Frank Skinner Autobiography (21 page)

I can't imagine why God would have made me write that twice.

When I got home, I didn't tell anyone what had happened. I guess there were two main reasons for this. Firstly, my dad, Terry and/or Keith would have killed him if they knew. I don't mean as in ‘beaten up', I mean as in ‘put in the ground'. I didn't care about him, but I didn't want them to get into trouble.

Secondly, despite the fact that I've ended up as a risqué comedian, my dad could be quite puritanical and we had to mind our language and our subject matter around the house. There was no swearing, not even ‘bloody', unless my dad forgot himself in drink, and we weren't allowed to watch naughty stuff on the telly. (Our Nora will love that bit.) Once, in order to watch
The Benny Hill Show
, which was always the big talking-point at school the next day, I had to persuade my dad that Benny Hill was Catholic so he'd feel guilty about switching him off. I remember one terrible occasion when the comedian Marty Feldman did a sketch in which he played a dad telling his son the facts of life. As the sketch developed, getting more and more detailed, the tension in our kitchen got worse and worse. (We lived in the kitchen, remember?) My dad had missed his opportunity to switch the telly off early on and nip things in the bud, and now, switching it off would have left us in a terrible post-squirm void. The sketch had taken over. Marty Feldman was oppressing us in our own home. My mom and dad kept asking me to pass them things and how my day had been and how school was going. We were all totally aware of what was going on but no one could face mentioning it. I wonder how many times my own cheeky TV routines have put respectable families in a similar predicament.

Years later, I was reminded of that terrible Marty Feldman night. My brother Terry liked a gadget and was always at the forefront of modern technology. For example, he was the first person in our family to have a colour telly. I remember walking the three or four miles to his house to watch Albion's Asa Hartford play for Scotland in living colour. When I got there, there was a power-cut and Terry's whole street was plunged into darkness, so I walked home again, not having seen a ball kicked. As I trudged dejectedly down the gloomy streets, I felt I had been punished for wanting to watch the match in colour when we had a perfectly adequate black-and-white telly at home, punished for over-reaching myself. I was as Milton's Lucifer, though I doubt that I made the analogy at the time.

Terry was also the first person in our family to own a video recorder, and the first to go away for an annual holiday. These firsts, however, conspired against him because he was worried about leaving his VCR unattended for a week while he was away. I have to say, it would have been a pretty burly intruder who made off with it. VCRs were still in their infancy and Terry's was about the size of a small bungalow. Anyway, he managed to haul it on to a bus and brought it round to my mom and dad's house. He gave me a crash course in how to operate the mighty brute and then shot off on his hols. My mom and dad weren't exactly at the cutting edge of technology – they were still fighting family pressure to install a telephone – so I became Mr Video-Entertainment. I told them to sit down and I'd go and get them a good film. I toddled off to the only video shop in the area and came back with
On Golden Pond
. My mom liked a weepie and I knew this would fit the bill because a friend who, years later, confessed that he was homosexual told me he had been shushed for sobbing out loud while watching it at a local cinema. My mom judged a film by how many tissues she got through while she was watching it. I used the same criterion, but for films of a very different nature. Anyway, they loved
On Golden Pond
and I promised to get them something similar the next day.

I had heard that
Sophie's Choice
, with Meryl Streep, was a real tear-jerker so that was the next main feature. Now, I can't face going back to
Sophie's Choice
to check actual quotes, but the following description is as accurate as it needs to be for the purposes of the story. I sat down with my mom and dad that night, and the film began. Early on there was a scene where a young girl was chatting to a young bloke about her various interests. She said, ‘You know, what I like best of all is fucking.' I froze. She couldn't possibly have said that, could she? My mom and dad were staring at the screen, unblinkingly, so I presumed I must have misheard. The young girl went on, ‘Do you like fucking? I could just fuck all day, couldn't you?' I realised that I was now standing up.

‘I'm sorry,' I said, ‘I can't cope with this,' and walked past my poor parents who were still staring, transfixed, at the screen. I walked upstairs and sat, shaken, on the edge of the bed. After a few minutes, there was a knock at the door. It was my mom.

