Frank Skinner Autobiography (25 page)

‘Why don't we have a Donkey Derby?'

‘Well, now that's a good point . . .'

3. Dear Lord. I think taboo subjects are bad for a relationship. You know what I'm going to say. We need to talk about the hell thing. Now, let me get this right. We fail the course and then you have us tortured forever. Not just till we die. We get teased and toasted for all eternity. When I read about two kids, torturing an old-age pensioner for a day and a half, in his own home, until he died broken and humiliated, I felt like crying. I even thought, ‘This is what happens to society when religion isn't a big deal anymore.' Please don't tell me that this is the your-own-image you made us in. Of course, even as torturers, we fall short. We can only keep 'em alive for a day and a half.

This hell thing, it's just not you. You're better than that. Even cattle get it short and sharp. This is the bad thing about working on your own. If only you'd had a team. When you brought up hell at a meeting, you'd have picked up on the raised eyebrows. You'd have gone away and come up with something better. I suppose purgatory was your compromise, but I think that's something you just put in for the Catholics: ‘OK, we'll go to heaven but we insist on some suffering beforehand.' Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I have a corrupted-by-liberalism view of things that has strayed from the truth. Maybe eternal torture is a good thing, but do me one favour. Please don't torture anyone for what they did to me. I forgive them. I'm the forgiving type. I wonder where I get that from.

4. Dear Lord. Sometimes, when I pray, I leave quiet bits so that you can chip in with any epiphanies, bits of wisdom, solutions to problems or one-off money-making schemes you might have up your sleeve. That's an interesting concept, God's sleeve. I imagine it roomy and perhaps slightly flared. Anyway, the scary thing is that, instead of divine inspiration, I might be filling the gaps myself, subconsciously. (PAUSE.) Yes, you're right. Of course it's not me.

5. Dear Lord. Somewhere, in a big pot, there must be a load of Bible out-takes: drafts one and two of the Sermon on the Mount, the extended version of the Good Samaritan story, including some not-so-good things that the Samaritan did, removed to avoid a muddying of his image of general goodness. We really have to trust the editor: ‘We could lose that bit about promiscuity being acceptable as long as one's partners are treated with courtesy and politeness.' Some bloke in a nightshirt, crossing stuff out. Oversights, mistakes, whole pages destroyed by the wine-bottle going over, mis-readings, misspellings, human error. If, for example, the prodigal's dad had, in fact, killed the
matted
calf, y'know, that calf whose grooming had been neglected as a direct result of the son's absence, then the story becomes even more poignant. The son is then a vivid expression of the way our sins come back to haunt us, as he stands, tearful with guilt, at the sight of the calf's uncombed carcass. So, Lord, forgive us our trespasses, especially if they came about as a direct result of a typo.

6. Dear Lord. Hallowed be thy name, apparently. Which is a bit worrying. Don't get me wrong, it's nice that you're hallowed and everything, it's just that hallowedness can really get in the way of warm, smiley, arm-around-the-shoulder type things, and they mean a lot to me. You see, when I meet human beings who are only just ever-so-slightly hallowed, I'm no good with them. I get awkward and dorky, and they start to think I'm a bit odd. I don't want you to think that. I want you to see my jaunty familiarity as a breath of fresh air. However, it's always in the back of my mind that, on the Judgement Day, you might say, ‘Not him. I don't feel he ever truly acknowledged my hallowedness,' and I'd be dragged off, calling back to you that your hallowedness was so fundamental and profound that I'd felt there was no need to up-front it. And some of the more liberal angels would deliberately not catch your eye.

