Frank Skinner

Anyway, what I do remember about the Buffalo Bill’s Western Annual was that I loved it, as I loved all things ‘cowboy’. I had a cushion folded over the arm of the settee, which acted as a saddle. I straddled the settee-arm and rode the prairies of my imagination. It sounds tossy but I can’t think of a better way of putting it. My mom got very confused when the little girl next door asked her if Davy Crockett was coming out to play. It was the first time I had given a girl a false name. My dad must have been very proud of me – after all, it was a lot more inventive than Len. And I bet he’d never convinced one that he’d died at the Alamo, either.

However, I made the mistake of showing the girl next door my Daniel-Boone-killing-the-bear picture. This sounds like a gag but it’s absolutely true. She never brought teddy out into the garden again. Not that I had a musket, but I did carry quite a tasty white plastic rifle. This was where Mr Parkes came in. Mr Parkes lived next-door-but-one where he spent all day sitting outside his garden shed (he only had one!) watching the world go by. Whenever I was out with my rifle, Mr Parkes would stick a matchbox on top of the open shed-door and invite me to shoot it off. I rarely missed. Only quite recently did I work out that he was tapping the door with his foot when I shot. However, what was brilliant about this was that every so often he’d have me miss. I suppose he was trying to give me an early lesson in life.

The little girl who lived on the other side of my house was not really party to my cowboy world. I didn’t have much to do with her until one day when she was standing on the fence that separated the two gardens. Land, I had learned from the cowboys, was special. Special enough to kill or be killed for. I told her to get off the fence. She wouldn’t. I told her again. Nothing. Couldn’t she see the rifle? The first shot was over her head. She laughed. So I fired twice, straight at her. Somehow, I missed. Then I saw a half-housebrick lying in my garden. Half-enders we called them. I put down the rifle and picked up the half-ender. I threw it as hard as I could. Suddenly, she was covered in blood. There was silence, more than you’d expect, and then tears – from both of us. She needed stitches. There were arguments. I was very scared.

But what if I’d killed her? Imagine how different my life would have been. I guess I was too young for prosecution but I’d have been marked for life. Do you think you’d be reading the autobiography of a much-loved, successful, highly paid entertainer who’d killed a little girl when he was five? I don’t think so. Even if I’d got that far, the tabloids would have made mincemeat out of me once the story filtered out. Do you really want to laugh at the evil killer freak-kid? Do you want to watch the cowboy murderer pretending he’s cured now? My stomach is churning just writing this. She was fine, not even a scar, but what if the half-ender had caught her a bit differently?

Is that what life and death are all about? Who knows which decision is going to be the one that changes your life forever, for better or worse? Like when Roger Milford didn’t book Gazza for that first challenge in the 1991 FA Cup Final and Gazza was crippled on the second challenge and England didn’t qualify for the 1994 World Cup, or when Jeffrey Archer wrote in his diary: Monday – Stayed in and chatted to my lovely wife, who I’m very loyal to. Tuesday – Spent the whole day definitely not giving money to a black prostitute. Wednesday – Bought this diary.

One night, a few months later, I was playing in the street outside my house. Some of the bigger kids were taking part in this game, which involved leaning a flat stick on the edge of the kerb, placing a stone on the lower end, and then stamping on the raised end to make the stone fly high in the air. I thought I’d give it a go. In fact, I was so enthralled that I stood directly over the stick to get a really good view. I stamped on the stick as hard as I could. There was a loud thud and my mouth hurt. The Wife of Bath, in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, had a gap between her two front teeth, which, the poet says, is a common sign of wantonness. Suddenly, that night, I went wanton. The stone smashed into my teeth and created a gap at the bottom which is there to this day, though it’s now more of an upward slant than an actual gap. My lips almost instantly swelled up to about five times their normal size and the kids started calling me Mick Jagger. I walked into my house, holding back the tears. Sticks and stones . . . and Stones.

I suppose my don’t-cry policy was based on the cowboy thing as well. Every Western seemed to have a scene where the hero had to grit his teeth while a bullet was prised out of his hide with a Bowie knife. Pain was there to be borne in silence. My teeth weren’t really fit for gritting but I stuck with it. Thirty-five years later I was on a ranch holiday in Montana. Yes, the old urges were still there. I’d swapped the settee-arm for a real American quarter-horse and a small group of us were inching our way down the side of a canyon, a steep and scary ride where we had to relax the reins and trust the horses. The genuine cowboy who was leading the party was keeping his eye on stuff. My horse stumbled and was propelled into racing downward through a narrow gap between two trees. My leg was forced against a thick branch which eventually snapped under the strain. The pain was pretty severe and I yelled out in agony. ‘Frank,’ said our still-totally-cool party leader, ‘cowboy-up a little.’

If you can’t tolerate football, feel free to skip this bit. I have a certain amount of respect for people who don’t like football. Even though, as you know, my dad always said, ‘Never trust a man who doesn’t like football,’ I prefer such a man to the dabbler. You know, the one who watches the odd England game and usually claims to support Arsenal. He who hates football is a man who must have experienced football in an emotional way or it would not have triggered such a strong, albeit negative, emotion. The dabbler is a man who has experienced football in a third-gear, quite-like-it kind of a way. This is beyond me. To encounter football is to meet with something big. It requires love or hate. Anything in between is an insult. I hope you will have, up to now, found me to be quite a genial, mild-mannered chap. I think this is a fair summing-up of my general demeanour, but football tends to bring out the mouthy git in me.

Anyway, West Bromwich Albion are in the Division One play-offs. We’re only three games away from the Premier League. Trust me, this is massive. We play Bolton Wanderers at the Hawthorns, West Brom’s home ground, next Sunday. Sunday is also the BAFTA Awards ceremony, in London, of course. Let me make one thing absolutely clear. If there is a choice between Dave and me winning a BAFTA for Unplanned or West Brom winning the play-offs, it’s a no-contest. West Brom, or Albion as I would normally refer to them, are the great love of my life. I’ve loved them literally as long as I can remember. I care about them. I was at a home game against Coventry City in the late seventies when Albion’s veteran midfielder, Tony ‘Bomber’ Brown, stuck one in from thirty yards. I rose to my feet with fists clenched and I remember very clearly thinking to myself, ‘This is as happy as it’s possible to be.’ Of course, women and work have made me elated, but always that elation is slightly scarred by fear of losing, or betrayal, or humiliation or the burden of responsibility. You know, the usual stuff. But Bomber’s goal was joy in its simplest, purest form. Forgive me for sounding like Mr Showbiz, but, as I sang on the B-Side of ‘Three Lions ’98’:

On the other side of the football-coin, I cried like a baby when Albion got relegated to Division Two. We haven’t been in the top flight for fourteen seasons. In all the time I’ve supported them, they’ve won two major trophies, the last one in 1968! I don’t often use an exclamation mark, but that last sentence really deserved one. If any job had put me through the misery that Albion have, I’d have walked years ago. If any woman had done it, I’d still be in prison. But I remain totally loyal to them. I do not even lust after other teams and commit adultery in my heart. There is a chant that begins, ‘We’re Albion till we die . . .’ This is one of the few opinions I hold that I know I will hold forever. There is another chant that goes, to the tune of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, ‘We will follow the Albion, over land and sea, and water.’ This one, I’ve never really understood.

Despite all this, I was quite a late starter as far as actually going to the games was concerned. I didn’t see Albion play live till I was ten. It was December 1967, the Saturday before Christmas. We were playing Southampton at the Hawthorns and it pissed down with rain from start to finish. My brother Terry took me and sat me on the wall at the front of the Smethwick End of the ground. I had my legs tucked behind an advertising hoarding but I still got drenched, totally, utterly drenched so that my vest was stuck to my back and the blue dye from my overcoat had run into the white cuffs of my shirt. What’s more, it was a goalless draw. And, guess what. I was hooked. It remains one of the most exciting days of my life, the best Christmas present I ever had. I became a regular after that and although I miss some games because of work, I’m a season ticket holder thirty-four years later. And counting.

