Frank Skinner Autobiography (48 page)

Our rock-solid, vastly experienced central defender was Peter Orton, the director. Pete was only in his late forties, but he'd worked on everything from
Blue Peter
to
Penn and Teller
, and had an air of done-it-all confidence about him. Sometimes this was frustrating. Dave and me would have an idea and Peter would look at us in a ‘now let me explain something' kind of way and I used to get well wound up. But whatever we asked Peter for – special effects, spoof styles, unusual camera-shots – he always delivered. His direction deliberately gave the show a live feel, that rough edge that made it feel slightly chaotic, but he still managed to catch every unexpected, unrehearsed moment on camera. Peter and me argued about almost everything at first. When he was pissed off he looked like Michael Douglas on vinegar, but I soon came to respect him and his solid, steadying influence on the show.

The audiences were unbelievable. They came from all over Britain, to Wandsworth on a Thursday night, wore footie shirts, waved scarves, chanted for Statto, and, most importantly, laughed. They were a real supporters' end, our Kop or North Bank.

On Show Sixteen I closed with a song. It was nearly the end of the football season and Albion had three games to avoid relegation. I stood up as we neared the end of the show and sang a version of ‘I Believe', which explained why I loved the Albion and how I still had faith in them. It could have been embarrassing, but it was from the heart and our football-mad audience understood and went with it. At the end of it there was massive applause, and three Albion fans I hadn't even noticed in the audience ran out and hugged me like we were all family. It was a special moment for me when some fans turned up at the next Albion game with a banner that said, ‘Frank Skinner. We believe.' A girl at the refreshments stall that day told me her dad had cried when he heard the song. And no, not because he was a musician.

All previous football TV programmes had offered the opinions of ex-players, or journalists, but now it was the fans' turn. For years, football supporters had laughed at bad players, enjoyed horrible tackles, and developed a weird nostalgia-based folklore, but it had remained strictly an oral tradition. Then, in the eighties, football fanzines rose up, putting these gags and alternative, fan-based views of the game on paper. Now football fan culture had a voice on national television. David Thomas, in the
Daily Telegraph
, described the show as ‘one long celebration of the free-masonry of football fandom'.

The second series stuck with the same format as the first, but introduced Jeff Astle as our close-the-show crooner. The new set of guest managers included Elvis Costello, Jo Brand, Nick Hancock, Paula Yates, Patsy Kensit, Alan Hansen and Nick Hornby. Nick Hornby, of course, was the writer of
Fever Pitch
, a book about the life and times of an Arsenal fan, which had become a bestseller. Some journalists were saying that
Fever Pitch
and
Fantasy Football League
had both made a significant contribution to football's new mega-popularity, particularly among Britain's middle classes. Dave, Nick and me, all university graduates, had suddenly made it OK for the Hampstead set to talk about Francis Benali instead of Francis Bacon, and write about Paul Gascoigne instead of Paul Gauguin. Obviously, I felt terrible about this. I never expected to be blamed for football going posh, a phenomenon I was, and am, incredibly suspicious of. Only recently, I had started to think that maybe the old days of football hooliganism weren't, in fact, such a bad thing. At least the boot-boys kept posh people and, of course, girls away from the grounds. Now, it seemed, I was ushering them in.

The other thing that always came up when
Fantasy Football League
, or just
Fantasy Football
as everyone now called it, was discussed was the phrase ‘New Lads'. I had first heard this term used about Newman and Baddiel a few years earlier. Again, it was a case of the middle classes hijacking something which had always been largely associated with the working classes. Traditionally, lads, as in ‘lads' night out' or ‘one of the lads', referred to someone who was male, working class, under thirty-five, and liked shagging women, playing and watching football, getting pissed and fighting.

The New Lads, like New Labour, were a sort of laundered version of that. They were middle class, under thirty-five, liked shagging women but only if they used a condom, and made it clear in advance that this was just sex so that no one was being exploited, playing football in a trendy ‘five-a side in the gym followed by a quick drink in a local bistro' kind of a way, watching football in an ‘England matches on Sky, season ticket at Arsenal' sort of a way, getting quite pissed on bottles of beer with slices of lime in the top, and fighting, but only in kick-boxing classes at their swish health club.

