Frank Skinner Autobiography (3 page)

Who'd have thought that sixty-odd years later her little boy would still be milking the same story for financial reward?

My dad was what used to be called a man's man. He was sturdy and short-tempered but also very funny, with loads of stories and anecdotes. He would tell me how his uncle, Tom Shanks, had carried a horse across the town square for a bet, and how my grandad, after a disagreement, had hanged a man in a Newcastle pub. He finally allowed regulars to cut the man down when he started to go purple. Apparently, it had been suggested they might cut him down when the man was still only blue, but my grandad insisted they wait till the man had a head like an aubergine.

My grandmother was also a formidable north-easterner. I remember my mom telling me about the shock she experienced when she first met my dad's parents and they were both smoking pipes.

My mom's dad died just as the 1957 FA Cup Final between Man Utd and Aston Villa kicked off. His wife, whose maiden name was, I'm happy to say, Polly Stocking, was the only grandparent I remember. She was a game old bird who lived into her nineties and regularly breakfasted on shepherd's pie and Guinness in her later years. I remember she was rushed into hospital in her late eighties and we all thought this was the end. She survived, and before she left the ward they decided to perm and set her hair as a bit of a treat. After lots of teasing and spraying, they took out the curlers and my gran's hair returned immediately to its natural, Don King-like, I've-been-electrified look. ‘It's like me,' my gran explained. ‘It's dead but it won't lie down.'

I was driving to the West Brom-Crewe game today when my mobile went. It was a conference call, with my sometime double-act partner David Baddiel, and our manager, Jon Thoday, on the line.

Jon Thoday is a chunky, dark-haired man, who looks like I imagine Michael Winner looked when he was in his thirties. He is the boss of Avalon, a company that manages and promotes comedians, and has the reputation, rightly or wrongly, for being tough, ruthless, and downright rude in its dealings with broadcasters, theatre managers, and other employers of comics. I like Jon, though. He is, with me at least, funny and charming, and inclined to giggle in a high-pitched way that belies his scary reputation. I've been with Avalon nearly ten years. A few months after I joined, I walked into their then tiny offices in Litchfield Street, London W1, and found Jon on the phone. ‘Fuck you and your fucking attitude,' he was shouting, and then he slammed down the phone with such force that it broke into about six pieces. ‘Ah, Frank,' he said, suddenly mellowing, ‘I don't think you'll be doing that radio show.' There was a pause, and then we both pissed ourselves laughing.

David Baddiel tells me that the first time he became aware of my existence was when we were both working as stand-up comics on the London comedy club circuit in 1989. I was on stage at the Comedy Store, at that time a basement club in the corner of Leicester Square, and Dave was with a bunch of comics watching the show. I was still fairly raw. I'd been doing stand-up for about a year and a half and was only just starting to get gigs at this much-respected comedy club. It was about 1.15 in the early hours of Sunday morning when I walked on. The crowd were often a bit drunk and mouthy by this stage, but I was having a good time. There was some heckling but, after being a bit scared of hecklers in my very early days, I was now almost encouraging their intervention. It got me thinking on my feet.

There is something of a myth about heckling. It's often suggested that every comedy club has a throng of hecklers making clever, witty remarks that the poor comic is scarcely able to compete with. In fact, I've been doing and watching stand-up comedy for fourteen years and in that time I might have heard three or four funny heckles. Mostly it's drunks shouting ‘Fuck off' or just making incomprehensible noises and then falling over.

Perhaps the best heckle I ever received was at a club called the Red Rose in Finsbury Park, North London. There was a blind man, a regular punter, who was in one night just as I was beginning a twenty-minute set. About two minutes in, the blind man shouted, ‘Get off, you Brummie bastard. (Pause) Has he gone yet?' I prided myself on being pretty quick with hecklers but a blind man is a tricky opponent. I considered engaging him in friendly conversation for a few minutes whilst, at the same time, holding my hands in double V-signs about six inches from his face, but I wasn't sure the crowd would go with me on this. I decided against shouting, ‘Well, at least I can fucking see', for the same reason. In the end I silenced him by trumping his ‘You can't attack me because I'm disabled' card by suggesting to him that he was only against me because I was Pakistani. He looked genuinely ashamed.