Unfortunately, we live in the age of the celebrity fan, many of whom are phoneys who couldn’t, at gunpoint, name three members of the first team. They turn up in the Directors’ Box twice a season and get interviewed before the Cup Final to discuss ‘their team’. I pay for my season ticket and sit in the stand with ordinary fans like myself. Mind you, before I sound too purist, I love a freebie at away games. Why put money in their pockets?

The great thing about being a season ticket holder is that you end up sitting with the same people every week. Some you speak to, some you don’t. There is an ageing ex-marine who sits next to me. He goes up for every header and crunches in to every tackle. At first, this got on my nerves. Sometimes he virtually pushed me out of my seat, but I’ve grown to like it. It reminds me of watching boxing on the telly with my dad. He threw every punch and sat bobbing and weaving on the sofa till the fight was over. I once grabbed a towel and started fanning him between rounds. He laughed, but I’m not sure he was actually aware of his synchronised shadow boxing. It came from somewhere deep down, a dim echo of some three-rounder in a school hall in West Cornforth. A forgotten dream that he could have been a contender.

I think it’s the same for the ex-marine. With the right breaks, maybe he could have worn the blue and white. Then there was the old guy to my left, who I once heard shout of an opposition striker, ‘I’m glad we didn’t have him on the five-inch mortars.’ A heckle he’d probably been using for some fifty years. Or the guy two rows in front who always leaves twenty minutes before the end, regardless of the score or the significance of the match. Or the bloke I was next to, leaving the ground after we’d lost 2–0 to Nottingham Forest, following the tannoy announcement: ‘We have a message for Mr Martin So-and-so, your wife has just given birth to a baby boy in Sandwell District Hospital.’ The bloke next to me said, ‘Poor bugger. He’s had to sit through this lot and now he’s got to go home and make his own tea.’ Or the bloke behind who must have read a coaching manual or something similar. He once shouted out, ‘Come on, Albion. They’re getting us on the second phase pick-up every time. And quite rightly.’ I’m all for the first part of this. I mean the ‘come on’ bit. I can get through a whole match’s shouting with just ‘come on’ said in various intonations: angry, pleading, plaintive, excited – it’s so versatile.

Anyway, I warned you I might get a bit angry-young-man about this. The fact is, I’ve grown up with football. I’ve watched it grow too. For example, when I first went to the Albion there was no segregation of fans. I would stand behind the goal Albion were attacking and then use half time to wander round to the other goal, so I’d still be close at hand if they scored. Not that I saw many goals. Oh, we scored them. Quite a lot. But I only saw about twenty per cent of them. When administrators go on about the safety aspects of terracing, and the supporters’ organisations go on about the atmosphere, I really wish someone would mention that the chief characteristic of terracing is that you can’t see a fucking thing. As a kid, this was particularly true. Lots of schoolboys brought milk crates to stand on or special little platforms knocked up by their dads, with handles for carrying to and from the game. I used the tip-toe neck-stretching method which is, of course, fatally flawed because everybody tip-toes and neck-stretches at the same time. Thus, the relative heights remain the same. We, the great unsighted, might as well have all made a pact to rest on our heels, relax our necks, and accept our miserable lot.

The game was different then. It was only just starting to become the modern game. When a player got injured in those days, or there was any kind of long stoppage, the other players would lie on the grass and relax while the matter was being attended to. I miss that. I miss lots of stuff. But football nostalgia has also been hijacked by a lot of researcher-assisted Johnny-come-latelys who write stuff about funny haircuts and those little tabs that Leeds used to have on their socks, so I’m leaving it there. Anyway, all I really miss is Albion being in the top flight. The next three weeks might sort that out.

One particular memory of Moat Farm Infant School seems nondescript but is, I think, very significant. We had a thing at home – I don’t know if it was a family saying or a bit of local street-talk – but if anyone seemed stupid we’d say he was ‘as saft as a bottle of pop’. ‘Saft’, I presume, was a bastardisation of ‘soft’. Who knows? Anyway, I was in the classroom at Moat Farm, and we were doing painting. Some kid had a cuddly toy he was showing to me. I dismissed it by saying he was as saft as a bottle of pop and got a big laugh from the surrounding kids. It’s the first audience laugh I ever got, and I really liked it. I think I was six.

The more pedantic reader might suggest that, as I (judging by the cowboy-suit story) was something of a show-off, I probably got audience laughs before this, but I just don’t remember them. Well, believe me, when it comes to audience laughs, I’d remember. Soon the word went round the class. The phrase was repeated by other kids and got secondary laughs. Soon a crowd of children gathered around my desk, wanting me to say it again. They knew exactly what it was, they just wanted to hear me say it, preferably over and over. It was like being Harry Enfield.

There must have been fifteen kids around my desk. It was the first sense of celebrity I ever got and I really liked it. I said it again, they all laughed. Soon the teacher came over to see what all the fuss was about. She could hear laughs and see I was at the centre of it but couldn’t work it out. The desk was covered in newspaper because of the painting, and I had turned some of the letters in the headline words into silly faces, just as. an unthinking doodle, no more. She said, God, I remember it so clearly, ‘Oh, I see. He’s made funny faces out of the letters.’ I was outraged. It was the first time I was misunderstood by a critic, and I didn’t like it. There I was, setting new standards with my ground-breaking ‘saft as a bottle of pop’ material, and she thought I was dealing in stupid cartoons. I hit her with my new catchphrase. The kids all laughed. I think someone whooped but I may have embroidered the moment a little. The teacher tried to force a smile but couldn’t see what was funny. I remember the expression on her face. I’ve had two-thousand-seater theatres rocking with laughs, but there’ll always be one face in the crowd who has the same expression as that teacher. And what I hate is that all the laughing faces blur out of focus and the only face I can see is that one.

I said at the beginning of this book that I didn’t like autobiographies or biographies that went on about the subject’s childhood. I hope I’ve sugared the pill a bit by talking about current, showbizzy stuff as well. It’s just that now I come to think about these incidents from my early days, I start to think that stuff about ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you a man’ is more real than I thought. I now recognise a lot of current themes in my life that, on reflection, seemed to have been planted way back then. Of course, it could be that I’m looking back at insignificant incidents and then imposing meaning on them that was never really there. Why don’t you decide?

In the Unplanned show, we have an audience-member on stage to document the topics we cover on a white board. As I’ve said, we call them ‘The Secretary’. It’s a comedy device, obviously. If the secretary is an interesting character it gives us a whole new avenue for laughs. Tonight’s secretary was called Shelley. Turned out that her uncle is Mick McManus. In case you don’t know, Mick McManus was one of the most famous wrestlers in Britain in the sixties and seventies. He was one of the bad-guy wrestlers. I didn’t realise it until I read an essay by this French writer called Roland Barthes a few years back, but wrestling is a modern-day morality play. It has good guys and bad guys and, most interestingly, the bad guys win quite a lot. Wrestling comes from the same school of realism as Mr Parkes. It would’ve been easy enough to make good triumph all the time in the wrestling ring, but apart from the predictability factor, it just wouldn’t seem true. I know it seems odd to talk about wrestling and truth in the same sentence, but even allowing for the audience’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, it still needs to be kind of, well, real.

I used to watch wrestling . . . hold it. I need to make something clear here. When I talk about wrestling, I mean British wrestling in the sixties and seventies. Wrestling that was on ITV’s Saturday afternoon World of Sport programme and also on most Wednesday nights on the same channel. Wrestling that was commentated on by Kent Walton. Wrestling that included stars like McManus, Jackie ‘Mr TV’ Pallo, Les Kellett, Billy Two Rivers, Johnny Kwango, Honey Boy Zimba and Adrian Street. What I do not mean is American wrestling in the eighties and nineties, where everyone looks like a cross between a body-builder and a heavy-metal star. The mainstays of the wrestling I love were middle-aged rough bastards with beer-bellies and dirty fingernails. The sort of blokes you could see bashing someone’s head against a bus stop on a Saturday night in any northern town. To the young me, these men were gods.

