Frank Skinner Autobiography (7 page)

I was, at the time, regularly hosting in Bearwood, and other places like the Fleece and Firkin in Bristol and Cheltenham Town Hall. London dubs tend to have quite a large turnover of audience because there are so many places to choose from, but out-of-London comedy clubs get the same crowd in every week so I had to write about twenty-five minutes of new material for each weekly show, otherwise there'd be cries of ‘Heard it' after each familiar punchline. This is why it's much easier to be a singer than a comedian. Frank Sinatra never walked on stage to the ‘My Way' intro, sang ‘And now . . .' only to be cut short by someone calling out ‘Heard it'. I remember one comedy club in North London where the regular host never changed his act. After each gag, people would shout ‘Again'. I couldn't be having that.

Obviously, some of my weekly twenty-five minutes was piss-poor, but it also threw up some really good stuff. Law of averages and all that. My only problem was cowardice. After a few months doing the London clubs I had put together twenty minutes of stand-up that worked. So why risk taking some of that material out and replacing it with stuff that might not get laughs? It was just asking for trouble. One night I was on at the Comedy Store and Eddie Izzard had just watched my act. He had played Bearwood a few weeks earlier and asked me why I hadn't done some of the stuff at the Comedy Store that had previously stormed it in Bearwood. I explained my fears and he gave me a bit of a speech about risk-taking in comedy.

The thing I admired most about Eddie, apart from the fact he was really funny, was his bravery. I had seen him as a regular host at gigs and his method seemed to be based on composing gags on stage. Just stand there and something will happen. So I started changing my act, sticking in new material, topical references, improvising, and chatting to the London audiences just like I did in the Midlands. I improved about five hundred per cent in just a few months. Good old Eddie.

On a stand-up tour, when I do about an hour and a half, of course ninety per cent of what I do most nights is set material. I can cope with the repetition for a few months, mainly because the buzz I get from the new or improvised stuff gets me through the rest. Not that it's a chore. If it gets stale, I chuck it. It hurts, but it's gotta be done.

What's great about
Unplanned
from a performance point of view is that there is no set material to get through. Dave and I made a rule in that bar never to repeat a gag we'd done in a previous show (that's why we get someone on stage to keep a note of the stuff we talk about. ‘The Secretary', we call them), and that bits from our respective stand-up routines are not allowed. Only very rarely do we stray from these rules.

At the same time, from an audience point of view, I sometimes worry about the quality control in these circumstances. Virtually every performance of
Unplanned
has shit bits, those sections that one journalist described as ‘the moments between the trapeze'. When I look back on an
Unplanned
show, no matter how well-received, these seem to be the only bits I can remember.

So we decided to try
Unplanned
at Edinburgh 98. Not that it was called
Unplanned
then. The show was listed in the Edinburgh Fringe Programme as ‘Baddiel and Skinner return to the original spirit of the Edinburgh Fringe'. I had seriously wanted to call it
This Might be Shit
but Dave felt this was a bit too negative. Incredibly, the shows, on at lunchtime in the 300-capacity Pleasance Cabaret Bar, were stormers. We just turned up and chatted about any old bollocks and people liked it. One day, Dave announced he was off for a session in a flotation tank after the show. He explained that this meant floating in water in a closed container for about an hour. He said this worried him because he could not be in a confined space for an hour without ‘having a wank'. This, I explained to the audience, was why the show only lasted for forty minutes. We even had the cheek to dose with a song, chosen by a member of the audience from one of the song books we bought on arrival in Edinburgh. Dave sight-read at the piano and I sang. All I needed was my cowboy outfit.

The show sold out every day but, at two quid a ticket, we didn't get too bigheaded. After a few days, various TV executives started appearing in the audience. The next thing we knew, there was talk of
Unplanned
becoming a TV series. I've never been sure if we made the right decision when we said yes.

The Edinburgh show had been a real lark. Now, suddenly, we were having meetings about set designs and which was the optimum size sofa for a wide-screen TV audience. It wasn't really what we'd got excited about that night in the bar in London. To do a completely improvised show was one thing, to do it on national television, LIVE, was something else.

