Frank Skinner Autobiography (39 page)

‘How do you know I won't win?' I asked.

‘Well, we've got a ringer in.' I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘He's a semi-pro. He wouldn't come if we didn't promise him Wolverhampton.' I was shocked. Just a few months in and I was already face-to-face with showbiz corruption. Marty was nice to me, though. He was very drunk, but he was nice to me. ‘What you need,' he explained, ‘is a sure-fire opening gag, something that can't fail. Then they know you're funny. I always start with this.'

He told me his sure-fire opener:

I picked up this bird the other night and when I got her back to my place and took me prick out, she said, ‘Who ya gonna satisfy with that?' and I said, ‘Me.'

‘You can't use that though, that's mine,' he explained. I felt really privileged. It was like a sort of comedy master-class. Years later, I got some more advice from a helpful comic. I suppose this next tip shows how my career had progressed. I had done a storming set at one of the top clubs in London, Jongleurs in Battersea, and I was getting a lift back, in a BMW, to Malcom Hardee's house, from a comedy-magician called Keith Fields. Keith was a nice bloke but very business-minded as comics go. He was the first comedian I ever saw with a mobile phone. I was doing alright but I was still very new. ‘Frank,' he said, as we got nearer to Malcolm's place, ‘you're going to do well in this business, very well.' Again, I was flattered. ‘And I'm going to offer you one bit of advice.' I was all ears. Keith was quite successful, and I felt that one pearl of wisdom from him could be a crucial piece in my comedy jigsaw. He paused for effect, and then went on, ‘When you buy a BMW, and you will, make sure you get one with power-assisted steering.'

As I chatted to Marty, the old guy who managed the place walked past breezily and said, ‘We could have filled the London Palladium with the bill we've got on here tonight.' He hadn't seemed to notice that this bill couldn't even fill the Phoenix Club, Cannock.

The semi-pro, a middle-aged crooner, did Barry Manilow's ‘Copacabana'. When he said, ‘She was a showgirl,' he did that thing that blokes used to do in the sixties to represent a sexy woman. Y'know, when you use both hands sliding downwards to mime an hour-glass figure. The crowd whooped. Oh, I had so much to learn.

By now, I was getting friendly with a student called Lisa, the dark-haired girl who had sat under the orange dayglo poster a few months before. I was thirty-one, she was seventeen. Clearly, I was born for the showbiz life.

Maybe I should take some time out here to talk about young women and me. Caroline was twenty years younger than me. My previous girlfriend was about the same. (I don't know if you believe in Freudian slips, but I just had to correct that ‘previous' because I mis-spelt it as ‘pervious'. Oh, dear.) In fact, my last four relationships have had that kind of age difference, but I didn't plan it that way. The fact is, most thirty-something women or even, God forbid, forty-something women, are in relationships. There just aren't many older properties on the market.

For some reason that I'll let you guess at, thirty-something women often get really angry with me for going out with young women. They always ask what I find to talk about to a girl of that age. But what can I talk to thirty-something women about that I can't talk to girls in their early twenties about? There's been so many TV programmes about the seventies just lately that the thirty-something women have lost their trump-card.

At the same time, one of the unpleasant side-effects of going out with girls in their early twenties is that guys come up and start shaking my hand and saying stuff like ‘You lucky bastard', and this just makes me feel unclean. The fact is, when I was in my early twenties, I couldn't get women in their early twenties because I was ugly and not on television, so I've got a lot of catching up to do. And, anyway, they're just firmer, now leave it.

Let me take some time out to tell you about Lisa. She was, like Celine before her, well into Indie music and black clothes. She once persuaded me to completely shave her head, which I did, with a t-bar razor that got caught on a mole and pared off a strip of skin like I was peeling a potato. She took this with an indifferent shrug, which was how she took most things when I first knew her. Her dad had walked out when she was fourteen, and I think she'd decided that emotions were a kind of disability, but she had big dark eyes and a dirty laugh and everybody liked her. One night, I was, as usual, off to a comedy gig, and asked her how she was planning to spend her evening. After listing three or four potential activities, including, visiting friends and going to the gym, she said, ‘But I think I'll stay in, sit on me big fat arse, and watch television.' I don't know if you find women like that outside the Black Country. Eventually, after much deliberation, she decided that a bald head was too extreme and so grew it into an orange mohican.