Anyway, I used to watch wrestling at two main local venues, Thimblemill Baths and the Hen and Chickens pub. The Hen and Chickens also had a country-and-western evening on Thursday nights which attracted a lot of divorced older women. Younger men, in search of, amongst other things, a nice breakfast, would go there to meet the divorcees. It was known locally as Grab-a-Granny night.

Thimblemill Baths was a great place for all sorts of entertainment, including swimming, obviously. I remember Keith got arrested there once after a dance. The police claimed he was half-way up a lamppost, calling out encouragement to his fellow rioters. Keith always said he was stitched up. The headline in the local newspaper, the Smethwick Telephone, was ‘Youths swarm like locusts’. Whenever the word ‘youth’ appeared in a headline, it usually meant trouble. Terry got arrested for wiping several glasses off the bar in a pub that refused to serve him. The headline was, of course, ‘Youth has smashing time’.

Incidentally, one thing I never worked out was how the Smethwick Telephone got its name. I imagined the editorial staff, all gathered round a large table, looking at the newspaper, saying stuff like, ‘Well, it’s definitely some form of communication. Maybe it’s a telephone’, followed by lots of nodding and muttered agreement. The staff at the Telephone were certainly firm believers in the old adage that every picture tells a story. In fact, I wondered if they believed that their readers couldn’t actually read at all. For example, I once read a story in there about a man who was retiring from his job in a tube factory. The accompanying picture showed the man, standing outside the factory. Behind him stood several people in overalls, all looking at him and waving, and next to them was a much smaller group in suits and ties one of whom was proffering a large carriage-clock. The non-clock-carriers were also waving. At the front stood the man, waving with one hand, and holding a large tube in the other.

However the Telephone’s finest hour was when a woman from nearby Rowley Regis claimed that a flying saucer had landed in her garden and two little aliens had got out. In the front-page story that resulted, she said she had spoken to the little green men and they had understood exactly what she said. If you’ve ever met anyone from Rowley Regis you’d know how unlikely this was. Anyway, she told a Telephone reporter that she had taken the little men into her house and given them mince pics (it wasn’t even Christmas) and then they had left. I know this all sounds like nonsense, but I’ll remember the last sentence of that article if I live to be a hundred. It said, ‘She watched as the alien craft rose into the morning sky and disappeared, towards Dudley.’

Anyway, I developed my taste for wrestling by watching it on the TV. My number one hero was a bloke called Les Kellett. He always looked about fifty and had a fair old belly on him, but the great thing about Kellert was that he was funny, I mean really funny. One of his favourite bits was to make like he was dead on his feet with no chance of recovery. He would stagger around the ring with his eyes half-open and his opponent would go in for the kill, at which point Les would suddenly recover completely and give the shocked opponent a good hiding. He would also often spit at the referee while talking to him and then pretend it was an accident, or pat his opponent on the back so the man would think it was the referee’s signal to break, thus releasing Les from a tricky situation. You might suggest all this was a fix, but so what? If Les was on, I was there, watching his every move and doing impressions of him. If I had to pick my all-time favourite comics, Les would be right up there.

The first time I watched wrestling live was at Thimblemill Baths when I was about eleven. The star of the night was a bloke called Lord Bertie Topham, who arrived in the ring wearing a monocle, top hat and opera cloak, and this was a long time before Chris Eubank. Lord Bertie was accompanied by his butler carrying a crystal decanter of water on a silver tray. This was a brilliant act for a wrestler: class warfare. He sneered at the audience, called them common and complained about the smell, all in a plummy posh voice. To hammer this home, the opponent, an ordinary-looking bloke, wore his working-classness on his sleeve, and abused Topham in a strong local accent so that the lines were cleanly drawn. We were really desperate that Topham should be taught a lesson, shown that he couldn’t treat hard-working ordinary people like that. We were all screaming out ‘snob’ at the arrogant toff. And then, in a typical example of how the class war goes, Lord Bertie won by foul means. He held the poor Joe Nobody in a headlock while the butler battered his head with the silver tray.

Still, the lure of live wrestling lived with me. I spent the evening of my eighteenth birthday at the Hen and Chickens, watching the wrestling. The Hen and Chickens’ bills were pretty experimental. They included women’s wrestling as a regular feature. I remember there was a big fat bird called the Black Widow, who would greet the crowd with the most elaborate V-sign I’ve ever seen. It started, fingers pointing downward, at ankle level, and in one fabulous sweeping motion ended with fingers held in the traditional thrusting V, high above her head.

But the women were often disappointing, stretching our suspension of disbelief to the very limit. Slaps clearly didn’t make contact, throws received far too much help from those being thrown. The crowd would get restless. I suppose we all knew it was fixed but we didn’t want our noses rubbed in it. They were letting the side down and lots of people were angry at being forced to confront the all-corrosive truth. Once the poison was in the well, we’d be lost forever. I remember, a few years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and wondered if my religious belief was based on a similar convention. It was a scary half-hour, but while doubt does hurt it also nourishes. I’m talking religious belief now, not wrestling. There’s no room for doubt in wrestling. With religion, I find doubt almost reassuring. It shows that I’m still thinking about my faith, still searching, involved in something not completed, but ongoing. But with wrestling, which offers you, at best, only a fragile truth, and is always switching, mid-bout, between real-life and theatre, you need a firm grip. Believe or leave.

The Hen and Chickens may have fucked up with the lady wrestlers but it continued its policy of cutting-edge entertainment by announcing one night that the next bill would include dwarf-wrestling. This had the crowd buzzing on the way out. Unfortunately, one problem with watching wrestling is that the night often begins with a series of apologies for people on the bill who couldn’t make it. The excuses were often, to say the least, cosmetic. My own favourite was ‘Sorry, Klondike Jake will not be appearing tonight, because he’s in Glasgow.’ Oh, I see. Fair enough.

However, when one of the dwarves doesn’t make it, the one who does is at a bit of a loose end. You can’t really stick him in with one of the big boys, so he gets paid for just turning up. I wouldn’t be surprised if the management toyed with the idea of pitting him against a big wrestler and staging a slingshot incident to produce a shock result, but, as it turned out, they merely introduced Tiny Tim, as he was called, to the disappointed crowd so we could, well, see a dwarf, I suppose.

Anyway, the next wrestling night they managed to produce the pair. On that memorable Tuesday night at the Chicks, Tiny Tim’s opponent was Little Beaver, ‘all the way from Chicago’. Well, it was good of him to make the journey, but strange that he’d picked up a broad Birmingham accent on the way. Little Beaver took off his coonskin cap and the fight began, but the crowd, now finally confronted with two half-naked dwarves, became sullen and ill at ease. Normally, the bouts were accompanied by all sorts of cheering and abuse, but now there was silence in the hall. All you could hear was the dull slap of dwarf against dwarf. Whether it was shock, pity, fear, horror, respect, or a mixture of these, I don’t know, but the silence was unbearable.

As the fight continued in this vacuum, Little Beaver, who had set himself up as the bad guy, probably because he was slightly taller than Tiny Tim, gave Tim a totally unprovoked kick up the arse. I never thought I’d go to my grave knowing what sound it makes when a dwarf kicks another dwarf up the arse, but I will. However, the injustice was more than I could handle. ‘Pick on somebody your own size, Beaver,’ I hollered. A big laugh went up and suddenly the floodgates were open. ‘Come on, you short-arsed bastards,’ called a black bloke in a smart grey suit to my left. The taboo was broken and soon everyone was joining in. It was the most mediaeval night of my life. At the end, both wrestlers got loud cheers as they passed under the ropes.

I didn’t tell Shelley McManus any of this. She was a pretty girl and Dave and me did a bit of comedy-flirting. Shelley said that if it came to a passionate encounter, she couldn’t decide which one of us she’d choose. I suggested Dave and me could operate as a tag-team. Just think, if I had told the Hen and Chickens story the Little Beaver jokes would have been thick on the ground.