‘Can you come downstairs?' she said.

‘No, I don't want to,' I replied. I could clearly hear the word ‘fucking', in an American accent, coming from below.

She said, with a tone of pleading in her voice, ‘Your dad doesn't know how to switch it off.' I walked past her and downstairs where Dad was wrestling with the massive bulk of the VCR, while it verbally abused him at his very fireside.

I switched it off and my mom made tea. None of us spoke much. The VCR stayed dormant till Terry, with a slight tan, came and took it away. By the way, I was twenty-six at the time.

When I was in my mid-teens, I knew a few pubs where the landlord would turn a blind eye to my obvious youth, and one Friday night, myself and six school-friends sat drinking in just such a place. We could get drunk on about three pints so conversation would soon get candid, and occasionally reckless. A close friend of mine began to look as if he had something important to say. ‘Listen,' he began, ‘do you remember that kid in the lower-sixth with the greasy black hair? Well, one day he asked me if I could play billiards . . .' He went on to describe a very similar experience to my own. I decided I would tell my story as well. I'd never told a living soul what had happened. Then, before I could begin, another friend began explaining how the big kid had done a similar thing to him. In the end, it turned out that six of the seven lads at the table had been to see the sad little billiard table in the smelly little house. We laughed at our seventh friend and said it must be bad if even the big kid didn't fancy him, but I knew it had been an important night for us six. It was a bit like the erection discovery in St. Hubert's library. Not so joyous, of course, but it was really good to be able to talk about it at last, and we were all relieved to get it off our chests. We'd all remained silent since the incidents took place.

A few years later I went to a non-conformist church with a friend of mine. Standing at the door when I arrived was the big kid, handing out bibles. He looked me in the eye briefly, and then looked away. I said nothing. I still can't play billiards.

Y'know, I think that was better than the first version.

As you may have gathered from my brass-band digression, I've come to Birmingham to write this book. I've got a cute little two-bedroom flat with a nice view and it's good to be back home. I went to Mass at the Birmingham Oratory on Sunday. I've got a soft spot for the Oratory. It's a really beautiful church (Oh, no. The funnyman's getting all weirdo Catholic again) and it's associated with two top-notch celebrity Catholics from the nineteenth century, Cardinal Newman and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Newman was a real cracker because he was one of the country's top Protestants, then he converted to Catholicism. Nice one. Hopkins was a poet who I like a lot but we won't dwell on it or I'll start to sound like a big ponce.

Anyway, that's them summed up. It's very traditional, the Oratory. The priest, I noticed, stood with his back to the congregation, which is something I haven't seen since I was a kid. It died out in the sixties because people felt it was a bit alienating for the ordinary worshippers, but I quite enjoyed it on Sunday. Having the priest at the front of the church, facing in the same direction as us, made me feel like I was part of a team. It felt like we were playing one up front. The priest, who admittedly looked about eighty, was our star striker and it was our job to make sure he got the service he needed. Then I thought that him talking with his back to us was like he was a taxi-driver, driving his fares to heaven. Then I thought I'd better stop thinking of what the priest reminded me of and start concentrating on what he was saying, but this wasn't easy because the old fool had got his back to me.

Actually, I once saw this same priest on a documentary about Catholics and he came over as a bit of a right-winger. I like my priests a bit more on the liberal side, a bit more approachable. My parish priest in London came up to me during the BBC twenty-million-quid furore and whispered, ‘Don't let the buggers grind you down.' I can't imagine the Oratory priest using the word ‘buggers' unless it was in between ‘all' and ‘will rot in hell'. My London priest is also, it seems, quite a heavy smoker and, at the beginning of Lent, he gave a sermon, the gist of which was don't give up something if you will become irritable without it, because then those around you will be doing the penance instead of you. That got him off the hook.