Verbal jousting with the disabled is, generally speaking, thin ice for a stand-up. I once did a gig at a theatre in Cambridge and had cause, in an improvised moment, to start talking about those people you see who are bent over double with hunched backs and walk along staring at the ground. A man at the back shouted, ‘It's called ankylotic spondylitis.' Well, nobody likes a smart-Alec so I asked him how come he knew so much about it. ‘I've got it,' he shouted in reply. An uneasy murmur started in the crowd. ‘Well . . . ,' I began, fumbling for a way out of this comedy cul-de-sac, ‘ermm . . . well at least you'll probably never stand in dog shit again.' The crowd took a second or two to consider this and then, thank God, applauded. I'm not really sure why. Were they being heartless in taking my side against the woefully stooped heckler just because I'd bounced back with a cheeky response, or did they honestly feel that I had shown true compassion by identifying, for the man, a silver lining in his dark, dark cloud?

I have to admit I don't always find a happy way through these dark patches that sometimes occur during audience banter. I was performing at a club in Manchester and casually asked a guy if he had any kids. ‘Not alive,' he said. I never like to just ignore an audience remark but this one floored me so I just carried on as if it hadn't happened. Even Homer nods.

So, it's very late at the Comedy Store, I'm on stage, the crowd is lively and David Baddiel, still a stranger to me, is in the audience. Then came the heckle. Now, a lot of comics have set responses to heckles. These, as I'm sure you know, are called put-down lines. It's not really an activity I approve of because the same put-down lines get shared around and I think it's really important that a comic treats each heckle as an individual case. Otherwise every turn is doing ‘Don't drink on an empty head', ‘Isn't it a shame when cousins marry?' or ‘Do your gums bleed once a month?' regardless of the heckle, and the spontaneity, the challenge of dealing with the unexpected, is lost. So, I'm still on stage at the Comedy Store and the heckle comes: ‘Don't I remember you from medical school?'

Now, as heckles go, this one was quite tricky. Firstly, it didn't follow the normal heckle-structure of insult from audience, followed by better insult from comic. It was more of a polite enquiry, but still potentially destructive and probably still motivated by bad intent. It sounded friendly but it was designed to throw me. Secondly, you'll be surprised to hear, it was not a heckle I'd had before, so I couldn't even fall back, if stuck, on my own personal heckle-response back-catalogue. If someone says they remember you from medical school, there isn't much logic in suggesting that, as a result of this, they'll never stand in dog shit again. Thirdly, I never went to medical school. Anyway, the exchange went like this,

Dave tells me he joined in with the applause. We didn't actually speak that night, though. Dave was already established on the London circuit and I was just breaking through. There was a fairly rigid pecking-order on the circuit, the general rule being that established comics sat at one end of the dressing room, sharing in-jokes and ignoring the new boys, and people like me sat on their own, giggling nervously at overheard gags they didn't quite get but which the established boys thought were hilarious. I made a vow that if I ever got established on the circuit, I'd always make an effort to make the new boys feel at home. You know, go over and ask their name and so on, maybe even introduce them to the closely knit in-crowd I was now part of. Of course, when the day came that I did get established and accepted, I thought, ‘Oh, fuck it. Let someone else sit in “Twats' Corner”.' Human nature, eh?

Dave and me (yes, I know it should be ‘Dave and I' but I'm trying to find my real voice. I just read what I've written so far and I thought some bits sounded a bit grand) had our first proper conversation in a dressing room at a club called Jongleurs in Battersea. It was during the 1990 World Cup and there was a telly in the dressing room so we could watch that night's Republic of Ireland game. Being of Irish Catholic stock, I was supporting the Republic. I'd said hello to Dave on a couple of occasions but we hadn't had anything like a proper conversation. He was doing pretty well at the time. He was getting a lot of radio work and doing gigs at all the best clubs. I was sort of world famous in Birmingham and getting on OK in London, but the differences didn't stop there. Dave, or David as everyone called him. Hold it. I found a difference already. In my whole life up till then, I had never met anyone called David who people called David. In Oldbury, he would have been Dave, no messing. And he was Jewish.

