Frank Skinner Autobiography (5 page)

In reality, I have no evidence that this was the chimp from Dudley Zoo. And let's face it, if it had been him, he would have had his own method for putting out the cigarettes.

I was flicking through the Official Elvis Presley Fan Club magazine today when I saw a fantastic advert. There's a book called
Paradise, Suzanna Style
, which has been written by the actress Suzanna Leigh about the one film she made with Elvis. I say ‘the actress Suzanna Leigh' but I don't know if she's still working. How long can actors be out of work and still call themselves actors? (I'm getting a lot more relaxed about the rhetorical question thing.) I met Sylvia Kristel, the star of all those 1970s soft porn
Emmanuelle
films, in the summer of 1998. She was a bit full of herself and said to me, ‘Hello, I'm a film actress, what are you?'

‘Well, by that logic, I'm a schoolboy,' I replied. Happily, she didn't get it.

Anyway Ms Leigh, apparently, tells the tale of filming
Paradise, Hawaiian Style
with King El, or, as the blurb puts it, ‘A behind the scenes look at the 60s movie industry by icon actress Suzanna Leigh and the effect that Elvis Presley had on both her career and her outlook on life. A charming, thoughtful text acclaimed by the media.'

Now, being in the memoir business myself, I was very interested by all this. Especially since the book had been ‘acclaimed by the media'. I wish they'd supplied more details of this. I'd like to have known who said what on the acclaim front. But best of all, there is a thing on the cover of the book which really made my day. In the top right-hand corner it says, ‘Warning! This is not a novel.'

Well, what's all that about? Someone seems genuinely concerned about the possibility of the book being mistaken for a novel and all the ensuing chaos that might trigger. I might persuade my publisher to put something similar on the cover of this.
Frank Skinner
by Frank Skinner. Warning! This is not an A to Z of Leeds.

We lived in a council house in Oldbury. 181 Bristnall Hall Road. Oldbury, as I remember it from my childhood, was a game of two halves. It had a lot of factories. You could smell industry in the air, from the acrid, eye-stinging vapours of the Albright and Wilson's chemical plant, to the seductive, sugary scent of Parkes' sweet factory. In the shadow of these factories lived the workforce, often in council housing, or in poky little terraces that the family had lived in for generations. But Oldbury also had some nicer spots with private houses and cars and caravans in the drive, the homes of the clerk and the middle manager. Bristnall Hall Road managed to combine both. Our side of the road, the council-house side, had barely a car parked on it; there was the odd motorbike and side-car and Mr Feraday's massive lorry, but that was it. The opposite side was all private houses, with cars parked on the street, and in the driveways, where people had had their front gardens tarmacked over for that specific purpose. My dad couldn't drive. He couldn't afford a car so what was the point? I lived in Bristnall Hall Road into my late teens and I can barely remember even walking on that side of the road. I knew my place.

My dad painted a big 181 on the wall of our house that is still there. The house had three bedrooms: my mom and dad's room, my sister Nora's room, and the room that me and my two brothers, Terry and Keith, slept in.

Nora was the eldest, the big sister. She was seventeen when I was born and some of the neighbours thought I might be hers. She was a wild one in her teens, a hairdresser who went in for beehive hair-dos and tight skirts. I remember her practising the twist in the kitchen and getting told off by my dad for staying out too late at jazz nights at the Locarno Ballroom. She had long fingernails and would put a flannel over one and use it to clean my ears. It really hurt and it gave me a life-long aversion to ear-cleaning. I still have dirty ears now. When Nora married, in her early twenties, her husband, Frank, had a car, and they bought their own house. We all felt a bit intimidated. Now she is a member of Halesowen Conservative Party and is always telling me stuff like how she met that nice William Hague and that he was a real gentleman.

Terry is my oldest brother. As a kid he loved drawing, and collecting birds' eggs. He was a good-looking lad with a bit of the early Cliff Richard about him, and soon developed an eye for the girls. He would listen to Elvis and Roy Orbison and Jim Reeves, and worked on building sites as a carpenter. Nowadays, he's a handsome bloke in his fifties. He doesn't draw or go birdnesting anymore, but does impressive DIY and watches endless wildlife programmes. He also likes a drink, and has an endless supply of stories to tell.