Despite this, I was often described as the archetypal New Lad. I was forty, nouveau riche, had a season ticket at an Endsleigh League Division One club I'd supported since I was in liquid form, couldn't play at all, was a practising Roman Catholic teetotaller, and hadn't had a fight since I stopped drinking ten years earlier. OK, I liked shagging, but one swallow doesn't make a summer. (Mind you, it can certainly make an evening.)

Anyway, I must have been a New Lad because it was in all the papers.

The third series of
Fantasy Football
, in 1996, was extra-special because it was tied in to the whole ‘Three Lions' thing. But just before Euro '96, after years of taking the piss out of footballers, something happened that we hadn't seen coming. On May 22nd, the headline on the back page of the
Sun
was ‘Skinner and Baddiel wrecked my career'. It was an interview with Nottingham Forest striker Jason Lee, who claimed that our jokes about him on the show had destroyed his confidence, created an unfairly negative view of his abilities, and inspired an open season of scorn and abuse from football fans wherever he played.

We had done a sketch, earlier in Series Three, which had me playing Lee's club manager, Frank Clarke, and Dave playing Lee himself. The sketch included clips of some terrible botched goal-opportunities by the player, and the main comic thrust was that Jason missed everything. He missed a tea cup with a sugar cube, a waste-bin with some rolled-up paper, and so on. It was typical
Fantasy Football
stuff. Dave's make-up included a hair-do that incorporated a pineapple. Jason's tied-up dreadlock-style hair looked a bit like a pineapple. I believe a chant pointing this out was already doing the rounds of Premiership grounds where he played. So that was it. We did the sketch, it went well, we forgot about it. But the audience didn't. We got a massive response from viewers. Week after week they sent in pineapple-based sculptures, a photo of a pineapple-roofed house they'd seen on holiday and so on. So Jason Lee, with his crazy hair and his inability to score, accidentally became something of a running gag.

But we made one large mistake. It's one thing to take the piss out of Peter Beardsley, or Gazza, or Alan Shearer. These were extremely talented players, with massive self-confidence, who couldn't give a shit about leg-pulling, but Jason Lee was different. He wasn't, by Premiership standards, quite good enough. This, I suppose, must have led to all sorts of doubts and insecurities and so the running gags, to him, must have felt like a cruel vendetta.

Dave and me felt bad about Jason being so hurt and we wrote to him to make friends and invite him on the show, if he fancied it. We never got a reply. The papers were full of it that week. We'd overstepped the mark, they said: when does comedy become cruelty? There was even a vague hint by one broadsheet journalist that the jokes, or at least the ones about his hairstyle, were racist. John Barnes, God bless him, defended us on this charge, but did say that the continued ribbing of Lee probably did go a bit far.

A few months later, a documentary called
Footballers' Wives
showed Jason and his missus watching tapes of the show and generally slagging us off.

I have never deliberately tried to upset anyone with my comedy, well, not professionally, anyway. I was genuinely sorry Jason took it so badly. Mind you, when he eventually shaved his hair off, he was photographed in the
Sun
, holding a pineapple just above his shaven head and talking about his new look as a ‘kiwi-fruit head', so I think he learned to cope.

Some of you might ask what gave me, a self-confessed shit footballer, the right to take the piss out of any player. Well, I'm a football fan. It's my job.

The fourth series, I can't bring myself to call it the last, saw some drastic changes. We had switched to ITV, the show was centred around the World Cup rather than the Premiership, we were on three or four nights a week, and we were live. It still seemed to work, maybe even better, but I missed the domesticity of the old show. The World Cup is lovely, but British club football is what I really like.

Still,
Fantasy World Cup
did produce my favourite-ever headline. On June 14th, 1998, the front page of the
Sunday Sport
led with ‘Three Lions stars hire lesbo porn girl'. Unfortunately, it was just a reference to the fact that one of the guests on the series was
Emmanuelle
star Sylvia Kristel.