It was the day I nonchalantly sang ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ in the kitchen that my dad resolved to get me a transfer to a Roman Catholic school. ‘Listen to him,’ he said, ‘singing that HYMN.’ Never before or since have I heard the word ‘hymn’ said with such disgust. As far as Dad was concerned, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ was a Protestant battle-cry, and Moat Farm Infants had taken me as far as they could. It was time to learn about my religion, to take the three C sacraments (Confession, Communion, Confirmation), to recognise that I was part of a spiritual and cultural minority that had been beaten, burned and beheaded by various representatives of the British establishment, but had somehow survived, battered but unbowed. It was time to get Catholic.

I’d been going to Catholic church on Sundays and stuff, but the real combat training had been on hold until now. So, aged eight, I started at St. Hubert’s Roman Catholic School on the Birmingham New Road. This was the main road between Birmingham and Wolverhampton, usually referred to as The Wolvo. You couldn’t really miss the school because it adjoined St. Hubert’s Roman Catholic Church, my family’s regular place of worship, which had an incredibly tall steeple adorned with an enormous white cross painted on the brickwork. At that time the parish priest was Father O’Doherty. He was, as you might guess, Irish, but he might as well have been Lithuanian for all you could understand of him. No, actually, that’s a bit unfair. You could understand about one word in twenty, so his homilies went like this: ‘Ar bara baba baba baba Jesus sappa passa papa, ar bara bara the apostles ba bara baba . . .’ and so on. To make things worse, he was not of the opinion that brevity is the soul of wit. His homilies were long. I mean long. My dad always said that Father O’Doherty had to have ‘his pound of flesh’. You see, I’m not the only one in the family who liked to quote Shakespeare.

Speaking of which, many years later, just a few months after I’d started driving, I had my first car crash. I inched out of a side-road in my 1967 Vauxhall Viva and slammed into some bloke’s Nissan. He leapt out and started going on and on about how I’d nearly killed him and his wife. I explained that he was driving too fast and thus turned my safe manoeuvre into a dangerous one. He went on and on. I was on my way back from Halesowen College where I had just given a lecture on Hamlet to a group of mature students. (How did the seven-year-old with the piss-bucket get to be lecturing on Hamlet? Stick around.) As the Nissan driver wittered on, my mind wandered back to the Prince of Denmark. The Nissan driver’s wife eventually wound down the window and joined in the attack. ‘He’s right,’ she said, sticking up for her husband, ‘you did pull right out.’ Almost to myself, I muttered, in the words of Hamlet, ‘How all occasions do inform against me.’

So anyway, I went to St. Hubert’s. The school had a house system. Most schools did then. You were put into what they called ‘houses’, which just meant that each pupil was allocated to a group or house and won ‘house points’ for good behaviour, good work, promptness or sporting achievements. At the end of each year, the points were added up and the winning house was, well, the winning house. We wore badges with our house names on and it was good early practice for losing and letting other people down.

The houses were all named after Catholic martyrs like More, Fisher, Campion etc. School trips tended to be to Harvington Hall in Worcestershire, where we could squeeze into the ‘priest holes’ and play at being persecuted. Here, brave Catholic priests were forced to hide out from Protestant oppressors out to get them just because they were saying Mass on the quiet. This might sound like indoctrination to you, but so what?

Catholics are different and there’s no getting round it. Go to a Catholic church on a Sunday and you’ll see a very special mix of people. Of course there’ll be that solid mainstay of all organised religions, the very old, scoring their own house points before the ultimate end-of-term count-up. But then there’ll be the special Catholic elements: the chunky skinhead in the Glasgow Celtic shirt; the beautiful dusky maiden of Spanish or Italian descent; the old Irish man with red face and gnarled hands, still smelling of drink from the night before; the trendy young oriental couple in ripped jeans and clubbers t-shirts, the black family with the incredibly cute kids. They’re all there. Of course, this doesn’t mean that they’re all necessarily operating on a higher spiritual plane than other Christians, but they just seem to have more balls about them than the C of E congregation down the road, where bad skin, acrylic fibres and badly chosen spectacles seem to be the order of the day.

Not that anyone in the UK with Christian beliefs could ever consider themselves fashionable. I know it got trendy to wear t-shirts with Mary or Jesus on, or big crucifixes and so on, but that’s just externals. (Generally speaking, I’m not keen on this religious-iconography-as-fashion-item thing, but I saw a brilliant t-shirt that had a Renaissance portrait of Jesus on it and said underneath, ‘Jesus is Coming. Look busy.’ Funny, but also sort of true.)

In 1990, I went on a whirlwind tour of Sweden with Eddie Izzard, doing stand-up to people whose English was good but not quite good enough to understand stand-up. On our way home, Eddie and me were chatting on the plane and he said he was planning to use his stand-up act to talk about the fact that he was a transvestite. He said he thought it was really important to talk about stuff that’s true to you when you’re doing stand-up. I agreed with this. It’s why I’ve never been so crazy about character-comics. You know, people who just play a part on stage. I know it can be really funny but, personally, I like to know the person who’s up there. I want their opinions and attitudes. It’s like Wordsworth said about the poet, he should be a ‘man talking to man’. Or woman, obviously. If I want characters, I’ll watch a play.

So, we talked about how an audience would react to a comic telling them he was a transvestite and then doing gags about it. We agreed maybe not at the Circus Tavern, Purfleet, but generally speaking, a so-called alternative comedy crowd would probably be fine with it. So Eddie asked me if there was anything close to my heart that I hadn’t yet tackled as part of my stand-up act. I suggested Catholicism. We both sat in silence for a bit, mulling it over. Transvestism, yes, but Catholicism? We agreed it was a no-no. They’d never go for that. Too weird. I think lapsed Catholics can get away with talking about Catholicism in retrospect, but only if they take a negative, ‘How stupid was that?’ approach. Still, I’d rather lose Catholicism as a stand-up topic than burn in hell as a betrayer.

So, St. Hubert’s. The teaching staff included two nuns, the older of which was the headmistress, Mother Mary Adrian. My brother Keith had been to St. Hubert’s four years earlier and had warned me about Mother Mary. He told me she was the strictest teacher he’d ever known. Mind you, he also told me that he’d put lighted Roman candles under the Nazi soldiers’ beds during their occupation of Oldbury.

One day, me and my mate Jeffrey were walking down the school corridor arm-in-arm, singing some current chart hit, when Mother Mary Adrian emerged from a classroom. She was so hacked off she was almost growling. How dare we sing in the corridor? She told us to wait outside her office. We stood there, terrified, underneath the enormous dark-brown wooden crucifix on the wall. Jeffrey looked up at this cross and said, ‘He’ll help us.’ And he meant it. The real, deeply felt, uncomplicated faith of the small child. He liked wrestling as well. So we waited . . . for ages. Soon, Jeffrey was aching for the toilet, but we both knew that if Mother Mary came back and Jeffrey wasn’t there, well, we just knew it was a bad idea. So we waited. Maybe she forgot. Maybe Jesus had helped us, although we hadn’t seen any lightning or heard a loud bang and resulting scream.

Then she came back. We were tight against the wall like butterflies pinned to a board, looking up at her as she towered over us. She was about four foot ten. I took the initial verbal attack, then she turned to Jeffrey. ‘And as for you . . .’ At this point, a long jet of urine came through Jeffrey’s short grey trousers and Mother Mary had to jump, feet together, out of the way. If this was Jesus’s attempt at a struck-by-lightning scenario, it was a bit lame. Mother Mary screamed at Jeffrey but it was too late. Yes, the floodgates were open. Her initial protest was abandoned. In fact, there was a strange moment when she actually waited, in impatient silence, for the piss to stop. She looked at Jeffrey, then at me. I looked at Jeffrey. He was already beginning to cry. For goodness’ sake, how much liquid could a small child produce? At last the jet of urine began to curve downwards and stopped. I recall a small after-jet, then silence. And then dripping. And then Mother Mary resumed her attack. He was a dirty little boy and he could keep those trousers on all day and then maybe he’d learn how to behave himself. When we went back to class, the teacher suggested that Jeffrey should change into some PE shorts, but we explained what Mother Mary had said, and the teacher, who didn’t look very happy, told us to sit down. And Jeffrey kept his wet trousers on all day.

