Frank Skinner Autobiography (36 page)

There was a show on TV at that time called
Saturday Live
. It was more or less the only place people from outside London could see alternative comedy. I remember being utterly convinced that once word had got round of how brilliant I was, I would almost certainly be on there the following week. I don't know how I imagined that word of a crappy gig in Icknield Port Road would reach the ears of the comedy intelligentsia in London, but I did. It scares me when I look back and think about that. I mean, I was thirty, for fuck's sake, not some stupid kid. At least when I'm banging in goals for Barcelona I know it's just a fantasy. But this was something that I honestly thought would happen.

I had spent the previous weeks trying to remember funny things I'd said or done in the pub, writing them down, and then working them into little routines I could do in between the acts. For example, sometimes when I was out with my mates, I would pretend that I was about to do a massive sneeze and start frantically searching my pockets for a handkerchief. Then, suddenly I would turn away, sneeze, and turn back with a massive length of snot swinging from one nostril. Of course, it wasn't really snot, it was wet cling-film, but it always got a big reaction from the other customers, especially if they were eating. I decided I'd try this on stage, and then wrote some sneezing material to precede it. I suppose, having already sounded like a twat once in this section, I might as well suggest that this particular bit was an examination of the class-system through the medium of sneezing. It centred on the fact that working-class people, in my experience, do massive great sneezes.

. . . My dad would do about three or four sharp intakes of breath, kind of false starts, before the sneeze actually happened. This gave you a chance to put away your stamp-collection, put the food into tupperware containers, and get the smaller children into hats and mackintoshes before the big explosion came. And when it did, there was no ‘hand in front of the mouth' thing. It was just ‘AAASHOWWW!' We used to actually surf on my dad's sneezes. (At this point I'd demonstrate, complete with theme from
Hawaii Five-O.
) But then, when I got a bit older, I met some middle-class people. And they're nice and everything, but different. And I was sitting with this middle-class bloke one day, just having a chat, and he said (in a posh accent), ‘You know I think I have a bit of a cold com . . . oh . . .' (And then my impression of a little squeaky sneeze like, it has to be said, middle-class people do. I look puzzled.) And I thought, ‘What was that? Has he just swallowed a chaffinch?'

OK, I was just finding my way, but it turned out to be the first bit of stand-up I ever did on stage.

I turned up at the gig pretty early. It was quite a big room and I sat on the edge of the stage with my legs dangling, wondering how it would be when the place was full with laughter. One of the other acts, a comic called Andy Feet, was another early arrival. He was a tall, thin, swarthy-looking bloke, I guessed about fifty years old. In anticipation of his performance, Andy Feet wore a smart pale-blue suit, with man-sized footprints made of red fabric stitched to it. There were four on the front of the trousers, and four on the jacket, including one on each lapel. He also wore a massive silver footprint medallion over his shirt and tie. I thought all this was a great idea, but I knew it wouldn't really work with Collins. I'd seen him do a club in Aston, on the same bill as the singer who'd done the Andy Williams number. The centre-piece of his act was an impression of Anthony Newley, so you wouldn't call him topical, but he made me laugh. Now, I was slightly in awe of him. But Andy Feet was nervous. He kept asking me what time the bar would open, and when he finally sat down with a double scotch he told me that he'd had two heart attacks, and had spent some time in a wheelchair after the last one. He also told me that he'd played Vegas, and that Bill Cosby had said to him, ‘Andy, when you come back again, we'll meet up and talk comedy.' It was a conversation still pending.

I got the impression that he didn't feel his choice of profession had helped much in the stress department. As he sat, head bowed, looking down past his dangling footprint at the whisky, he seemed like a man with a great deal on his mind. But this was a bloke who earned his living by making people laugh. I couldn't work out what he was worried about.

Eventually, we went backstage and the tables and chairs in the auditorium started to fill up. There were about two hundred punters in. I stood in the wings, waiting to blow 'em away.