Keith is seven years older than me. He was a fat schoolboy and a lean teenager. I remember he caused quite a stir at my confirmation ceremony when he turned up with his long blonde hair and his swinging sixties suit. I once went on a trip from my mom's work to see Danny La Rue in Coventry, and Keith and his friends got some real stares when they refused to stand for the National Anthem. Now he is a chubby, roll-up-smoking angler who has, as he always had, a funny line for almost every occasion.

For the first five or six years of my life, Keith and me shared a double bed while Terry had a single. Thirty years later, when I got Keith a walk-on part in a sitcom I'd written, another extra, an elderly woman whose career highlight had been a stair-lift ad, asked Keith how he got the job. ‘Well,' he said, ‘I used to sleep with the writer.'

With Keith seven years older than me and Terry five years older than Keith, I think the age-range kept us fairly separate. When I was six, I remember telling Keith that I'd fallen in love with a girl in my class at Moat Farm Infants. She was called Annette and looked a bit like a mousy Shirley Temple. I explained I thought about her all the time, and even mentioned her in my prayers in a ‘Make-Annette-fall-in-love-with-me' kind of way. Keith was thirteen and I thought he could offer me some advice, sort of man-to-man. He said, ‘Don't be so stupid,' rolled over, and went to sleep. So I never told Annette how I felt about her. She could have been my soul-mate and made me truly happy. As it was, she seemed to develop a crush on Christopher, another classmate, who wore glasses for goodness' sake. Wearing glasses is quite trendy now but in those days it was very shit. Often, a kid who wore glasses would have to wear sticking-plaster over one lens to encourage his weak eye to pull its weight. This seems very primitive now, as if the eyes were seen as riders on a tandem.

Christopher would sometimes, with the teacher's full approval, entertain the class by doing Freddie and the Dreamers impressions, with himself as the lead man Freddie Garrity, and his stupid, puffy friends as the Dreamers. Freddie was about the only pop star I knew who wore glasses. Annette would gaze adoringly at the speccy git jumping about at the front of the classroom and singing ‘You Were Made for Me' or ‘Who Wears Short Shorts?'. Whatever happened to the old saying, ‘Freddie Garrity breeds contempt'?

Number 181 had garden front and back and we all lived in the kitchen so that the ‘front room' could be kept for ‘best'. It was empty ninety-nine per cent of the time. I remember it being used on one occasion when Keith brought a girl back. I don't remember her name but Linda rings a bell. She had long dark hair and, most excitingly, wore a see-through blouse which revealed a white bra underneath. My mom, the kindest and most sweet-natured woman I ever met, wrote her off as a slut within about fifteen minutes, an opinion confirmed when she asked the girl what time she had to be home and was told, ‘Oh, any time really.' Mistake. She might as well have added, ‘because I work quite late as a common prostitute'. But I really liked the white bra. I studied the straps with their metal adjuster-bits, the delicate cut of the cups, the tantalising shadow of her cleavage.

I was about eight at the time. In fact, I was so impressed by Linda's bra and its contents that I was beginning to wish I hadn't carefully taken out the twisted-up newspaper that had been placed in the fire-grate in anticipation of a coal-fire, and mixed in a few fireworks that had been left over from Bonfire Night. (Incidentally, I never celebrate Bonfire Night any more because, with the benefit of education, I have come to recognise the whole thing as a celebration of British anti-Catholic bigotry. Still, more weird religious stuff later.) Keith came out of the front room looking a bit flushed, having lit the fire. Apparently, the effects of the fireworks were, in the context of a council house front room, quite spectacular. I remember him turning on me and snarling, ‘Someone could have been blinded.' I must admit I hadn't considered that, but surely it would almost have been worth the pain to have spent the rest of one's life being referred to as Linda ‘who lost an eye in a courting-accident'.