Although Lisa wasn't actually in any of my classes at Halesowen, she was still a student of the college, which made things slightly problematic. She used to skip cookery classes to see me. I used to think about that a lot after we got married, especially at meal-times.

She wasn't very keen on my comedy career and wouldn't come to gigs because, she said, she didn't want to watch me suffer. I once managed to drag her to a club in London, but just before I went on she walked outside and sat in the car. I suppose it's a bit like going out with a boxer. I did persuade her to come to another gig, though, on a Saturday night in Coventry city centre, but as we wandered around trying to find the venue I was doing, dodging gangs of marauding drunkards, she said, ‘I'm sick to death of your stupid fucking comedy,' and I didn't try to get her along to any more gigs for quite a while.

In fact, my stupid fucking comedy was going quite well. London Weekend Television were starting a series for new alternative comics, called
First Exposure
, and Malcolm got me an audition. When I say it was for new acts, I mean acts that had, in the main, been around for a few years but hadn't yet done any telly, not for new new acts like me, but I thought there was no harm in giving it a go. I drove down to the rehearsal rooms in Kennington, South London, and did my act in front of four people including the producer, Juliet Blake, sitting at a table in what looked like a massive school hall. They laughed. As I drove back, I was desperately trying to not get carried away, but I thought it had gone pretty well. They asked me if I was in Equity, the performers' union. I said I wasn't and they said they'd sort it out. Now, why would they have said that if I didn't have a chance?

Sure enough, on June 28th, 1988, two hundred and two days after my first-ever gig, I made my television debut. I know comics are supposed to have years of struggle and all that, but this was one of those ‘right place, right time' things that happen to lucky people. Of course, the producers liked the idea of a wet-behind-the-ears Black Country lad appearing with all the stars of the London alternative circuit. I had novelty value. And I was funny-ish. The recording was at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. I spent most of the day chatting to a bloke called Hank Shanks, who told me that he had chosen this as a stage-name purely because it gave the compere the chance to say ‘Thanks Hank Shanks' at the end of his act. The compere that night was Arthur Smith, who sat in one of the lovely old theatre boxes and did his intros from there. Arthur is a truly funny comic, and the author of perhaps the finest piece of observational comedy I ever heard: ‘Whatever happened to white dog shit?' On that night, he forgot my name during the intro, and had to stop and think for a bit before it finally came back to him. I bounced on, looking positively thrilled to be there, and did the sneezing routine, complete with my old swinging ding-film gag, as a closer. It all went pretty well. The show didn't exactly open a lot of doors for me career-wise, but just getting on and getting laughs was a massive boost for my confidence. I also got a cheque for £149.69. That was it. I had placed my foot on the bottom rung of the ‘Highest-paid Man on Television' ladder. Only thirteen years to go.

When I watch that show now, only for research, you understand, there's one thing that always makes me wince. As the audience applaud at the end of my set, I say, with Uriah Heep-like humility, ‘You've been very kind.' I think this highlights a problem that was holding back my act at the time. I was a bit too desperate to be liked. The most important thing for a comic, I think, is to ‘find himself onstage. To know who he is and why he's there. A comic, like I've said, needs a point of view, and I hadn't found mine yet.

My main problem, at this stage in my career, was that I couldn't get enough performance time. My hour-long show in Edinburgh was only two months away and I had put together about fifteen minutes of slightly shaky material so far. I needed to work at my act on a regular basis.

There was a very strange pub in nearby Tipton called Mad O'Rourke's Pie Factory. It was the first theme-pub I ever saw. The theme they had chosen was, well, abattoir, I suppose, with phoney cows' heads and other animal parts making up the bulk of the decoration, but the most talked-about aspect of the pub was its catering. They sold these enormous ‘Desperate Dan Cow Pies', complete with horns made of pastry, that were a challenge to even the greediest bastard. People came from all over to try the pies and get arseholed on one of the many real ales they had behind the bar. It quickly became a Black Country must-see. And it had an upstairs room.

