Frank Skinner Autobiography (32 page)

Mind you, not all the side-effects of a literary education are good. After my success in my first degree, I had a massive burst of self-confidence that was perilously close to cockiness. One night in the Duck Inn, my regular haunt, I had a debate with a very hard bloke I knew called Duncan. I suggested that, given my superior intellect, it was very stupid of him to challenge my opinion. He beat the shit out of me, and the next day I looked at my bruised face in the mirror and said out loud, ‘You deserved that, you arrogant bastard.' I went up the pub, thanked Duncan for saving my soul, and bought him a pint. I'm not sure he ever understood, but I have no doubt that beating pulled me back from the brink of lifelong cuntiness. Maybe they should bring back flogging.

One non-academic milestone that occurred at Birmingham Poly was that I wrote and starred in a comic play, as part of the poly's ‘D.H. Lawrence Week' celebrations. It was called
Sadie Chatterley's Lodger
, a kitchen-sink comedy in which I played Lawrence as an amorous Jewish lodger, chiefly because I'd been to a Vicars and Tarts party as a rabbi a few weeks earlier and still had the costume. The play began with a prologue, sung by me in George Formby, cheeky-wink mode, complete with ukulele. It had the same tune as ‘When I'm Cleaning Windows', and included references to Lawrence's Oedipus-complex and various risqué episodes from his novels.

The Rainbow
seemed a nice book, I'm afraid I spoke too soon, With big fat pregnant women dancing underneath the moon.

Typical undergraduate drivel, but I liked being up there getting laughs. The play itself was pretty disgusting, including a sex-scene with Sadie's neighbour where I tell the audience, mid-shag, I'm thrilled because she's a virgin. Then she turns to them and explains that she's still got her tights on. Still, it stormed it, and afterwards a lecturer told me he'd never seen anything that ‘adhered so strictly and consistently to bad taste'. Signs of things to come, I suppose.

Anyway, with two English degrees under my belt, the way forward was pretty obvious. I went on the dole for three and a half years.

I just got into Northern Seoul today. I don't mean I'm spending my weekends at the Wigan Casino. I mean I'm in Korea. I'm going to be making a documentary about Korean and Japanese football when I've finished this book, so I'm out here with Phil the producer/director and Bernie the assistant producer. Phil, mild-mannered in thick spectacles, looks like a very brainy twelve-year-old, but has made loads of documentaries and you get the feeling he really knows what he's doing. Bernie is blonde, business-like, and probably in her thirties. If I'd seen her in a bar, I would have said she was cute, but I don't think she's the kind of woman who'd really enjoy that adjective. They're both good company, though, and I've been looking forward to the trip. We're doing a bit of a recce. I didn't find out how to spell ‘recce' until very recently, and now I find myself on one. I must be careful not to find out how to spell ‘heamephrodite'.

Sorry, I'm just trying to work out what tense I'm writing this in. There's a temptation to write these journal-bits in Present Tense but I'm going to switch back to Past Tense now. I think it's a bit classier.

Having met up with Phil and Bernie, who've already been here for a week, we went out to meet a couple of English guys, Brian and Mike, who've been living in Korea for about twelve years. They used to be journalists but now they do PR, including helping with Korea's World Cup bid. We had a traditional Korean meal, with bowls and bowls of pickle-type stuff, and a bit too much sitting on the floor for my liking. When we'd finished, I limped outside and noticed that the barber-shop across the road was still open. It was nearly midnight. Mike explained that barber-shops in Seoul are a bit unusual. The barber asks you if you need any special services, and if you say yes, he steps out of the individual booth that the chair is in, and a young woman comes in and masturbates you.

No, I didn't. In fact, there seemed something very odd about the whole concept of what I suppose you'd call the barber's hired-hand. I wonder if being in a barber-shop influences her approach to her work? I wouldn't want to be masturbated by a woman who was saying stuff like, ‘D'you see the match last night, sir?' or asking me where I was going for my holidays. And I'd be very uneasy at the end, when she held up the mirror for me to see the finished job from various angles, with me having to go ‘Yeah, that's great, that's very nice' before she moved on to the next one.