Unplanned has been going pretty well at the Shaftesbury. The crowds have been good and the front of the theatre looks fantastic: two massive photographs of me and Dave, and, in between these, our caricatures above the words ‘Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned’, all done in neon. This weekend is the end of the run and it’s all been worth it, if only for that theatre-front. I don’t think of myself as a vain man, but the other night I nearly got myself run over, standing in the middle of the road so that I could see us all over the theatre and reflected in the glass-fronted building across the street.

One night last week, someone from the audience asked me what my favourite TV programme was. It’s a toughie, but Columbo would definitely be up there. At this point, Dave pointed out that Columbo had a glass eye. I said that it was Peter Falk, the actor who plays Columbo, who had the glass eye. Dave looked confused. To be honest, I had no idea where I was going with this, but on I went. I put it to Dave that, while Peter Falk does indeed have a glass eye for the purposes of the role, the glass eye plays the part of a real eye. This triggered off a debate in the crowd that I overheard still going on in the pub afterwards. I think that’s great.

The next night, someone asked if we could have any superpower what would it be. Dave suggested that X-Ray vision would have its advantages. He started talking about those adverts for X-Ray specs that you used to see in comic books. The advert showed a kid in these specs, staring at his hand and able to see all the bones inside. I confessed that I had discussed this years before in my stand-up routine. I had concluded then that if I owned genuine X-Ray specs, within a couple of months, EVERYONE would be able to see the bones in MY hand.

I went on to say that, best of all, I would like to be able to fly, but if I did I wouldn’t do it like Superman. I don’t like the one-arm-raised flying style, or even the less common two-hands-raised version. I’d fly, perhaps with my hands folded behind my head, or maybe on my hips, with legs crossed, if I felt so inclined. I demonstrated these various options. Oh, I love my job.

The library at St. Hubert’s included a book called Born Free, you know, about the woman with the lions and stuff. One day a classmate of mine called Stephen told me and another couple of kids that the book was a must-see. We made our way into the library and stood looking puzzled at each other while Stephen flicked feverishly through the pages. Then he stopped. He looked at us, then at the book, then he showed us. It was a full-page black-and-white photograph of an African tribeswoman shot from the hips up. She stood staring at the camera with a slightly unfriendly air. Stephen was grinning. His eyes had widened. Yes, we’d noticed. The tribeswoman was bare-breasted.

He laid the book open on a table and the four of us just stood staring at it. I mean, for ages. I can still see those breasts even though I haven’t seen the book for years. And I absolutely guarantee that it was a picture of bare breasts and not the solar system. We just stared. And then Stephen said, in a slightly hushed voice, ‘Y’know, when I see something dirty like this, my thingy goes all stiff.’

Suddenly, eureka! I have never felt so relieved in my life. I thought it was just me. I thought I had some sort of paralysis thing. I looked around and I could see that the other two were similarly relieved. Yes, all our thingys went stiff when we saw something dirty. Hurrah! I could have hugged Stephen for this revelation. We all got giggly and joyous that we’d discovered something universal and important. We even shook hands. We actually shook hands. We were normal. The experience was uplifting in every sense. I’m glad we held back from hugging each other because if Mother Mary had come in and found us all locked in a group embrace, each with an erection, there would have been four other wooden crucifixes on the wall outside her office, and we’d have been on them.

There’s a science fiction story about a guy who goes backwards in time and while he’s in the past, he accidentally steps on a butterfly. When he returns to his own time, we speak a different language and Britain has a fascist government, all because of the changes he triggered when he stood on the butterfly. Just like I can never know the weird and unfathomable effects the half-ender I chucked at my neighbour might have had on my life, how can any of us possibly predict the consequences of even our most trivial actions on the lives of others?

Could that African tribeswoman have ever imagined that her breasts would have such a massive effect on an eight-year-old schoolboy on the other side of the planet? She brought me sexual arousal, removed what seemed like very real fears about my health, and gave me a strong sense of belonging and self-awareness, all with one unsmiling flash of her tits. It was a truly important moment in my personal development, all thanks to her. It could also be seen, of course, and not as facetiously as you might think, as another step on my ladder to nob-joke fame and glory. It added a new dimension. We all became firm friends. I guess you’d call it group solidarity.

Friday night. 11th May 2001. If we take our lead from Ready Steady Go, the weekend starts at tea-time on Friday. Guess what? I’m in my office at Avalon (y’know, my management company) in Ladbroke Grove, West London, writing this book. I’ve worked out that I need to write 3,000 words a day to make my deadline. This is slightly scary but I’m starting to really enjoy writing it. Let’s face it, I’ll probably never write another book, unless I do volume two of this when I’m eighty, so I might as well enjoy it. My girlfriend, Caroline, says she thinks writing the book has made me more reflective, especially about my background. She reckons I’ve suddenly become very class-aware, more inclined to make casual anti-posh remarks, to whinge about privilege. I need to watch this. I don’t like rich, successful celebs who go on about their poor backgrounds. Shit, I’ve done that big time, haven’t I? Well, it’s an autobiography. I’m trapped in facts.

I sit in my office, which has a window that faces a brick wall, so I get no hint of the sunny day outside. On the wall, pics of Muhammad Ali, Bruce Lee and Elvis Presley. A photograph of me and another hero, former Albion star Jeff Astle. I go for heroes on the office wall. In the corner, a life-size cut-out of John Wayne. On top of my computer there’s a teddy bear dressed as Elvis, a gift from Caroline. There’s also a baseball that has the inscription ‘The one who complains about the way the ball bounces is likely the one who dropped it’, and a little model of my great inspiration, Wile E. Coyote from the Road Runner cartoons. He’s the one who gets blown up, fried, crushed, and generally badly hurt in his pursuit of the Road Runner, but keeps going. He’s the ultimate symbol of endurance, determination and single-mindedness. When I’m writing the book, a TV show, or stand-up, he looks over me. Fuck failure, keep going.

The soundtrack to my writing is an endless wall of hip-hop. Today it was Dr Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg and the Notorious B.I.G. Throbbing bass lines, and people rapping about niggers, bitches and motherfuckers while I write about garden sheds and schoolboys weeing their trousers. It works for me but I’ve no idea why. I didn’t even get into this sort of music till about three years ago. I didn’t like rap. When people tried to win me over, I would say that if I needed bad poetry, I’d buy a greetings card. Then I got drawn in via the weirdest route, French hip-hop. I went out with a woman who was into MC Solaar and ‘I Am’, both French rap acts, and I got hooked, even though I had no idea what they were saying. Maybe because I had no idea what they were saying. It was the human voice as musical instrument, just a good noise, but now I need all those nasty words as well.

At 6.45 p.m. my car turns up. I drive but, particularly when I’m working, I’ll often hire a car with driver, and, if he’s available, I always book Gerry. Gerry is arguably the most Irish man in the world. He also has more stories than anyone I’ve ever met, my favourite being the one about when he patented a device for picking up dog excrement. It was called the Mess-Stick, and when he tried to get the pooper-scooper franchise with Westminster Council, him and his friends turned up at the plush council offices to discover that their rivals had all brought plasticine to aid their demonstration. Gerry and his boys had stopped off in Green Park to collect real dog shit for theirs. It didn’t help. Gerry is also a Catholic, so that reduces the weirdo factor if I ask him to stop off at the local Catholic church so I can light a candle for someone, or get in the car with ashes on my head.