I remember the first show very well. This was it. Live TV and no script. Not even a general idea about topic-areas. Nothing. Dave and me were sitting around backstage and I explained to him that I was feeling a weird sort of stiffness in my joints, and I had a bit of an unsettled stomach. Dave explained to me that this was known as ‘nerves'. I hadn't really had pre-show nerves since my very early days-as a stand-up. I'd forgotten what they felt like.

It was a twenty-five-minute show with a commercial break. I've never watched it back, I just couldn't, but I remember the first half as one of the worst pieces of television I've ever been involved with. We sat like rabbits in the headlights, trying to remember what funny meant. It was essentially eleven and a half minutes of nothing. And this was the beginning of a twelve-part series. The show was to go out Sunday to Wednesday for three weeks. When, after what felt like about a day and a half, the commercial break finally arrived, I could sense out of the corner of my eye that Dave was looking at me. I didn't look back. I started messing around with the audience; taking the piss out of people, flirting, cracking one-liners, the works. I had one minute ten seconds to remind myself of what it felt like to be funny. Dave sat still and let his usually invulnerable self-confidence raise itself up again to its full height. I did what I needed to do – show off. When the second half started, we were alright. We said funny things, they laughed. The chemistry was there again.

We've done two series of
Unplanned
. It just recently has been nominated for the Rose D'Or and the BAFTA for Best Comedy. Now we're opening in the West End. But if the second half of that first show had been as bad as the first, ITV might have pulled it on the spot, or we might have lost our nerve. Thank God for that commercial break. I knew I was right to move to ITV.

Autobiographies of performers always mention a stage debut, usually with the future classical actor playing a sunflower in a school dramatisation of
The Tales of Beatrix Potter.
My own stage debut was so disastrous that it didn't even take place. I was playing a shepherd in the Moat Farm Infants nativity play. Better still, on the morning of the dress rehearsal, the teacher who was directing the production made me Head Shepherd. When you're five that's quite a big deal. Especially when Annette, the mousy Shirley Temple, was playing the Virgin Mary. This was a real chance to impress her.

The dress rehearsal was going pretty well. I saw to it that my boys watched their flocks like there was no tomorrow. And when the angel turned up we were genuinely taken aback, partly because, in a childlike way, we were aware of her profound religious significance, but also because she knocked a tree over.

Then the scene switched to the stable. Mary and Joseph were sitting by the manger and we were to march on and do a bit of adoring. As head shepherd, I was to lead the other shepherds. The teacher whispered in my ear, ‘Go on, and kneel around the baby Jesus.' I passed this on to the boys and then gestured to them to follow me on with a little turn of my head. This is where it started to go wrong. The baby Jesus wasn't actually in the manger for the dress rehearsal. He had just got haloed-up with a bit of wire and some crepe paper and was letting his glue dry in a big crisps box at the back of the set. Lots of people wouldn't have even noticed him back there, but I did. I headed towards him like a homing pigeon, my fellow shepherds following my lead straight past a confused Mary and Joseph until we reached the back of the set and knelt in adoration around the crisps box.

It was an easy mistake to make but the teacher went ballistic. Strangely, she used an identical line of attack to the one my dad had employed after the bucket-of-slime incident. She grabbed me by my ankle and swung me upside down, causing my tea-towel to fall off. However, she had badly misjudged the arc of my swing. As I spun upside down, my outstretched right hand went right up her skirt and touched an area of warm clamminess that can only have been her gusset. The panty-hose was still in its infancy, so inevitably, she was wearing stockings. I could actually feel the springiness of her pubis pressing against her knickers. It was all over in a second but she became scarily upset and began smacking my legs and calling me stupid, over and over again. In a fit of what I realise now was chronic embarrassment, she dumped me down on the floor, told me I was no longer in the play, and then walked out of the rehearsal looking close to tears. Before you ask, this is not where the phrase Shepherd's Pie comes from.

I was confused and upset as I sat on that floor. I could understand why she took my captain's armband, but to kick me out of the play felt harsh. Also, Annette was looking at me as if I was vermin. If I ever had a chance with her, it had gone. But, most confusing of all, I had handled my first-ever female genitals. I had an awareness, fuelled partly by the teacher's reaction, that this was significant but I wasn't sure why.