7. Dear Lord. I just want to make it official that I believe in you. I mean, I really believe that you exist and you made everything and all that. Otherwise, your just a device I use to organise my thoughts. Y'know, that last line just fell out of me. I had no sense of contrivance. Maybe it was
your
line, given to me through your divine inspiration. Thanks. Mind you, it was a strange line for you to come up with, if you don't mind me saying. I mean, it's not as if you're trying to communicate to me that you ARE just a device I use to organise my thoughts. If that were true then it can't have been your line because, well, you're just a device I use to organise my thoughts. And a device can't have ideas. Although it does sound a bit like ‘divine'. If I hired a clergyman to edit this, then he would be a divine I use to organise my thoughts. Perhaps that's it. You were telling me to hire a divine to edit my stuff and I just mis-heard you. Perhaps you were telling me that I use you like you were just a device I use to organise my thoughts, and that's bad. I should listen more, let you run the prayers a bit, go with the flow. Hold on, I just read that original line again – it should be ‘you're just a device' not ‘your just a device'. So whose grammatical error is that? I'm not accusing anyone but it's very unlike me to make that kind of slip-up. Anyway, as I say, I really believe in you. And faith is more important than grammar.

Oldbury Technical School was the making of me. Whether the ‘me' it made was a good thing is highly debatable. My school-report in the first year was quite encouraging, but pretty soon I was getting ‘uncooperative and evasive', ‘only works when constantly badgered' and, perhaps most tellingly, ‘spends far too much time playing to the gallery'. The class-comic thing had got completely out of hand by this stage. Whilst my professional career began in the December of 1987, in truth, I became a full-time comic during the second year at Oldbury Tech. I did virtually no school-work. Me and a select group of friends just messed about all the time. The school nerds got the treatment, we'd have nicknames and comedy angles on every aspect of their appearances and personalities. One girl had fat legs (a bit like sausages), red cheeks (a bit like tomatoes), and flat tits (a bit like fried eggs). We called her The Breakfast. I wrote comedy-poems and songs about certain kids and teachers, drew cartoons depicting them in various disparaging ways, and was constantly developing my schtick till our gang had their own language and a massive collection of in-jokes.

Now I know lots of schoolkids form these exclusive little sub-groups. It's normal. But I was determined not to let it go, ever. I liked it too much. I think that was one of the reasons I started drinking heavily. Any bunch of drunken blokes in a pub leave behind their responsibilities and emotional commitments and become schoolboys again. I also think it's one of the reasons I went into comedy. As I've said before, it's not really what you'd call a grown-up job, is it? That group of mates from Oldbury Tech have just been replaced by nine or ten million viewers, but I'm still writing jokes and songs and showing off and stuff. I sometimes have that dream that I've got an exam to do and I've done no work for it. I know it's a common theme, based on insecurity I think, but it also reminds me of that time at Oldbury Tech when, occasionally, the grown-up world would intrude into my full-time comedy show.

The drink thing was already starting to happen. My night out with Terry had given me a taste for pub life, and I set out with a mate called Fez to actually get served in a pub without ‘grown-up' help. Fez was one of my closest friends. He was tall, chubby, and always looked like he'd just got out of bed. He had a fabulous way with words. It was Fez who once invited me round his house to try his new pellet-rifle with ‘Come over and we can dispatch some wildlife.'

We walked into the pub and I, being something of a veteran after my Johnny Cash experience, sent Fez to a table while I went to the bar. I had turned fifteen a few weeks before. The barman looked at me in anticipation. ‘Two halves of mild, please,' I said, in a voice so deep that my chin was actually touching my chest. So deep that the barman didn't actually hear me, he just felt the vibration. ‘Two halves of mild?' he said, enquiringly. Shit. I hadn't anticipated some sort of question-and-answer session. Maybe, I reasoned, you couldn't actually buy mild in halves. I had asked for something that didn't exist and completely exposed my inexperience. ‘Well . . . bitter, then,' I replied. This lack of conviction aroused the barman's suspicions and he asked me how old I was. ‘Nineteen,' I said. Eighteen would have sufficed but I was operating on a sort of one-for-the-pot theory. ‘I don't think so,' said the barman. I could see Fez looking across anxiously. ‘Right,' I said, and strode out purposefully with Fez following on behind.

Then some other mates told me they had found a pub in nearby Langley Green that had made them very welcome. It was called the New Inn on Station Road and was owned by an Indian bloke called Dave. Obviously, he wasn't really called Dave, but this was the West Midlands in the early seventies. English people couldn't be bothered to learn how to pronounce difficult foreign names, so a lot of Asian people just gave up and adopted an English name that was slightly similar. Dave was really friendly and the New Inn became a regular haunt for Oldbury Tech's drinkers. I can't say it was what you'd call a glamorous place. In fact, looking back, it was fairly horrible, but I was soon doing gags and writing songs about the regular clientele.