My thoughts turned to that mate's girlfriend, the one who'd asked me, ‘What's it like to be thirty and on the scrapheap?' It was a fair question. I hadn't done much with my life. I mean, I had a couple of degrees, but I followed them with three and a half years on the dole and I'd spent a large part of my adult years getting too drunk to remember why I needed to get drunk. But through it all, there'd been gags. At the very lowest times, there'd been gags. As I've already said, people had been telling me I ought to be a comedian since I was at infant school. It was the only thing I'd ever been any good at. It was so obviously what I should be doing. How could I have taken so long to realise it? Malcolm came up to me. I was expecting a ‘Good luck' but he just said, ‘Let's start then.' And I walked out of the gloom into the bright light.

Slight snigger on
Hawaii Five-O
, a laugh on the chaffinch, a laugh and some groans of disgust on the swinging cling-film. I bombed. Not horribly or completely, but to a man who was expecting that, after his opening routine, people from
Saturday Live
would be chartering helicopters in order to get to Icknield Port Road in time for the second half, it was a major shock. I honestly couldn't believe that the crowd weren't on their feet. I mean applauding rather than leaving.

Before the show I had been completely calm and confident. Now, as I stood in the wings watching the first act, The Nice People, get laughs, I was filled with dread. I couldn't do it after all. I'd been kidding myself. I was just shit, and I had to go out there again and again and again. My next routine was, worryingly, a slightly more experimental piece about the X20 bus that went from New Street station to Stratford-upon-Avon. I suggested the bus was named after the Stingray character, X-Two-Zero, Titan's evil henchman, and began to riff on this very unconvincing theme. This was fraught with problems. For a start off, this was just before reminiscing about kids' TV really took off, and very few people in the audience seemed to know who X-Two-Zero was. Also, everybody who knew the bus, which was maybe a quarter of the audience, referred to it as the X-Twenty. Most of the two-hundred-strong crowd had heard of neither the puppet nor the bus and, although they weren't openly hostile, they were starting to lose faith in me, fast.

Dying on your arse, as comedians tend to call it, is, as you might expect, a pretty grim experience. And it doesn't take much to start the terrible ball slowly rolling. A comedy act is a bit like a long street, with the jokes as lampposts. I know this is pushing it but bear with me. If you're walking down a long street and you come to a lamppost that doesn't work, it's a bit dark, but not bad enough to cause you to turn back because the light from the next lamppost and the previous one will suffice. However, if the
next
lamppost doesn't work either, then it starts to get really gloomy. Logically it seems wise to turn down another street because, well, you just can't rely on these lampposts any more. Clearly there is some sort of power failure.

It was getting so dark, I couldn't see the end of the routine at all.

As often happens with nerves, I got quicker, and quicker, trying to hurry to the next lamppost before it was too late. I was driving blind, with no headlights, at breakneck speed, and, unfortunately, I was driving the X-Twenty to Stratford.

My best mate, Marino, was in the audience. Pete, who offered me the job at Halesowen College, was in the audience. One of my slightly older female students, who had fantastic, slightly muscular legs and a sun-bed tan, was in the audience. A girl from my drama evening class I was desperately trying to shag was in the audience. And, of course, Malcolm was in the audience. But it was too dark to see any of them. The dying comic is utterly alone. I had come to see myself, from a personal-worth point of view, as funny, and not much else. Now, even that had been taken away.

Comedy without laughs is just someone talking. This is what I became. Andy Feet went OK, but not as well as when I'd seen him previously. The world was upside-down. I started to crumble. I would begin a routine but, if the first line or two failed, I just gave up and introduced the next act. I suppose I was afraid of the dark. Slowly, my terrible evening ebbed away, and when I finally walked off stage at the end of the show, there was just silence. I felt smaller and older. I was back on the scrapheap. As soon as I was in the gloom of the wings, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and just stood there. I was a broken man. Then I remembered that I had spent my life-savings booking an hour-long stand-up comedy slot at the next Edinburgh Festival. I was trapped.