So, Malcolm and me opened a comedy club at the Pie Factory. We got two acts from London up every week, I hosted, and if any locals fancied an open spot, we stuck that in the mix as well. Nick Hancock, Jo Brand, lots of people who went on to do really well, played the Pie Factory at that time. Nick Hancock, probably best known as the host of BBC's
They Think it's All Over
, is a man not known for his sophisticated social niceties. He's very competitive and a bit grouchy, but he took the time to give me a lot of praise and encouragement one night at the Pie Factory, when stuff like that, from an established London name, meant a lot to me.

I was writing my bollocks off, forming a habit that I've never shrugged off. If I could spend thirty or forty hours a week drinking, I didn't see why I shouldn't spend fifteen hours a week trying to write gags. Stand-up seemed to be justifying all my wild years. I thought I'd wasted my time, chasing rough birds and getting pissed, but now it all turned out to have been research. More and more of the things that had happened to me got shoved into my comedy sausage machine, and came out the other end as neat little sausage-shaped routines.

Of course, an autobiography is the ultimate example of turning life into work. Speaking of which; I think I should make a point about this book.

When I read all this back, especially the journal stuff, it actually sounds like I lead, and have led, a very interesting and eventful life. Well, that's how it reads to me. There might actually be people reading this who are slightly envious. Well, listen, if your only knowledge of football was
Match of the Day
, you might think that it was all about goals and nearmisses. It isn't. Most games have quite long patches of dead time when everything is bogged down in midfield and no one can put two passes together. Well, it is at the Albion, anyway.
Match of the Day
, or its equivalent on ITV or Sky, is a highlights package. They take out the shit and just give you the good stuff. Though it might sound like I've spent most of the duration of this book swanning around premieres and award ceremonies, driving Bentleys, and jetting off to Venice, Korea and Japan, the fact is I've spent most of the duration of this book shut away in a room, on my own, writing it. Besides, I'm forty-four and single. Who'd envy that? Yeah, OK, put your hands down.

I don't know where that speech came from, but we'll move on. The Pie Factory gave me a chance to try stuff, loads of stuff, every show. The thing was, we got the same people in all the time so I had no choice other than to keep giving them new material. I suppose I wrote about twenty minutes every week. I don't want to reveal too much of it to you now, because I'd like you to think I was a lot better than is actually the case, but this is the truth of it:

Hello, my name's Christopher Collins, which, as some of you may have already worked out, is actually an anagram of ‘willing cocksucker'. Well . . . it isn't quite an anagram of ‘willing cocksucker', but one feels that it ought to be.

As you may have guessed, I also work as a children's entertainer, but when I'm doing that, I have to have a chirpy, cheeky, children's entertainer-type name, so I don't call myself Christopher Collins. Besides, a lot of them little kids wouldn't know what an anagram was.

So when I'm doing kids' parties, I call myself ‘Berdum-Berdum the Clown', because kids make that noise, don't they, ‘berdum-berdum'? (Wait for response that doesn't come.) Well, you've obviously never run one over.

I was sitting in that cemetery, next to St. Philip's in Colmore Row, when this tramp came and sat next to me. And I tried to ignore him and concentrate on my sandwich, but he was scratching the old scrotum and tugging the old penis . . . and eventually I said, ‘Look, will you just get your hands off me?'

I had a friend who worked with tramps in Wolverhampton and he told me that the main cause of anyone becoming a tramp is a broken heart. That's sad, isn't it? I wonder how long that process takes. Does a bloke get in from work one night and his girlfriend says, ‘Listen, Geoff, I'm not gonna lie to you. I've met someone else. It's all over between us. I'm sorry but I'm leaving,' and the bloke says, ‘Oh, God . . . I just can't . . . look . . . you haven't got ten pence for a cup of tea, have you?'