Frank Skinner Autobiography (14 page)

It was a cruel thing to do to Jeffrey. Even as a little kid I realised that. But like my teacher at the nativity play, Mother Mary got embarrassed and lashed out at the source of her embarrassment. And anyway, in the current social climate, circa 2001, a little old lady being cruel to a schoolkid is quite a refreshing turnabout.

Unplanned
has been going pretty well at the Shaftesbury. The crowds have been good and the front of the theatre looks fantastic: two massive photographs of me and Dave, and, in between these, our caricatures above the words ‘Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned', all done in neon. This weekend is the end of the run and it's all been worth it, if only for that theatre-front. I don't think of myself as a vain man, but the other night I nearly got myself run over, standing in the middle of the road so that I could see us all over the theatre and reflected in the glass-fronted building across the street.

One night last week, someone from the audience asked me what my favourite TV programme was. It's a toughie, but
Columbo
would definitely be up there. At this point, Dave pointed out that Columbo had a glass eye. I said that it was Peter Falk, the actor who plays Columbo, who had the glass eye. Dave looked confused. To be honest, I had no idea where I was going with this, but on I went. I put it to Dave that, while Peter Falk does indeed have a glass eye for the purposes of the role, the glass eye plays the part of a real eye. This triggered off a debate in the crowd that I overheard still going on in the pub afterwards. I think that's great.

The next night, someone asked if we could have any superpower what would it be. Dave suggested that X-Ray vision would have its advantages. He started talking about those adverts for X-Ray specs that you used to see in comic books. The advert showed a kid in these specs, staring at his hand and able to see all the bones inside. I confessed that I had discussed this years before in my stand-up routine. I had concluded then that if I owned genuine X-Ray specs, within a couple of months, EVERYONE would be able to see the bones in MY hand.

I went on to say that, best of all, I would like to be able to fly, but if I did I wouldn't do it like Superman. I don't like the one-arm-raised flying style, or even the less common two-hands-raised version. I'd fly, perhaps with my hands folded behind my head, or maybe on my hips, with legs crossed, if I felt so inclined. I demonstrated these various options. Oh, I love my job.

The library at St. Hubert's included a book called
Born Free
, you know, about the woman with the lions and stuff. One day a classmate of mine called Stephen told me and another couple of kids that the book was a must-see. We made our way into the library and stood looking puzzled at each other while Stephen flicked feverishly through the pages. Then he stopped. He looked at us, then at the book, then he showed us. It was a full-page black-and-white photograph of an African tribeswoman shot from the hips up. She stood staring at the camera with a slightly unfriendly air. Stephen was grinning. His eyes had widened. Yes, we'd noticed. The tribeswoman was bare-breasted.

He laid the book open on a table and the four of us just stood staring at it. I mean, for ages. I can still see those breasts even though I haven't seen the book for years. And I absolutely guarantee that it was a picture of bare breasts and not the solar system. We just stared. And then Stephen said, in a slightly hushed voice, ‘Y'know, when I see something dirty like this, my thingy goes all stiff.'

Suddenly, eureka! I have never felt so relieved in my life. I thought it was just me. I thought I had some sort of paralysis thing. I looked around and I could see that the other two were similarly relieved. Yes, all our thingys went stiff when we saw something dirty. Hurrah! I could have hugged Stephen for this revelation. We all got giggly and joyous that we'd discovered something universal and important. We even shook hands. We actually shook hands. We were normal. The experience was uplifting in every sense. I'm glad we held back from hugging each other because if Mother Mary had come in and found us all locked in a group embrace, each with an erection, there would have been four other wooden crucifixes on the wall outside her office, and we'd have been on them.

There's a science fiction story about a guy who goes backwards in time and while he's in the past, he accidentally steps on a butterfly. When he returns to his own time, we speak a different language and Britain has a fascist government, all because of the changes he triggered when he stood on the butterfly. Just like I can never know the weird and unfathomable effects the half-ender I chucked at my neighbour might have had on my life, how can any of us possibly predict the consequences of even our most trivial actions on the lives of others?