There was an Indian bloke called Batman (
his
name must have been
really
hard to pronounce) who had the biggest quiff I'd ever seen and had this thing that he would eat glass for a fiver. I saw him do it once. It was a piece of beer-glass about two inches square. He once paid me and my mate Shane a quid each to throw a brick through the window of someone who'd upset him. We did; and so did our mate, Sammy, but he got the wrong house.

There was a woman who was, I guess, over forty, but wore very short skirts, and eye-shadow like Alice Cooper. She owned a pair of white PVC boots and whenever she wore them I would joke that she had got her ‘working-boots' on. There was an old guy we called Alfred the Butler, because he looked like Batman's butler. When I say he looked like Batman's butler, I mean the one in the Batman comic books not the one from the Batman TV series. And when I say Batman, I mean the caped crime-fighter, not the quiffed glass-eater. When Alfred came over to chat, his loose dentures made him spit so much that you had to sit with your hand over the top of your glass to avoid getting a saliva-topping on your beer.

There was a bloke called Ronnie who once held a knife against my throat for about two hundred yards of the walk home because he thought I had informed the police about the whereabouts of his borstal-skipping daughter. I hadn't, but I was being cagey because I kept watch the night before while my mate got friendly with her up an alley. There was Gay Ray, the Sea-Hag, Tommy the Weasel, Trev the Ted and Dirty Violet, who always arrived with at least three black blokes and had a penchant for pissing in the lift at the block of council flats where she lived. Dave's barman, Suki (a sort of a half-way house on the anglicising front), used to sell me beer in the New Inn in the evenings, and then sell me 99s from his ice-cream van when I left school in the afternoons. After several months, he asked me about this. I explained that ‘I work there, helping the teachers.' He accepted my story, even though it was wrong on both counts.

Vandalism was another passion. On one occasion after leaving the pub one night, a bunch of us found a pile of newly delivered concrete bollards on a nearby factory car-park. We blocked the road one way by standing three of these bollards half-way across it, and then blocked it the other way by laying three bollards down so that they were less visible than the standing ones. It worked like a dream. A car sped up the road, swerved to avoid the standing bollards and crashed over the other ones so that they became wedged under the car. We hid around a corner, laughing. I always like to think that the policeman who investigated this incident went on to invent the speed-bump. A company working on the local canal had boats with thousands of pounds' worth of equipment on board parked-up overnight. We had a right laugh watching them trying to get it out of the canal the next day.

I think my most enjoyable act of vandalism was in a multi-storey car park in Birmingham. I walked from floor to floor, swinging on the overhead pipes and kicking strip-light after strip-light off the ceiling. They went with a bang, and a cloud of powder from inside the tube that left my boots and jeans dusty-white. I must have done about twenty. I don't know why I did it. I would blame the drink, but I was vandalising before I started drinking. I just did it. Of course, I can't look back on these things without making a damning moral judgement, but although I am loath to admit it, there is something profoundly joyous about destroying an entire bus-stop with a big lump of concrete. Hopefully someone clever will read this section and get me off the hook by blaming society. You certainly can't blame the parents. If my old man had found out he would have killed me.

But always, there were the jokes. I heard David Frost on telly doing a gag. It wasn't a side-splitter but I thought it was quite clever. The joke consisted of him just saying ‘Marmite – hopeful pa.' I liked it. That night, my friend Roy came round for me on the way to the New Inn. I sat him down and then said, ‘Here's a joke for you. Marmite – hopeful pa.' Roy, a lovely bloke but not the brightest, looked at me and went, in a hollow, staccato way, ‘Ha! Haha! Ha!' I wasn't convinced by this reaction and said, ‘Do you get it?'

‘No', he said.

I said, ‘You must do. Marmite – hopeful pa. Y'know.' Roy looked at me blankly. ‘Marmite – hopeful pa. Ma, or mother, might . . . have sexual intercourse, thinks a hopeful pa.' Roy stared at me some more, and then smiled.