I used to go to a smaller local church in Birmingham called St. Mary's, but I got married there and I'm always plagued by a desire to turn to the congregation halfway through the Mass and shout, ‘Why didn't you stop me?' And what would that achieve? People don't like shouting in church. I once went to a Mass in Tottenham, and when the priest was giving Holy Communion this big bald bloke suddenly upturned the dish containing the eucharist – y'know, those little round wafers – and then ran off down the aisle shouting about ‘Cranmer in the Flames'. (Just trust me, will you?) As he disappeared out of the back doors, I noticed a couple of burly, Irish-looking blokes go out after him, looking as if they were in the mood for a fairly physical theological discussion.

At the Oratory I bumped into a bloke called Eamonn who used to teach me when I did teacher training. (We'll get there, don't worry.) He used to go to St. Mary's but he explained to me that he had stopped because they had begun to incorporate an accordionist into the services. Sounds like I got out just in time. I knew those acoustic guitars were the thin end of the wedge.

After the service, a very respectable-looking Irish lady took me by the hand as I chatted to Eamonn, and said, ‘I love your shows.' She said she watched them all and taped them and sent the tapes to her daughter in Belfast who, she explained, is a psychologist. I found this slightly unnerving, but the Irish lady was very nice and asked me if I might speak at a function to raise money for the Grand Order of Baby Sitters, which is a group that takes sick children to Lourdes. I'll sort something out but I probably won't speak at the function because, to be honest, as you may have already gleaned from this book, and if you haven't, you will, I'm not really a very good Catholic. As well as all the usual sinning stuff, I'm also a divorced Catholic.

So, as far as the Church is concerned, any sexual intercourse I have that isn't with my ex-wife is adulterous, even if I married the woman involved. In fact, that would probably be even worse. The only way a divorced Catholic can satisfy the Church's rules is to remain celibate. I have to admit I haven't done that. I mean, for goodness' sake, the Oratory priest has been on the telly. He must know what the temptations are like. A priest in London once told me he was allowed to forgive me if I'd murdered my wife, but he wasn't allowed to forgive me for divorcing her. Thus, I live my life as a hypocrite. I love the Catholic Church, with all its faults, but it's not too keen on me. Oh, well, you gotta have rules. As someone once said, ‘Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.'

I was in a Catholic church in California shortly after Hugh Grant was caught with a receiver of swollen goods. The priest did a whole sermon about the loose morals of ‘the Englishman, Hugh Grant' and so, when I got back to England, I phoned Hugh Grant up. I'd met him once when I had been in goal in a charity football match and he'd scored two goals past me. Someone I knew had his number so I rang it. He didn't seem at all bothered by me calling him out of the blue, and described how he could see a group of paparazzi outside his flat through a chink in the curtains. I told him, in some detail, how he had been the subject of a sermon in a Catholic church in California. He seemed quite flattered. I asked him to do my chat show, he said no, and then we said goodbye. There was a time, I'll admit it, when I was too embarrassed to admit that I went to church. Now I'm phoning up film stars to tell them about it.

As I was leaving the Oratory, a young lad approached me and asked if he could have my autograph. I said he could, but not until we got outside the church. As I explained, ‘It's not really my gig.'

A question that often crops up in interviews, at dinner parties, or in pubs, is ‘What's the first record you ever bought?' Well, I'll tell you, mine was ‘Back Home' by the 1970 England World Cup squad. It was in a blue paper sleeve and the label looked like a football. The following week it got to number one in the charts. Now I'm fully aware that, in this book, there have been several ‘who'd have thought?' moments. Who'd have thought I'd have been on that telly like my dad predicted? Who'd have thought I'd be the godfather to my boyhood-hero's granddaughter? Who'd have thought I would have lost my virginity to a prostitute called Corky? Oh, sorry. I haven't told you that one yet. But you must admit this one will take some beating. Who'd have thought, when I bought that single by the England football team in 1970, that I'd be writing and singing a number one record for the England football team twenty-six years later? Well, no one, obviously. I, or rather Ian Broudie, David Baddiel and I, even brought out a second version for the World Cup of 1998. Yes, the World Cup, the same event that inspired ‘Back Home', and that went to number one as well.