Could that African tribeswoman have ever imagined that her breasts would have such a massive effect on an eight-year-old schoolboy on the other side of the planet? She brought me sexual arousal, removed what seemed like very real fears about my health, and gave me a strong sense of belonging and self-awareness, all with one unsmiling flash of her tits. It was a truly important moment in my personal development, all thanks to her. It could also be seen, of course, and not as facetiously as you might think, as another step on my ladder to nob-joke fame and glory. It added a new dimension. We all became firm friends. I guess you'd call it group solidarity.

I thought I'd give you a brief run-down of a weekend in my life. Make of it what you will. Perhaps it will be read by some kid I'll never meet and change his life like the tribeswoman's tits changed mine. I can't imagine that but then, as I say, neither could she.

Friday night. 11th May 2001. If we take our lead from
Ready Steady Go
, the weekend starts at tea-time on Friday. Guess what? I'm in my office at Avalon (y'know, my management company) in Ladbroke Grove, West London, writing this book. I've worked out that I need to write 3,000 words a day to make my deadline. This is slightly scary but I'm starting to really enjoy writing it. Let's face it, I'll probably never write another book, unless I do volume two of this when I'm eighty, so I might as well enjoy it. My girlfriend, Caroline, says she thinks writing the book has made me more reflective, especially about my background. She reckons I've suddenly become very class-aware, more inclined to make casual anti-posh remarks, to whinge about privilege. I need to watch this. I don't like rich, successful celebs who go on about their poor backgrounds. Shit, I've done that big time, haven't I? Well, it's an autobiography. I'm trapped in facts.

I sit in my office, which has a window that faces a brick wall, so I get no hint of the sunny day outside. On the wall, pics of Muhammad Ali, Bruce Lee and Elvis Presley. A photograph of me and another hero, former Albion star Jeff Astle. I go for heroes on the office wall. In the corner, a life-size cut-out of John Wayne. On top of my computer there's a teddy bear dressed as Elvis, a gift from Caroline. There's also a baseball that has the inscription ‘The one who complains about the way the ball bounces is likely the one who dropped it', and a little model of my great inspiration, Wile E. Coyote from the
Road Runner
cartoons. He's the one who gets blown up, fried, crushed, and generally badly hurt in his pursuit of the Road Runner, but keeps going. He's the ultimate symbol of endurance, determination and single-mindedness. When I'm writing the book, a TV show, or stand-up, he looks over me. Fuck failure, keep going.

The soundtrack to my writing is an endless wall of hip-hop. Today it was Dr Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg and the Notorious B.I.G. Throbbing bass lines, and people rapping about niggers, bitches and motherfuckers while I write about garden sheds and schoolboys weeing their trousers. It works for me but I've no idea why. I didn't even get into this sort of music till about three years ago. I didn't like rap. When people tried to win me over, I would say that if I needed bad poetry, I'd buy a greetings card. Then I got drawn in via the weirdest route, French hip-hop. I went out with a woman who was into MC Solaar and ‘I Am', both French rap acts, and I got hooked, even though I had no idea what they were saying. Maybe
because
I had no idea what they were saying. It was the human voice as musical instrument, just a good noise, but now I need all those nasty words as well.

At 6.45 p.m. my car turns up. I drive but, particularly when I'm working, I'll often hire a car with driver, and, if he's available, I always book Gerry. Gerry is arguably the most Irish man in the world. He also has more stories than anyone I've ever met, my favourite being the one about when he patented a device for picking up dog excrement. It was called the Mess-Stick, and when he tried to get the pooper-scooper franchise with Westminster Council, him and his friends turned up at the plush council offices to discover that their rivals had all brought plasticine to aid their demonstration. Gerry and his boys had stopped off in Green Park to collect real dog shit for theirs. It didn't help. Gerry is also a Catholic, so that reduces the weirdo factor if I ask him to stop off at the local Catholic church so I can light a candle for someone, or get in the car with ashes on my head.