This, then, was my first sexual experience – upside down with a woman forty years my senior, and me close to tears because my tea-towel had fallen off. You know, that last sentence wouldn't be a bad quote for the cover of the book. I believe it could be what they call ‘a teaser'.

Anyway, forty years later I was interviewed by a journalist about the fact that I was acting in a West End play for the first time. He asked if I'd made a mistake on stage, how I'd felt about it and how the rest of the cast had reacted. I said they'd looked confused and I'd felt a bit of a cunt. I then cracked up at my own in-joke but decided it was best not to explain.

I had a difficult phone conversation with our Nora today. She told me she was ‘worried sick about the book' and felt sure I would bring disgrace on the family when I talked about our upbringing. This problem just isn't going to go away, is it? I mean, she's sixty. What if she died of embarrassment and it was all my fault? Or there was a terrible family feud that lasted forever. Now I was getting hysterical as well. Nora lives in a very nice road in a nice part of the West Midlands and I know she's very proud of my achievements, but I'm sure she'd rather my success had come without quite so many nob-jokes and swear-words. But it makes me happy that she's still proud. If her neighbours see anything about me in a newspaper or magazine, they cut it out and pop it through her letter-box. Nora keeps all these clippings of my career. I never keep anything, apart from a crisp packet with Dave and me on it from a promotion we did for the 98 World Cup.

I think it's really sweet that Nora's neighbours go to all this trouble, but the system went a bit wrong when it was in the
Sun
that Frank Skinner's brother, Keith, had head-butted his common-law wife and she'd had to have stitches in the wound. Nora's neighbours dutifully popped this through the letter-box as well. Poor old Nora was mortified, bless her.

Since it was in the press that I was writing my autobiography, I've heard from three ex-girlfriends asking me what I was planning to write about them. Like I knew. When I agreed to write this book I had no idea that people in my life would get so edgy about it. I can cope with ex-girlfriends, but I
am
worried about our Nora. What are my options here? (Yes, I spotted the rhetorical question.) I suppose if I was the perfect brother, I would give the publishers their advance back and abandon the whole project rather than risk hurting my sister's feelings. Mmmm . . . y'know, generally speaking, I tend to see myself as two people, Frank and Super Frank. Frank is who I am and Super Frank is who I'd like to be. For example, we had a technical rehearsal for
Unplanned
at the Shaftesbury, and at one point I snapped at the woman who is producing the stage show because I felt the rehearsal was a bit chaotic. She looked a little shaken by my behaviour. That was Frank. The next day I sent her an e-mail to say that I thought she was a very nice person and I was very sorry for being so arsey with her. That was Super Frank. Surely Super Frank would feel that Nora's self-respect was more important than any book. Then again, Frank might decide an easy compromise would be to produce a sanitised version of my life. Maybe I could take a few degrees off my swing and have my hand just brush against the teacher's stocking-top rather than thump into her red-hot dodge. If push came to shove, I could airbrush out the piss-buckets altogether. This way I still get the money and mass adulation (my dream is a life-size cardboard cut-out of me gesturing towards a special display case full of
Frank Skinners
by Frank Skinner, in all major bookstores), and a book that doesn't upset any of my friends, family, or former teachers. But what would Super Frank make of that? The old-school rappers used to have a saying, ‘Keep it real'. My motives are probably a weird mix of greed, selfishness, pride, meticulousness, honesty and vanity, but I'm sticking with it. Walk on, Bruce.

My dad liked to bet on horse-racing. My dad liked a drink. My dad had a bad temper. I really loved my dad. My dad always said there wasn't one working class, there was two. And we should see ourselves as being in Working Class Division One. Consequently, he believed in keeping up appearances. He was never a man to wander the streets in his working clothes, unless he was going to or from work. Therefore, if he wanted to have a bet on the horses, he would usually get someone else to put it on. Otherwise he would have to put a suit and tie on and once he'd done that he might as well go to the pub and get arseholed. This would almost certainly involve him spending more money in the pub than he was likely to win at the bookies, with his ten five-pence doubles, ten five-pence trebles, and a tenpenny roll-up.