The series opened with a bang, but one that was much more enjoyable for the viewers than it was for us. Brigitte Nielsen, the big-titted six-foot blonde from Denmark, Sylvester Stallone's ex-wife, was one of the guests. I don't know if she was pissed or what, but she was wild as the wind. As soon as she came through the door, she grabbed me in a massive bear-hug. Then she started shouting in Danish and attacked Dave with a Danish pastry. Dave asked her if the silicone had gone to her head. We were under siege and the gloves were. off. Brigitte grabbed Dave's hand and stuck it down her top so he could check if her tits were silicone or not. He was really going for it by now. He asked her why Sylvester Stallone had divorced her. She said why don't you ask him. I had a little gadget I often used on
Fantasy Football
, a button under the coffee table that, when I pressed it with my foot, made the phone ring. When Brigitte suggested we ask Stallone why he divorced her, I pressed the button, and picked up the phone. ‘Yeah,' I said to the imaginary
Rocky
star on the other end, ‘we guessed.' But there was no stopping Brigitte. In the end, as she stood waving her arms and shouting at the audience, you could quite clearly hear me say on air, in what Dave described as ‘the most complete breakdown of accepted chat-show etiquette ever seen on British television', ‘Oh, sit down, Brigitte. You're making a twat of yourself.'

Dave and me wrote and starred in seventy episodes of
Fantasy Football
After five failed attempts, I finally got my hit TV series. If only I'd lived closer to Arthur's Seat.

The success of
Fantasy League
on BBC2 rekindled BBC1 interest in me. I was keen on trying a chat-show format, having enjoyed my time on
Late Night with Wogan
.

The Frank Skinner Show
began in the Autumn of '95. It was produced and directed by Marcus Mortimer, a highly experienced comedy director who had a sort of aristocratic playboy manner about him, and who looked unnervingly like the golf legend Jack Nicklaus. Marcus had been engaged to the posh-totty sex symbol Fiona Fullerton but, unfortunately, wouldn't give me any of the details.

I wanted the chat show to be different from the usual Hollywood-star-plugging-his-film type of affair, so we combined famous names with non-celebrities, or ‘people-guests', as chat-show bookers call them. Thus, on the first show, we had the Sheriff of Nottingham (yeah, the real one), the late Charlie Kray (brother of the more-famous twins), Buzz Aldrin (the second man on the moon), and Neil Armstrong (not the first-man-on-the-moon one, the giant-leek-growing one).

It had its moments. When Charlie Kray explained that he'd done several years in prison for disposing of Jack the Hat, I said, in a journalistic tone, ‘Charlie, when you say you went to prison for disposing of Jack the Hat, let me just clear up one thing for the audience. Jack the Hat wasn't just a hat, was it? It was actually a bloke.'

‘Oh, yeah,' replied Charlie, taking me totally seriously. ‘He was a bloke, not a hat.' I could have hugged him.

The show lasted half an hour and began with five minutes of stand-up from me, and also had a couple of sketches. There were six shows in that first series. The guests included Ivana Trump, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Myra Lewis Williams (the woman who had married her cousin, Jerry Lee Lewis, when she was thirteen), a dog psychiatrist, a couple who'd trained a chimpanzee to do sign language, and Drew Barrymore's mom.

To be straight with you, although that first series had its moments (the three ‘Best Of . . .' compilation programmes were great), I wasn't really happy with it. I was writing the stand-up and the sketches and planning the interviews and editing with Marcus, so I had to take the blame, but it just wasn't right. Still, the BBC thought it showed real promise and commissioned a second series.

Marcus went off to do the very successful BBC comedy-drama,
All Quiet on the Preston Front
, and I had a new producer, or rather two – Jilly Hafenrichter and Juliet Rice, the sister of Anneka. They were from a documentary background, having made those
Hollywood Men, Hollywood Women
and
Hollywood Children
films for ITV. They were the kind of slinky brunette, slinky blonde combo that had worked so well for Abba, but they were much more than just pretty faces.

The second series was, in the main, much better than the first. Guests including Eddie Izzard, Tony Blair, and heavy-metal legend Ozzy Osbourne, but we still stuck with the non-celeb idea and included a woman from Birmingham who'd streaked at a televised snooker match, a Japanese inventor who'd invented biscuits with holes in the middle for watching telly through, and a man called Paul Sayce.