Frank Skinner Autobiography (49 page)

Paul was heavily tattooed, mainly with images of significant people and places from his life. He referred to his body as his ‘inky diary', and agreed to have a tattoo of me put on or near his bicep. He still had the bandage taped over his sore arm when he walked on, but when it came off, there I was, next to his ex-wife. I sometimes wonder if people from my past ever think of me. I bet Paul Sayce fuckin' does.

The BBC had extended the series to nine shows, but half-way through we hit problems. The broadcasters felt that the show was straying towards bad taste. Firstly, in the stand-up. It had been in the papers that charities for the deaf were not getting their fair share of lottery money. I claimed that a spokesman for the lottery had said, ‘Well, if they don't answer the phone. . . .' This got several complaints. Secondly, in the sketches. There was, at the time, a TV advert for IKEA in which several housewives threw floral-patterned curtains and furniture out of their windows and dragged them into a skip as they sang a song called ‘Chuck out the Chintz'. I parodied this, but with them singing ‘Chuck out the Chimps', and including several scenes of chimpanzees flying out of bedroom windows and even, in one case, being finished off with a baseball bat. This got a lot more complaints and, in fact, a spokesman for the BBC was asked to defend these items on a
Right to Reply
-style TV show. He just apologised and said it wouldn't happen again.

I was pissed off. There had also been several complaints about the Japanese inventor, all along the lines of ‘I don't know how you could have one of those people on after what they did during the war'. Were we also supposed to apologise for that? One of the problems about having a public-funded broadcaster is that anything you do can be described as a waste of licence-payers' money. On ITV, it's not like that. When did you ever hear anyone complaining about a waste of advertisers' money?

Everyone who buys a licence has the right to an opinion. Fair enough, but the only people who ever bother to phone in are, in the main, angry and confused sex offenders who live alone in desolate high-rise flats, or terrified, valium-popping old spinsters, whose dead pets lie decaying all around them. Are these the people whose opinions programme-makers should be listening to?

Anyway, it got worse. On the show that followed the ‘Chuck out the Chimps' controversy, I apologised profusely for the sketch and then said, slightly under my breath, ‘Thank God I didn't do that version set in Chinatown.' Then I sat down and introduced the first guest, ‘No stranger to controversy herself. Ladies and gentlemen, Rose West.' The band (I'll come to them in a minute) played ‘Go West' and the audience applauded. I pissed myself. Not only did they believe that Rose West was coming on, but they applauded her! I sneaked through the under-the-breath remark, but the Rose West bit was cut. On the next show I interviewed a married couple who were swingers. Y'know, they went to fetish clubs and bondage parties and had group sex with other like-minded couples. We had no graphic details and no swearing, but it still had to go. Then there was Mr Methane.

Mr Methane, a very tall thin man in a tight lime-green lycra body-suit and a lime-green mask, was a stage-farter. At the end of the show, I launched into the Phil Spector classic, ‘Da Do Ron Ron'. When it got to the bit where they sing ‘Da Do Ron Ron', the camera cut wide to reveal, on a table at my side, his legs raised high, Mr Methane. He provided the ‘Da Do Ron Rons' as only he could. Yes, he farted them. As this duet continued, the audience were, many of them, literally in tears of laughter. We played it totally straight, which, of course, made it even funnier.

Admittedly, I had cracked up earlier, but only because while we waited to begin, Mr Methane did an enormous, completely unrestrained and tuneless fart, in the same way, I suppose, that an operatic tenor might clear his throat just before he begins to sing. I wasn't expecting this and I just lost it. The BBC insisted that the duet was cut, and I was on my final warning. The headlines in the paper included ‘Clean it up, comic warned', ‘Frankly, who needs good taste', and ‘Beeb pulls plug on bum notes'.

Now, I am aware that even if I worked for days, honing and polishing a joke until it was technically flawless, it is impossible to create anything deliberately that is as intrinsically funny as a loud fart. However, I have always felt that jokes about farting are almost always unfunny. Even to hear a comic use the word ‘fart', for some reason, always makes me cringe. I don't even like reading it here. But Mr Methane was pure music-hall, like a sword swallower or a contortionist, and the audience, still my editors-in-chief, absolutely loved him.