I like Gerry. I always sit in the front, partly because he’s become a mate and it makes chatting easier, and partly because it’s bad enough swanning around in a chauffeur-driven Merc without sitting in the back like Lord Twat. We’re off to the Shaftesbury Theatre for the last weekend of the Unplanned run, picking up David Baddiel from his house on the way. It’s a sunny day and the streets are full of scantily clad women. Gerry and me sit in traffic in Notting Hill and two sexy black girls in breathtakingly short skirts recognise me and start waving and giggling. I wave and giggle back. Maybe a vague shadow of the Born Free book rolled across my subconsciousness, but if it did, I didn’t notice. Gerry points out a white girl in cut-off denims, crossing the street. ‘Never choose a new girlfriend in the summertime,’ he says, ‘because everybody looks good with a tan.’ I nod, and remember he gave me the same advice last summer. I think about my own girlfriend, Caroline. She presents an entertaiment news show called The Juice on Radio Five Live. They record it on Friday afternoons and I’m wondering how it went. She is DJ-ing at a club called Strawberry Moons tonight. We’ll probably meet up later. I’m not really sure how I rate as a date. She’s a party girl at heart. She’s twenty-three, with a taste for strawberry martinis and tequila slammers. I’m twenty years older and I don’t drink. The age wouldn’t really matter if I drank because everybody is seventeen when they’re drunk. Mind you, comedy is definitely not a grown-up job, so maybe I get away with it. What can I do? I can’t get younger and if I start drinking again, in six months I’ll be living on waste ground with seventeen carrier-bags, shouting, ‘I used to be on television.’ I don’t see how that would help.

Caroline came to a couple of Unplanneds early on, but she didn’t enjoy hearing me answering questions about my past sex life and the like. I sympathise. I don’t feel so good talking about these things if I know she’s in the audience. Unplanned is about opening up to the crowd, about talking to them like they’re old mates, so I have to go for it. Most couples don’t hear their partners when they’re talking about that stuff, especially not with 1,400 witnesses.

As we pull up outside the theatre, Dean and Bobby, our minders for the West End run, are waiting to greet us. Neither of us need minders in the everyday run of things, but Unplanned is essentially a free-for-all and we’ve had a couple of blokes try to get on stage. They may well have only been looking for a handshake or a moment in the spodight, but it’s nice to think that if they were looking for blood they’d be dealt with.

They say Elvis Presley used to have a revolver tucked in his boot on stage. Obviously, this wouldn’t stop him getting shot, but Elvis’s priority was that the assassin wouldn’t be alive to go around afterwards saying ‘I shot the King.’ What a fantastic image that is. Pandemonium as a dying Elvis, sprawled on the stage in a blood-stained white flared jumpsuit, fires haphazardly into the crowd where women and children drop all around the fleeing assassin, struck by the King’s stray bullets. And the ever-professional orchestra still blasting out ‘All my trials, Lord, soon be over . . .’ On stage one night Dave asked Dean and Bobby, in their usual front-row, centre-aisle seats, if they’d take a bullet for us. Neither of them seemed outraged at the prospect.

On Fridays and Saturdays we do two shows, at 7 and 9 o’clock. The first one was OK. I won’t bore you with the blow-by-blow. The heat has slowed the audience down a little but I like the slightly quieter vibe. OK, it was shit. Dave liked it, but to me there are two kinds of show, shit and brilliant. Ergo, any show that isn’t brilliant is shit. It’s a tough rule but it keeps you on your toes.

Caroline’s old mate Pete was in the audience. He comes to the dressing room to say hello. Pete is a fanatical Watford fan and talks to me and Dave about football, hard-core style. Football is a great conversation fall-back, so he probably didn’t like the show and used football to avoid having to confess it. Thus works the mind of the performer. Dressing room visitors are on frighteningly thin ice unless they take an undiluted-praise approach. Anything else will be picked apart by the performer until he finds the most negative possible interpretation of what was said. If you want to drive a performer crazy on your dressing room visit, why not try the old classic, ‘Well, you’ve done it again.’ This is a slow burner. The performer might well take it as positive at first, and then be woken in the early hours by all the dreadful connotations that will have been slowly released in his mind.

The second show was better, but very dirty. No one loves a dirty joke more than me but, in Unplanned, the audience set the agenda and tonight they wanted filth. This can get a bit turgid after a while. (Did I say that?) Still, big applause at the end and off we stride. Dave and me and a few friends go for a drink across the road. As it’s suddenly become summer, people are standing out on the pavement in their shirtsleeves. Dean and Bobby come too, in case we get kidnapped. Or become targets of a drive-by shooting by Ant and Dec.

I invited my doctor tonight, and his young son is telling me at length about why his favourite comedian is Eddie Izzard. Anyway, it’s a hot summer’s night in the West End and lots of people are saying hello and talking about stuff that was in the show. Then, two men in their early twenties, one short and one tall, approach me. ‘Excuse me,’ says the short guy, talking to me but pointing at the tall guy, ‘I’ve been asking him to come back with me tonight but he’s been staring at you and saying he wants to wait and see if you’re interested. Now, I keep telling him you’re not going to put out. That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘Right,’ I say, turning then to the tall guy. ‘I think you should go back with him.’ Without a word, the tall guy takes the short guy’s hand and they turn and walk off into the night. I think about the butterfly that got trodden on. Did I just change the future of the world? And what about the Catholic church? I just gave my blessing to a homosexual act. Do I have to confess this?

I phone Caroline. She’s finished her gig and is on her way home. I say I’ll pick up some chips in Camden. We sit on the sofa and eat chips and talk and kiss. She was unhappy with her radio show today. Everyone else liked it. I think she may have caught my ‘shit or brilliant’ bug. She falls asleep in my arms. She does the breakfast show as well. She was up at 4.20 a.m. this morning. I look at her face while she sleeps. I’ve got a big surprise for her in the morning. No, I mean after that.

Saturday 12th May 2001. Shortly after we wake up, I tell Caroline my news. I put in an offer on a house and it’s been accepted. It’s got four bedrooms and a garden and off-street parking and two balconies and a conservatory. It’s a big moment. Buying a house instead of a flat suggests that I’m growing up at last. I’m maturing. I’m thinking like a proper adult. She agrees. Then I tell her where it is: next-door-but-one to David Baddiel.

Next-door-but-one is close enough for tea and a chat, but far enough away for Caroline and me to feel, when we hold each other, like there’s no one else on the planet. It also means I’ll be able to spend lots of time with a plastic rifle, trying to shoot a matchbox off the top of Dave’s shed-door. Though, knowing Dave, I have a feeling I’ll be missing a lot more than I used to.

So we go and look at the house. It’s only a ten-minute walk. We meet Dave in his silver convertible, top down, on his way to buy an evening suit for tomorrow night’s BAFTA awards ceremony. You may recall that Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned is up for Best Comedy Programme. We won’t win. I know this because Bob Monkhouse’s son died recently so Bob, who was due to present an award, pulled out and BAFTA phoned to see if we’d stand in for him. They wouldn’t have asked us to present an award if we’d won one. Dave is still optimistic. Ish.

I had a dream once. I was walking down the road when I bumped into my mom. She explained that she had been trying to get tickets for her and my dad to go on an open-top bus trip around the Black Country, but they’d sold out. I laughed when she told me. I explained that if her and Dad wanted to go anywhere, I mean anywhere, I’d sort it out. I asked her where she’d most like to go in all the world. ‘Spain,’ she said. (I doubt that that would have been her choice but dreams are never perfect.) I was delighted. I explained that I’d pay for everything and I’d get them a driver and, well, just anything they wanted. When I woke up I was ecstatic. What a brilliant idea, and so obvious. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? Then I realised why I hadn’t thought of it before. They were both dead.

My computer has just underlined the word ‘dead’ with a green squiggly line. I believe this tells me that it is grammatically incorrect. I can’t see why. Suppose, I mean, just suppose for a second, that this is my parents’ way of telling me that they can see me now. That ‘dead’ doesn’t necessarily have to be followed by a full-stop. Now it’s underlined full-stop as well. The hiphop’s stopped. I’ll change CDs and move on. Wu-Tang Clan.

The General Election is coming up so there are people on the street trying to tell you how good their party is. As we pass the Liberal Democrat supporters handing out leaflets and stickers, I politely refuse a leaflet. ‘Labour scum,’ the guy mutters under his breath. I walk on a bit and then ask Caroline what he said. She confirms that it sounded like ‘Labour scum’ so I go back to check. By now the bloke has moved to the back of the bunch and is looking sheepish to the point where I’m starting to wonder if it was him I spoke to. I get bored and move on. There was a time when something like this would have really wound me up. My masculinity would have felt challenged and I’d either have had a row with the bloke or not had a row and then beat myself up for not sorting it out. Now, I just can’t be arsed. Labour scum? I’ve just bought a two-million-quid house. Maybe he meant New Labour scum.