I like Gerry. I always sit in the front, partly because he's become a mate and it makes chatting easier, and partly because it's bad enough swanning around in a chauffeur-driven Merc without sitting in the back like Lord Twat. We're off to the Shaftesbury Theatre for the last weekend of the
Unplanned
run, picking up David Baddiel from his house on the way. It's a sunny day and the streets are full of scantily clad women. Gerry and me sit in traffic in Notting Hill and two sexy black girls in breathtakingly short skirts recognise me and start waving and giggling. I wave and giggle back. Maybe a vague shadow of the
Born Free
book rolled across my subconsciousness, but if it did, I didn't notice. Gerry points out a white girl in cut-off denims, crossing the street. ‘Never choose a new girlfriend in the summertime,' he says, ‘because everybody looks good with a tan.' I nod, and remember he gave me the same advice last summer. I think about my own girlfriend, Caroline. She presents an entertaiment news show called
The Juice
on Radio Five Live. They record it on Friday afternoons and I'm wondering how it went. She is DJ-ing at a club called Strawberry Moons tonight. We'll probably meet up later. I'm not really sure how I rate as a date. She's a party girl at heart. She's twenty-three, with a taste for strawberry martinis and tequila slammers. I'm twenty years older and I don't drink. The age wouldn't really matter if I drank because everybody is seventeen when they're drunk. Mind you, comedy is definitely not a grown-up job, so maybe I get away with it. What can I do? I can't get younger and if I start drinking again, in six months I'll be living on waste ground with seventeen carrier-bags, shouting, ‘I used to be on television.' I don't see how that would help.

Caroline came to a couple of
Unplanned
s early on, but she didn't enjoy hearing me answering questions about my past sex life and the like. I sympathise. I don't feel so good talking about these things if I know she's in the audience.
Unplanned is
about opening up to the crowd, about talking to them like they're old mates, so I have to go for it. Most couples don't hear their partners when they're talking about that stuff, especially not with 1,400 witnesses.

We turn up at Dave's place. He comes out nearly smiling. Dave is not a great one for chirpiness. I ask him how he is, knowing that he will always say ‘tired'. Often he will fill this out with additional information like ‘I slept like a cunt last night'. We set off and pass more girls. He cheers up a little.

As we pull up outside the theatre, Dean and Bobby, our minders for the West End run, are waiting to greet us. Neither of us need minders in the everyday run of things, but
Unplanned
is essentially a free-for-all and we've had a couple of blokes try to get on stage. They may well have only been looking for a handshake or a moment in the spotlight, but it's nice to think that if they were looking for blood they'd be dealt with.

They say Elvis Presley used to have a revolver tucked in his boot on stage. Obviously, this wouldn't stop him getting shot, but Elvis's priority was that the assassin wouldn't be alive to go around afterwards saying ‘I shot the King.' What a fantastic image that is. Pandemonium as a dying Elvis, sprawled on the stage in a blood-stained white flared jumpsuit, fires haphazardly into the crowd where women and children drop all around the fleeing assassin, struck by the King's stray bullets. And the ever-professional orchestra still blasting out ‘All my trials, Lord, soon be over . . .' On stage one night Dave asked Dean and Bobby, in their usual front-row, centre-aisle seats, if they'd take a bullet for us. Neither of them seemed outraged at the prospect.

On Fridays and Saturdays we do two shows, at 7 and 9 o'clock. The first one was OK. I won't bore you with the blow-by-blow. The heat has slowed the audience down a little but I like the slightly quieter vibe. OK, it was shit. Dave liked it, but to me there are two kinds of show, shit and brilliant. Ergo, any show that isn't brilliant is shit. It's a tough rule but it keeps you on your toes.

Caroline's old mate Pete was in the audience. He comes to the dressing room to say hello. Pete is a fanatical Watford fan and talks to me and Dave about football, hard-core style. Football is a great conversation fall-back, so he probably didn't like the show and used football to avoid having to confess it. Thus works the mind of the performer. Dressing room visitors are on frighteningly thin ice unless they take an undiluted-praise approach. Anything else will be picked apart by the performer until he finds the most negative possible interpretation of what was said. If you want to drive a performer crazy on your dressing room visit, why not try the old classic, ‘Well, you've done it again.' This is a slow burner. The performer might well take it as positive at first, and then be woken in the early hours by all the dreadful connotations that will have been slowly released in his mind.