I am not a ‘dangerous' comic. Like I've said, I have no desire to be shocking or controversial, just funny. I'm not saying I was right in all of these instances, but I do think my duet with Mr Methane should have stayed in.

Anyway, the series still did pretty well without him, I learned my lesson, and the BBC forgave me and commissioned a third series.

Some months later, I got an e-mail from a friend of mine, Janet McLeod, who lives in Melbourne, Australia. She had been watching an awards ceremony on Australian TV, where Phil Spector was getting a ‘Lifetime Achievement' award. Halfway through his speech, the famously eccentric Mr Spector suddenly started going on about the shabby way that ‘artists' were treated nowadays, and launched an attack on ‘the British comedian, Frank Skinner' who had, Speco explained, taken a work of art and desecrated it by turning it into a duet with a stage-farter. Listen, Phil, you have your ‘Wall of Sound', I'll have mine.

When Lianne Croft, the snooker streaker, was on the show, she said, ‘I drove up to the tournament in my knackered old Maestro. Oh, am I allowed to say “knackered old Maestro”?'

‘I should think it's alright,' I said. ‘I've got four of them over there.'

I was referring, of course, to my house-band, ‘The Skinnerettes'. These four ageing musicians, Bob Rogers on guitar, Ken Penney on keyboard, Ron Seabrook on bass, and Ronnie Verral on drums, were the great discovery of Series Two. They were put together (Yes, they're a ‘manufactured' band, like The Spice Girls) by my musical director (Oh, I love being able to say ‘my musical director') Richard Thomas, and they have been on the show ever since. They accompany any songs, play the guests' walk-on music, and appear in sketches playing everything from Eminem's homeboys to, well, The Spice Girls. Not bad for four blokes with a combined age of nearly six hundred.

The songs they play to get the guests on are all carefully chosen. (My favourite combination was Aled Jones coming on to the Manics' ‘If you tolerate this, then your children will be next'), but the Skinnerettes always make them their own.

The drummer, Ronnie Verral, is something of a legend. As well as playing with loads of big jazz and TV stars over the last fifty years, he was also the man who played the drums for Animal on
The Muppet Show
.

But what I love best about the Skinnerettes never makes the screen. In rehearsal, whenever there's an enforced break, I'll start singing, usually an old standard, maybe Glenn Miller's ‘Chatanooga Choo Choo' or Frank Sinatra's ‘I've Got You Under My Skin', and, gradually, I'll hear the Skinnerettes working out the key and smoothly gliding in underneath my vocal. Y'know, if there was no
Frank Skinner Show
, I'd happily pay them to come round my place, and we could spend the whole day just doing that.

Shortly after that second series of
The Frank Skinner Show
, Dave hit me with a bombshell. He announced that he was going to live with his girlfriend, Sarah, and it was time for me to move out. I always knew this day would come, but it still hurt. I had lived with Dave for five years. I never managed to live with any woman for two. My marriage only lasted ten months. In our time as flatmates we only really had one nasty row. In a game of Trivial Pursuit, I asked Dave what Elizabeth Taylor historical epic had lost so-and-so millions at the box office. Dave said, ‘
Antony and Cleopatra
.' I said this was wrong. The film was called, simply,
Cleopatra.
Dave protested. After some debate, I explained that if Dave didn't want to play the fucking game by the fucking rules then he could stick the fucking game up his stupid fucking arse. Dave walked out of the room and there was a terrible silence for some time. In case you're thinking that I over-reacted, I should point out that it was a ‘pie' question.

There were, inevitably, rumours that Dave and me were gay. Two single blokes, over thirty, sharing a flat, people are bound to talk, aren't they? On one occasion, I was leaving The Ivy, a very celeb-heavy restaurant just off the Charing Cross Road, when I bumped into a gay television celebrity. We chatted and he said, ‘You know, I always thought that you and Dave were an item.' I explained that this was not the case. ‘Well,' he continued, ‘I always thought you were. In fact, I'll be honest with you, I've had more than one wank on the strength of it.'

