Poor Lisa, she looked at me in shock with tears dripping off my chin and food falling out of my mouth. She just didn't know what to do.

My dad wouldn't accept that all this was happening. He kept saying that she'd pull through. I sat at my mom's bedside, remembering all my childhood hugs and goodnight kisses. I held her hand and leaned in towards her. She told me that she loved me, and I told her that I loved her. I had lots more to say, but I felt like she knew anyway. There was an Indian doctor there and my dad said to him, ‘Hey, do you know who this is? It's Frank Skinner.' Of course, the doctor had no idea what he was talking about. I had only just got around to telling my parents about my comedy thing. I never told them anything much about my life after I moved out. They didn't even know about Lisa, the woman I was living with, until I turned up with her at my mom's deathbed. They didn't know that I'd gone back to the Church. I wanted to be all independent and free. But I didn't want this.

Then on Thursday, April 19th, I watched the priest read the last rites, and she was gone. I leaned over for one last kiss. The pain in my back didn't seem very important now. I kissed her soft, warm face. I recognised the familiar feel of it against my own. All my life, I had associated that kiss, that soft cheek, with love and caring and security. All my life. I touched her hair and looked at her face for the last time. And then I hobbled out of the room.

You know, it's hard, when you're reading back through your book, and doing corrections and re-writes, and trying to make the whole thing presentable, because grammar and punctuation, even the words themselves, seem pointless when you've got tears dripping off your chin.

The comedy workshop was quite a hit. The group were an incredibly varied lot. There was Tom, a fifty-nine-year-old ex-brewery worker who told comical stories about the war and wanted to specialise in doing old people's homes; Ron, a retired British Leyland foreman who wrote Stanley Holloway-type monologues, including one about a haunted house that had about seven puns on the word ‘ghoulies'; Suzanne, a busty club-singer who talked about the horrors of marriage; Terry, a trendy systems analyst from Land-Rover, who did mainly politics and PMT; and Evo, who developed a special-needs-type character called Norman.

Evo, six-foot-three and sixteen stone, did a few open spots as Norman. He would turn up in character, with bad clothes, unnerving stare, and mysterious carrier-bag, and genuinely scare the punters before he went on. He then dumped the character-comedy, became a working magician, and now makes a balloon-animal second to none. Shame about Norman, though. A special-needs magic act is something I would pay to see.

I have no idea what happened to the rest of them, but week after week, they turned up, did their stuff, and talked comedy. The showcase was, as you might imagine, a bit of a curate's egg. Malcolm Hardee, one of the London special guests, made the audience squirm with guilt when he told them that Tom, who had just gone down quite badly, was dying of cancer. It was a complete lie. But one very interesting thing happened during that workshops period. One night, out of the blue, Jasper Carrot turned up. Apparently he'd met the college principal on a train, and the conversation had turned to the comedy workshops. The idea had fascinated Jasper, so he made the forty-five-minute drive and dropped in to check it out. He stayed for about three and a half hours, listened to all twelve acts, and offered advice and encouragement to all of them. I decided that night that, if I ever got to be a top TV comic, I'd remember my roots and try to be a nice bloke like Jasper. Oh, fuck it.