In fact, I do vote Labour, but only because of some vague sense of working-class duty and the fact that Tony Blair was nice to me and Cherie Blair is Catholic. The bottom line is I’m not really interested. My dad was a classic working-class Tory. His view was that the Tories had been trained to rule; it was the natural order of things. Labour people were too much like us and, as he often said, ‘If you beg off a beggar, you’ll never be rich.’ My mom voted Labour, so one election they came to a deal that they might as well not bother to vote at all because they cancelled each other out. As we sat at home that night, the political correspondent on the telly announced that the polling stations had now shut. My mom turned to my dad with a triumphant smile. ‘I voted,’ she said. The old man didn’t see the funny side.

One thing my dad insisted on was that we all remained silent and paid attention during ‘Abide With Me’ which is, of course, the FA Cup Final hymn. Almost certainly Protestant, but my dad was prepared to make an exception for the Cup Final. In the old days, an elderly man in a white suit would stand on a high platform and lead the whole crowd in the hymn. Everybody sang it then. Then football fans changed and, more often than not, ‘Abide With Me’ was drowned out by people singing ‘You’re gonna get your fucking head kicked in’ and the like. Hymns very much modern rather than ancient. In recent times, though, it’s made a bit of a comeback. This year it’s being sung by two sexy birds known as the Opera Babes, one in Liverpool kit and the other in Arsenal.

No matter. Whenever I hear ‘Abide With Me’ before the Cup Final, I think of my dad. I think of his influence on me. I think of how he taught me that football was special. I mean, he gave me a love for all sorts of stuff: singing, boxing, heavy drinking, arguing, but best of all he gave me a love of football. I remember Dave and me sitting watching a nondescript Monday night game on Sky once. We were both having woman trouble at the time, and the game was a backdrop to our morose, frustrated and embittered conversation. Suddenly, somebody hit an absolute pearler from about thirty yards. We both leapt up in the air and whooped with joy. When we sat down again, I turned to him and said, ‘Never mind, Dave. We’ll always have football.’

‘Abide With Me’ is still my special little moment with my dad. In recent years, I’ve been to a few FA Cup finals, usually as part of some sort of corporate jolly. The hymn has been tricky on these occasions. I don’t really want to be crying in front of David Mellor and Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart. I’ve just gone all quiet and stared at my shoes. Now, sitting alone in my front room (I can’t believe I call it that), I’m at liberty to cry, but I think the presence of the so-called. Opera Babes will take the edge off the moment for me. It doesn’t. I cry like a silly kid. Real proper sobbing. I’m trying not to think American-soap-opera thoughts like ‘Thank you, Dad’, but I do. The song ends, I have a drink of tea, I’m OK. Caroline comes home. I don’t mention the crying.

The second show was much better, but I’m still glad it’s all over. I’m knackered tonight. And now Dave and me have a ‘meet and greet’ in the bar. This is where you wander around chatting to people. In this case they’re either from the video company who are putting out the Unplanned Live video, or from shops who will sell it. They seem like a nice bunch but I start to get a bit dizzy. I think I’ve been smoking too much. So I slip out and sit on my own in the Royal Circle, watching our set being dismantled and put into trucks by big blokes in t-shirts.

The shows have been great to do. We’ve had some mega laughs and the old Baddiel and Skinner chemistry has been really bubbling, but I wonder if we’ve taken Unplanned as far as we can take it. The problem is that it really is unplanned. Only the other night in the pub, some bloke was going on about how we must use plants in the audience or work out some stuff between ourselves beforehand, but we are very puritanical about it. When I sit on that sofa, I have no idea what we’re going to talk about, and I’m sure it’s the same for Dave. For TV, this is pretty unique. There are a few ‘spontaneous’ panel shows on the telly where the teams spend the whole afternoon with the questions and a team of writers. I’m not saying this is bad, especially if it turns out a funny show, but Unplanned is totally free-fall, and that makes it balls-on-the-chopping-block stuff.

The great thing about this is that the show requires no preparation whatsoever. The bad thing about it is that you can’t improve it by working harder. Everything I’ve done professionally, stand-up, the chat show, acting, whatever, I’ve improved by working harder. It frustrates me that I don’t have this option with Unplanned So we’re moving on a level plain, and I need something to climb. I haven’t told Dave any of this yet. No one here knows, but they might be dismantling the Unplanned set for the last time.

Sunday. 13th May 2001. I arrive at the Hawthorns with Phil. He’s producing and directing a documentary about Japanese and Korean football which is my next work-project after this book. Outside the ground, a middle-aged woman is selling Baggies Bonanza tickets. There’s a draw at half time and you can win a grand or so on a good week. She tries to sell me one. ‘I don’t need the money,’ I explain. It’s a slightly dodgy response, I know, but she takes it in the spirit it’s intended and smiles. We get inside the ground and I bump into another mate, Lee, who’s an Albion fanatic. His friend is explaining how his little boy came home in a Manchester United shirt and wanted to go and play football in it. In the end, Lee’s mate had to pull the shirt off the kid, who then headed for the football in tears. Lee’s mate said he felt like a heel. I told him he was a hero. He hesitated, then agreed.

As I arrive at the Grosvenor Hotel, the red carpet laid for the arriving VIPs is still down, but the metal barriers that hold back the excited crowds and the banks of paparazzi are piled up for collection. A couple of stewards sit smoking outside. ‘You’re a bit late, Frank,’ one of them says. I notice that the red carpet is slightly turned up at one corner. I walk into the quiet hotel and follow the signs to the awards ceremony. As I get nearer I can hear distant applause and cheering. I reach the doors of the Great Hall. There is a monitor on the wall. I’m on it. It must be our category. I walk into the hall and walk across to the balustrade at the top of the grand staircase. I can see the floor below, packed with dozens of tables of evening-suited blokes and glamorous-frocked women. It occurs to me that if we win, I can enter the hall down the staircase, like Jimmy Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy, and just continue to the stage in one sweeping movement. We don’t. I hold back on the stairs, and watch Ali G go up to get the BAFTA. He’s very funny but, of his genre, not quite as funny as Benny Hill playing the Chinese bloke.

One of the big changes I noticed when I switched from Moat Farm Infants to St. Hubert’s Juniors was the games we played. At Moat Farm, we did a lot of role-playing games. This led to all sorts of problems on the casting front. For example, if we played cowboys and Indians, more often than not, kids weren’t exactly queuing up to be the redskins. OK, you got to whoop and do that thing when you pat your open mouth with the flat of your palm, but that was about it. I always got in a major strop if I couldn’t be a cowboy. I took the acting element particularly seriously and wouldn’t come out of character, even if kids who weren’t playing in the game came and spoke to me. I remember a kid approaching me in the playground and asking if I’d written ‘Wolves are Shit’ on his duffel bag. I smiled ruefully and said, ‘No one said life out here was gonna be easy.’ The kid took this as a ‘yes’ and dead-legged me. Admittedly, this put a damper on my galloping for the rest of playtime, but I cowboyed up and put a brave face on it.

Perhaps I should point out, at this juncture, that the Wolves I refer to are Wolverhampton Wanderers, Albion’s local rivals. I was at an Albion – Wolves game once when the guy next to me explained that he would rather do the double on Wolves (if you’re not into football lingo that means beat them, home and away) than have Albion win promotion. I don’t get this, but when I object, Albion fans tell me it’s because I live in London. If I had to live with the Wolves fans every day, I’d understand. But I spent thirty-four years living with them and I never understood it then either.

I know this is getting a bit Albion-hardcore but bear with me. One thing that pisses me off is the amount of Albion chants that are about how much we hate the Wolves rather than how much we love the Albion. I think it’s shit if you can only define yourself by your relationship to someone else. It makes them sound more important than you. The General Election campaign is going as I write this and that lot are just the same. Labour can only slag off the Tories and vice versa. If the blurb on the back of this book said, ‘Much better than Suzanna Leigh’s Paradise, Suzanna Style,’ you might be inclined to question my confidence in the product.