I don't think I'd met a Jewish person before. If I had they'd certainly kept it under their hat. Which seems unlikely when you consider how small those hats are. (I'm not totally happy with this gag because although Jews do wear those little hats clipped to their heads, they also wear those big trilby-cum-stetsons which, I imagine, have loads of storage-room for secrets.) I may have sort of known a Jew back in Oldbury. There was a bearded, East-European-sounding local nutter who everyone called Jacob the Jew. I have no idea if Jacob was a Jew (I mean Jacob the nutter, of course, not Jacob, the brother of Esau and the son of Isaac. He was definitely a Jew). The rumour that Oldbury's Jacob was Jewish was definitely beefed up a bit when my mate Ogga saw him on. Crosswells Road shouting, ‘The Suez Canal: what for?' over and over. None of us really understood the significance of the Suez Canal at the time, but it certainly sounded Jewish to me. I'm not even sure if he was a nutter. This is not always easy to judge. I find, as a general rule of thumb, if you see someone wearing more than two badges, they're a nutter. But that's a personal viewpoint. I went along with the theory that he was a nutter mainly because it enabled me to pun on the popular foodstuff, Jacob's Crackers.

On a darker note, my dad told me a story of how a Jewish money-lender he knew of, back in the north-east, had driven a poor woman to put her head in the gas oven because of his cruel interest rates. My dad was not a man to hold back when it came to enforcing a racial sterotype.

Anyway, I know now that Dave is nothing like the nasty Jew that my dad spoke of. For a start, there is no way in the world that he would ever lend anyone money. But he was a bit scary at first. He was more successful, richer, better-looking, trendier and brainier than me, and when he first shook my hand I sensed he knew this as well as I did. In fact, I half-expected him to bring it up, but he didn't. He was dressed in blacks and greys, the way fashionable London people did in 1990. His hair was long on top and short at the sides and he wore little round specs. I didn't know if he actually needed them but I suppose they were easier to maintain than a large flashing sign that said ‘I've got a degree', and served the same purpose.

We shook hands in the dressing room and he joined me in watching the Ireland game. At first I thought that at any time he might ask if he could turn over to watch a Fellini movie on Channel Four (I presumed there was one) but he didn't. In fact, he seemed genuinely interested in the game, to the point where he started slagging off Ireland's use of the long ball game and explaining why the Italian and Brazilian systems were, in fact, more efficient as well as more entertaining. This pissed me off. I was prepared to play the newcomer comic role if I had to, but no toffee-nosed, four-eyed Cockney . . . (In those days, everyone from London and its environs was a Cockney in my eyes.) So we had a row about football. And, although we didn't agree, it slowly dawned on me that this trendy Jewish intellectual knew about, and really cared about, the game. I was well impressed. My dad had always told me that I should never trust a man who didn't like football. But if they did, they were alright, you could even forgive them the odd housewife on an unlit Gas Mark 9.

The next time I met Dave was at the Central TV studios in Nottingham. I was doing an Amnesty International comedy special called the Big 30. Dave was doing the same show with his then comedy partner, Rob Newman. When I bumped into them they were standing among their scary-looking management team from the Avalon agency. Rob had a photocopy of the blurb for the back of their new live video and was sitting with a pen, crossing out every ‘Baddiel and Newman' and writing in ‘Newman and Baddiel'. Dave sat nearby looking depressed. The Avalon team, including their big boss man, Jon Thoday, gazed about them like it was all in a day's work. I said hello and made small talk.

As the day went on, me and Dave got more and more chatty. It's a weird thing when a bloke makes a new male friend. Men of my generation spend about, I would say, forty per cent of their waking hours demonstrating that they're not homosexual. The amount of time I spend talking about football and big tits may be related to this, it's all a bit too chicken-and-egg to work out. Anyway, I sensed I was making a new mate. And a trendy, successful, sophisticated, highly intelligent one at that. And he liked football and big tits. And still no urge to put my head in the gas oven.