My mate Fez had already had a little spell on the dole, and had upset the Social Security people at his initial interview by turning up drunk and asking, across a crowded waiting room, ‘Excuse me. Is this where you get the free money?' This approach, refreshing in its honesty, I thought, didn't go at all well with the Social, so I decided to play it straight. I went to the Supplementary Benefit Office in Smethwick, took a numbered ticket from the machine and waited my turn. My plan, brilliantly conceived by my Careers Officer some years earlier, was to stay on the dole for as long as I possibly could. I even left home and moved into a horrible bed-sit so I wouldn't be under any parental pressure to find a job. I'd worked my balls off academically for four years, and was now trained to use my spare time constructively. I thought it might be nice to take a few years off to read some books and get drunk. All I needed was a few bob to keep me going.

On the staircase leading to the Benefit Office, someone had written in black felt-pen, ‘Cheer up, money isn't everything'. It made me laugh every time I passed it. The waiting room at the top of the stairs wasn't so funny. I was surprised to discover that some of the people there were actually looking for work. I couldn't quite get my head round that. The waiting room always had loads of kids running about and getting intermittently screamed at by chain-smoking young women in laddered tights, who, apparently, didn't own any shampoo. The men fell into two groups: the younger ones, with tattoos and lumberjack coats, also chain-smoking, mainly roll-ups, and the middle-aged, who had always worked but had fallen victim to international economics, and other stuff they didn't understand. These guys always wore a suit and tie for their appointment, as if to say ‘I shouldn't really be here. It's just temporary, I'm sure.' Over the years, I watched their suits and their optimism slowly grow threadbare. Most of those men never worked again.

I, on the other hand, was living the life of Riley. My housemate, Paul, was a manager at the Triangle Arts Centre in Gosta Green, Birmingham, and I started doing a bit of voluntary work for them. Basically, they paid me in cinema or theatre tickets, so most nights I'd nip in their canteen for some ethnic food, catch a Beckett play or a Japanese movie, and then get pissed and talk about women and football in the pub next door.

The government paid my rent and gave me £24.70 a week to live on, but this was no good to a man of my thirst, so I did lots of shit cash-in-hand jobs on the side. Obviously, it was my intention to declare these earnings, but alcohol has a terrible effect on the memory. When I wasn't at the Triangle, I spent my time on Birmingham's Hagley Road, either at the Duck Inn, or about fifty yards away at the Garden House pub. Life was simple. I never made any social arrangements. I knew that in any of these three places there would always be people I knew, and lots of drink to be drunk.

I had been going out with the same girl, Sally, since the first year of the English course. She was my first-ever posh girlfriend, short, dark and curvy. I liked her accent. It made her sound cultured and proper, which, in some ways, I suppose she was. Our relationship worked in a very similar way to that of Lady and the Tramp. As a boyfriend, I wasn't a very easy gig. Once, after a particularly heavy night, I pissed the bed with her in it. I woke up the next morning and tried my stock excuse, ‘Phew! I was really sweating last night', but her sniffing and suspicious looks told me that it wasn't going to work. ‘I don't think this is sweat,' she said.

‘I know,' I said. Then, trying my best to look pained and hesitant, ‘I think you've pissed the bed.'

Ten years later, during which time I'd incorporated this story into my stand-up act, she turned up at my dressing room after a gig at Leicester's De Montfort Hall and had a go at me for what I'd done. She'd had a slight doubt in her mind ever since that damp awakening, but my re-telling of the story on stage that night had finally put things straight. Of course, if I'd known she was in the audience, I would still have blamed her.

Sally also had to cope with a particularly weird period of my life when, at the age of twenty-eight, I became slightly obsessed with South African runner Zola Budd. I used to cut pictures of her out of the papers and even started going to athletics meetings where she was running. I eventually wrote her a steamy letter explaining my devotion, and she sent me back a signed photo that said ‘Thank you for your interest, Zola Budd'. What a flirt! Looking back, I can't work out what I saw in her. Maybe it was the bare feet. This was at a time when – certainly at the Triangle – it was frowned upon to eat South African apples, so wanking off to one of their athletes was definitely a political no-no. Perhaps that was it. She, like the apples, fell into that most alluring of categories, forbidden fruit.