The bathroom was next to the kitchen on the ground floor and, for some reason I never worked out, contained not only the bath but also the gas cooker. This wasn't quite the problem you might expect because bathing was not really a big deal in our family. It was certainly not a daily, and for most of us not even a weekly, occurrence. Most of the time the bath was just full of old newspapers and clothes waiting to be ironed. My mom and dad bathed about three times a year. Having a good old wash in the sink was the order of the day. My old man would stand at the sink with the washing-up bowl full of hot water from the kettle. (We had to light the coal-fire to get hot water from the taps. Always a pain-in-the-arse if not in the eye.) He would also have a mug of boiling water for sterilising his old army-issue t-bar razor. He would rub his shaving brush on his little block of shaving soap and then get stuck in. All this was done in a strange sumo-like stance that stopped his trousers falling down, because he had slipped his braces off his shoulders so he could have a good go at his armpits. I'm not sure whether deodorant existed in those days but, if it did, we didn't have any. My dad's only concession to men's toiletries, or ‘puff-juice' as most local males called it, was his use of Old Spice after-shave. To be honest, he was actually quite dapper by local standards, my dad. We weren't rich, but he always had a couple of made-to-measure suits on the go. A man called Sammy would come round the house and measure him up and then, after the suit was delivered, Sammy or his son, Sammy (yes, Sammy), would turn up every Friday tea-time for his five bob a week repayment.

Everything was bought by this method, except food. Mom got stuff out of the catalogue, or would buy stuff from a shop and be given a card which the shopkeeper filled in as she made each payment, or she'd use the Provident cheque method. Certain shops accepted Provident cheques, a sort of voucher that you paid for by regular instalments to the Provident man, who also came on a Friday to collect
his
five bob.

There used to be a fashion for finely detailed ornamental china human heads. They were usually things like old sailors or evil-looking Arabs but my mom bought me a pair of these heads which were representations of Laurel and Hardy, and very good ones at that. This was many years later when I was fourteen. I still have the little dub card, as they were called, that the shop supplied her with to keep the record of her weekly instalments. The heads cost £1.50 and she bought them over a space of six weeks at twenty-five pence a week. When I think of her making the journey, about six stops on the bus, to that shop, every week, to pay her twenty-five pence, it makes me feel like crying.

When things got a bit desperate, we had to resort to the money lender. He was a fat bloke with a pig-like face, thick glasses and a trilby. His name was Butler. I don't know much more about him than that. But I do know that in the bad weeks, when for some reason or other the money was short, the others got missed but Butler always got paid. Maybe my old man was worried that mom would end up with her head in the gas oven. Imagine the headlines, and having to read them every time you walked past the bath.

All this is true, although I worry that my honesty about my upbringing won't go down too good with my brothers and sister. It's all very well some well-off celebrity going on about how he's risen from rags to riches, but his family might feel all that stuff should be kept quiet. I know our Nora will say I shouldn't be telling everyone our business and ‘showing us up'. When I was on
This is Your Life
, my brother Terry got cajoled into telling the story of how, on those occasions when we got the electricity cut off due to non-payment, we managed with candles. My dad would shout at us if we went anywhere near the window because, if the neighbours saw candlelight, they'd guess we'd had the ‘electric' cut off and we'd get talked about. Now I live in a posh area of London where everything happens by bloody candlelight and the neighbours take it as a sign of sophistication!

Anyway, Terry told the story and my sister and her husband got upset with me about it, even though I had no idea how the story came out in the first place. I know Nora felt embarrassed, but I was innocent. Her husband, Frank, said I should keep quiet about the poverty thing because I never went short and my mom would have gone without food in her mouth to buy me some silly toy or other. All this is true but, at the same time, working in television and theatre has shown me that most of the people who get on in these professions are middle class and from the south-east. Now I can't help noticing that I had mates who worked as dustbin men or lathe-operators who, as far as I could tell, had much more natural intelligence and common sense than a lot of these privileged southerners. I know from my own experience that it's very easy if you're a working-class person from the provinces to write yourself off as far as achieving anything a bit unusual is concerned. Showbiz and all that stuff seems like another planet, something that ‘other people' do. It isn't. If you're running a mile, starting fifty yards behind a lot of the competitors makes it harder but not impossible. My point is, I don't want to shame my family, but I think it's important that people realise that any half-soaked fucker with a bit of luck can end up strolling down red carpets at film premieres and doing TV shows with his name on the titles. You don't have to have a nice accent and a background that involves Enid Blyton, fish knives and rugby union.