I moved out of Tanza Road in May, 1997, and into a flat about ten minutes' walk away. Shortly afterwards, Dave bought a house about five hundred yards away from my flat. He moved in with his girlfriend. A few months later, she moved out. Next week, I move into the house next-door-but-one to him. In about six weeks, he is due to become a father. I had always dreamt that one day, Dave and I might have children.

No, no, I made that bit up. When the story broke, the headline in the
Sunday Mirror
was ‘Skinner and Daddiel'. OK, he's going to be a father, but I still got top billing.

I was round his house last night, helping him assemble a Mothercare cot. You should have seen us, two of the world's least practical men, passing each other bolts and screwdrivers, and realising half-way through that we were building some of it the right way up, and some of it upside-down. All we needed was a couple of bowler hats. At one point, I stood, watching him fitting the right bracket in the wrong place, and listened to him talking about the table he'd bought for changing nappies on, and how his insomnia was finally going to come in handy.

My old mate, who'd said I could sleep on his settee for a few days, who'd been shoulder-to-shoulder with me when Brigitte Nielsen ran riot on
Fantasy Football
, who'd shared the terror of that harrowing first episode of
Unplanned
, and who'd stood, with his arm around me, singing ‘Three Lions' at Wembley in 1996.1 could see the grey in his beard and I imagined how he'd look with his own tiny baby in his arms. Even New Lads have to grow up eventually.

And I looked at him and I thought, ‘If ever I have a baby of my own, to hold and to buy things for, there's no way I'm going to let this fuckin' idiot build its cot.'

In 1998, I finally made a series of
The Frank Skinner Show
that I was really proud of. Jilly and Juliet were missing documentaries, so they went back to specialise in that line of work. The new producer was John McHugh, a short, stocky bull-terrier of an Irishman, who was something of a chat-show veteran, having cut his sharp teeth with Irish chat-show superstar Gay Byrne back in the old country. John was slightly scary, but he really knew his stuff and didn't mind telling me if I was talking bollocks. At the same time, he had real faith in my comic judgement and would often take the big risk if he could see that I was really keen.

I had some ideas for the new series. Firstly, instead of a specially filmed title sequence like we'd had on the first two series, I wanted to open the show, in the studio, with a song. I had specially written one for the job. It was called ‘Funtime Frankie'. Of course, it's just a light-hearted singalong, but the lyrics have a certain truth about them:

When I was just a boy in school, I always loved to play the fool. They said it was a childish game, but now I've grown, I'm just the same.

We had a new director as well,
Fantasy Football's
Peter Orton. By now, Peter and me had put the early, at-each-other's-throat days behind us. We even went to Crystal Palace–West Brom games together. We're mates. Soon, Peter was adding cameras and changing the set and the whole appearance of the show improved.

The first show was a Christmas Special, and I had an idea for a sketch. A few days earlier, I had got out of the bath at my flat and put on a pair of white briefs, at which point the Venga Boys came on the radio, so I started dancing in the bathroom, just in my white pants. Then I saw myself in the mirror. I absolutely pissed myself. I tried to carry on dancing, but it just looked too ridiculous. Now, imagine trying to pitch that as a sketch-idea to your Irish bull-terrier producer.

‘. . . and as the Venga Boys continue, I dance in these white pants.'

‘And then what happens?'

But he went with it, and it brought the fucking house down. When I think of all the time I've wasted trying to write clever jokes . . .

The guests were great. I explained to country-music megastar (there I go again, with my little descriptions) Kenny Rogers what the verb ‘to roger' meant, and then asked him about his fast-food chain, ‘Kenny Rogers Roosters'; I gave Eric Clapton a demonstration of how to play air-guitar; asked David Essex, when you're in a car with loads of sex-crazed, hysterical, screaming girls' faces pressed against the window, what facial expression do you adopt; and, after holding a metal-detector against Martin Kemp's head to see if it registered the metal plate he'd had fitted after his brain-tumour operation, (it did), I said, ‘You wouldn't get this on
Parkinson
.' And then there was Tara Palmer-Tomkinson.