I'm in Japan now, and I like it. In Osaka, I saw a Japanese Hell's Angel sitting on his massive bike at the traffic lights. He wore a helmet that had ‘Fuck the World' written on it, but he didn't look like he really meant it. When Phil took his photo, you could tell that he stayed especially still in order to be helpful. The Japanese are incredibly polite. I know everybody says this – well, everybody except old POWs – but it's true. It makes the whole place seem really safe. I know ‘Fuck the World' doesn't seem all that polite, but I'm not sure that English translations are ever quite right over here. Everything comes out sounding a bit like modern poetry. I saw a girl wearing a t-shirt that said, ‘Lay low until they consider you more highly.' If only she'd been at the Portland Club. More confusing, since we're in Japan, was another girl's t-shirt, on the railway platform in Osaka. It said, ‘Turn soft and lovery every time you have the chance.' Now, of course, it could have meant ‘lovery' as in like a lover, or, alternatively, well, I suppose it could have been a Japanese post-modern ironic take on Benny Hill.

We went to meet a schoolteacher in Shimizu, whose school has produced a stupid amount of professional footballers, several of them internationals. He was a very still, calm person, not like your average English schoolteacher. He had a manner more like that bloke with the ping-pong-ball eyes in the
Kung Fu
TV series. The one who used to say Grasshopper a lot. (I sense you're giving me that look I got when I mentioned X-Two-Zero, all those years ago.) The schoolteacher was like a sensei, I believe they call them here, a sort of master, a source of wisdom. He said he had a feeling for football, for its rhythms and its special moments. As he spoke, a fourteen-year-old Japanese kid on a nearby dirt pitch swept one sweet thirty-yard free kick after the next round a plastic five-man defensive wall, and into, or nearly into, a goal defended bravely by an unusually tall teenage goalkeeper.

The teacher started talking about football in a very philosophical way. He talked about a thing called ‘wa', which seemed to be a kind of extreme form of team-spirit along the lines of being prepared to truly suffer for the good of the team. As another free kick zinged home, he started to lose me a bit. He explained that one of the most important actions in football is inaction, or ‘pause'. That moment before something happens. All the great players have this pause, and their movements and non-movements not only employ this pause to its full advantage, but also deliberately fracture the pause in others. I could feel a very fine trail of steam leaving each of my ears. The Japanese word for this ‘pause', he explained, is ‘ma'. For a brief moment, or pause, I considered telling him the Marmite joke. But I didn't.

Unsurprisingly, I didn't hang around after the Portland Club gig. I had promised the girl from the drama group a lift home in my 1967 Vauxhall Viva, but now the idea of shagging her seemed like it came from a previous life. I no longer had the right to shag anyone. She chatted about everything but the gig on the way home, but it didn't help. Earlier in the evening, I had noticed that her arse looked fantastic in the tight white jeans she was wearing, but as she walked away from the car towards her front door, I didn't even bother to look. I sat there in the Viva, re-living each terrible moment. Malcolm had thought it was hilarious. Not my material, my humiliation, and amidst his uncontrolled giggling, he told my passenger to keep me away from canals on the way home. I turned off the lights and switched off the engine and sat in the dark. Marino, another witness to my disgrace, had the bedsit next to mine, and I didn't want to go home yet in case he was still up. After a while, I could see my breath in the air as the car steadily got colder. Apparently, despite everything, I was still alive.

The next morning I was back in college, teaching again. I entered the building through a side-door because I didn't want to pass the orange dayglo poster advertising the gig. My first lesson was A-level English. Which was a bit unfortunate because the class included the woman with the fantastic, slightly muscular legs and sun-bed tan, and I was hoping to avoid her for a while till I could get some of my composure back. As I neared the open door of the classroom, I could hear her voice, clear as a bell, saying, ‘Nobody was laughing.' I stopped, I took a deep breath, I walked in. She looked embarrassed. I think she assumed I would have taken my own life during the night. I looked straight at her and said, ‘Wasn't it terrible?' She struggled for a suitable reply, so I went straight into the lesson to get her off the hook. I don't know if she picked up on my strained over-cheerfulness, but I was glad she had turned up. Not because I felt the need to face my demons, or show the witnesses to my nightmare that I had awoken to a bright new day, but because she had fantastic, slightly muscular legs, and she sat at the front desk, where I could see them in all their splendour. I think I was starting to recover.