Meanwhile, bed-pissing, sherry for breakfast, dancing and singing ‘The March of the Siamese Children' with my pants round my ankles in front of Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen, after they had dropped in at the Duck one Sunday lunchtime, all seemed like normal behaviour to me, but the hangovers were getting worse and lasting longer. I had made that most dangerous of all discoveries for the drinker, ‘the hair of the dog that bit you'. This is when you drink to get rid of your hangovers. I would keep a large bottle of sherry on my bedside table for this express purpose, having several man-size swigs, most mornings, even before I got out of bed. When I say large bottle, I used to buy what they called ‘loose sherry', which was served from a plastic barrel at the local grocers, so you had to take along your own bottle. I would usually take a two-litre one that had originally contained Pineappleade. It stopped me getting edgy about the prospect of running out. I have got there at nine in the morning when there has been three or four people queuing with their bottles, waiting for the shop to open. I remember saying that they should open a special twenty-four-hour off-licence for alkies, that just sold Special Brew, Thunderbird, loose sherry and cider. It could be called ‘Desperate Measures'. Of course, whether I actually was or, indeed, am an alkie, I don't know, but I think it's fair to say that I had what you might call a ‘drink problem'.

On my second day in Seoul, I went off to see the Korean Mr Keepy-Uppy. Keepy-Uppy, as you may know, is the art of keeping a football off the ground for as long as possible by bouncing it from foot to foot, up on to the thighs, the head, catching it in the nape of the neck and so on. Robbie Williams, the rich, good-looking, very talented singer, is good at it. That's fair, isn't it? Needless to say, I'm shit at it, but happily, I was to be just a spectator on this occasion. The Korean Mr Keepy-Uppy, Hur Nam Jin, was giving an exhibition of his skills at a trade fair in downtown Seoul.

There is something heroic about the story of Hur Nam Jin. He was a promising footballer, expected to turn pro, when a terrible injury halted his career. Several of his amateur team-mates progressed into the professional game, and it was surely his cue to become a disenchanted, hobbling misanthrope, wincing at the mere sight of the sports pages and ending up swinging from a light-fitting, with a bottle of scotch and a melodramatic note left on a nearby table. But no, instead of drink, Hur turned to Keepy-Uppy. It was less of a strain on his injury than playing in a proper game, and he started to practise day and night, like Bruce Wayne weightlifting and studying chemistry as he trained himself to become Batman. Now Hur holds the world record for Keepy-Uppy. He Keepy-Upped (I believe that is the verb) for eighteen hours and twelve minutes, including, he pointed out through an interpreter, eight hours of heading. I was very determined, when I arrived in Korea, not to start doing a lot of gags about people's odd-sounding (to me) names or asking if they had a TV medical drama called
E.L
., but when the interpreter introduced me to Mr Keepy-Uppy and said ‘This is Hur', it took a gargantuan effort for me to not say ‘Who's Hur, the cat's mother?'

Mind you, jokes about domestic pets are also a bit of a no-no in Korea. The Koreans are slightly touchy about references to their tradition of eating dogs. Brian told me, during our traditional meal, that he was pissed off that someone had suggested that a country that ate dogs was not a suitable venue for the World Cup. He pointed out that no one had moaned about the French eating horses when the 1998 World Cup was being discussed. Considering that as a result of sitting on the floor for an hour and a half, I had become completely paralysed from the waist down, I didn't give a fuck either way, but I don't really see the difference between eating dogs and eating cattle. In fact, when you consider that you never see a picture of a little kid in the paper who had to have fifty-six stitches in his face because he was attacked by his neighbour's cow, you can't help but think that dogs, as a breed, deserve to be scoffed more than cows, pigs or sheep do.