Anyway, the Albion–Wolves thing does have its lighter side. Former England manager Graham Taylor managed Wolves for a bit. He spent a small fortune on players, still made a terrible job of it all, and ended up back at his old club, Watford. When Albion played at Watford shortly afterwards, our fans sang, to the tune of the old hymn ‘Rock of Ages’ (y’know, the one that was always ‘We’ll support you evermore’), ‘Graham Taylor, Graham Taylor. Thanks for fucking-up the Wolves. Thanks for fu-u-u-cking-up the Wolves,’ and, to his eternal credit, Taylor waved and smiled in acknowledgement. In fact, I think I might have even detected a glimmer of pride in a job well done. In an instant, I completely forgave him for his performance as England manager. Respect.

A few years ago, when Albion were playing at Wolves, the Hawthorns staged a closed-circuit broadcast of the game on a big screen for the Albion fans who couldn’t get tickets. Unfortunately, some Wolves fans got in as well and there was trouble. The Albion chairman was so outraged that the club’s efforts to stage the screening had been soured, he threatened to stage any further closed-circuit screenings ‘behind closed doors’. I’m not sure that he’d completely thought this through.

Meanwhile, back at Moat Farm, I remember causing real problems during one game when I had been forced to play a Red Indian. When the cowboy kids captured me and threatened to kill me, I said I thought it would be a bad idea. When they asked why, I explained, ‘Because I am . . . (Yes, I left a pause for dramatic effect. I remember the moment as if it was yesterday) Simon Templar.’ I even looked up above my head for an imaginary halo. The cowboys were fucked. They couldn’t complain without coming out of character. Suddenly, they’d gone from star turns in a playtime-length Western epic, to bit-players in an episode of The Saint. And where was Equity? Nowhere.

As I say, the move to the Catholic school threw up a whole bunch of new games, one of them ‘Burn the Heretic’, conducted completely in Latin. Just kidding. Anyway, the role-play games disappeared. (The next serious acting I did was twenty years later, when I performed a fortnightly series of fist-clenching, tear-filled monologues about my search for work for various members of staff at the local Job Centre.) The St. Hubert’s games could be put into four categories: dangerous, life-changing, very life-changing and incredibly life-changing.

The dangerous games were mainly British Bulldog and pile-ups. British Bulldog, as you probably know, was basically splitting into two teams and then trying to get from one side of the playground to the other while the other kids tried to stop you with sheer brute strength. This game wasn’t exactly tailor-made for me. I was always one of the skinniest kids at school: bulbous head too big for my body, arms that joined at the neck, and a chest like a thigh. As a mate of mine said to me a few years later, ‘You’re built like a gyppo’s dog, all prick and bones.’

Pile-ups was a more elaborate game with a carefully considered set of rules. One kid lay flat on the playground, and then about thirty other kids piled on top of him. And that was it. You’d just lie there thinking stuff like ‘shouldn’t that kid’s rib-cage be on the inside of his blazer’ or ‘I wish I hadn’t got a frog in my pocket’. Then we’d all get up, dust ourselves down, and start breathing again.

The life-changing game was football. Nowadays Premiership clubs seem to be signing kids shortly after they develop fingernails, but I don’t remember kicking a ball until I was eight. By the time I got to about nine, it was every playtime, and then I’d play after school until it got dark. I continued this regime until I was sixteen, and during that whole period I never noticed any discernible improvement in my game. I played, of course, at the back, which was where shit schoolboy footballers always played. The idea is that if you try really hard and run around a lot, you can spoil it for the talented players.

Some particularly shit schoolboy footballers got so obsessed with spoiling things for the talented players that they trained to become referees. Have you ever seen a referee kick a ball? They look like they’ve never played in their lives. In truth, they have spent their childhoods stuck at the back, building up enough anger and resentment to last them into their late forties. But, regardless of all this emotional baggage, it is amazing that though they spend so much time in close proximity to a football, it still seems like an alien thing to them. In this respect they are like goalkeepers. Goalkeepers, with one or two exceptions, always look like they would be worse outfield players than any fat woman on crutches. When the ball comes to them in open play, they have to run away from it so that they have space to take a little run-up before slicing it into the crowd.

When I first started playground football at St. Hubert’s, we played on the netball court in the middle of the playground. I played football on that court morning playtime, dinnertime (there was no such thing as ‘lunch’ in the working-class West Midlands), and afternoon playtime, over a two-year period, and only ever scored one goal. One goal in two years of playground football, where the scores were often stuff like 17–15. Of course, I remember the goal in some detail. There was a thin coating of snow on the court. I was about four feet from the goal line at the far post. I stuck out my right foot and the ball went about eighteen inches inside the post. It was such an occasion that I told my mom about it that same night: ‘I’ve had a good day today. I scored a goal at school.’ Her reply will live with me forever. ‘Ooo! That was lucky.’

When you moved up to the top two years, you became eligible to play in the school team. This was my dream. I was hoping to play for the Albion when I grew up. I figured it would be a lot easier to become a professional footballer if, at the interview, I could let it slip that I’d been in the school team at junior school. It would be some sort of seal of approval. The school team at St. Hubert’s was picked by the only male teacher in the school, Mr Hartley. We were playing football in PE one day (Oh, yeah, that’s another extra three games a week that I didn’t score in) when Mr Hartley suddenly appeared. The buzz went round. All the kids were whispering that this was our chance to give him a positive image of our abilities a few months before we became eligible for the school team. Suddenly, the ball was booted high into the air by one of the opposing defenders and I ran to meet it. I don’t recall ever heading the ball before so it would have been a big thing anyway, even without the presence of Mr Hartley making it a potential crushed-butterfly moment. The ball seemed to be in the air for ages. I braced myself for the thrusting impact of my headed clearance. The ball hit me in the face and I fell over. Mr Hartley stood looking for a few seconds, and then moved on. If I hadn’t been stunned, I would have probably, as a last resort, started looking up for my halo.

Twenty years later I went to a party at my mate Tim’s house. I’d been drinking cider all day and was arseholed by the time I got there. I then started drinking the Greek Pernod-like spirit, ouzo, mixed with Tim’s home-brewed bitter. I woke up in his spare room the next morning, with his wife screaming at me. She left the room and came back with a J-cloth and a bottle of Dettol, both of which she threw at me before she stormed out again. Yes, I’d pissed the bed, and being fully clothed, my jeans were a little juicy as well. I walked downstairs, leaving the bed un-disinfected. In the kitchen I strolled straight past a slightly startled Tim and his wife and headed for the fridge. I took out the bottle of ouzo and had what my old mate Shane used to call a ‘man-sized swig’. Tim and his wife watched in horror. To be fair to them, it was 8.30 in the morning. I fully intended to explain myself, but I just needed another couple of man-sized swigs to regulate my breathing. This done, I assured them that I had not pissed the bed but, rather, sweated heavily in the night as a result of having slept fully dressed. Tim’s wife laughed in what I felt was a scornful way. She said she could smell the piss on me. I took one more man-sized swig and left in a huff. I soon realised that I was on the street, whistle wetted, but the pubs didn’t open for three and a half hours, so I walked. By now, the man-sized swigs had topped up the previous day’s excesses and I was feeling fairly poetical.

As I walked my drunken walk, I had the contented smile that one might expect from a man whose piss-soaked jeans are slowly drying off in the bright morning sunshine. Then, either by accident or design, I found myself confronted by the giant white cross of St. Hubert’s, so I thought I’d go and have a look at the old school. I stopped to lean on the railings, carefully surveying my surroundings the way sober people never do. From this vantage point I could see the dinner hall and Mrs McGee’s classroom where I spent my last year at the school. There was the top end of the playground where we played game after game of football, with ten-year-old me wondering when the late-blossoming talent that would take me through to the ranks of the professional players was going to finally emerge.

A similar thing happened to me with an enormous statue of Lucifer I’d seen in the Birmingham Art Gallery. It stood in the entrance hall with its big cock and spread wings, towering above visitors like the Colossus of Rhodes, and gave me one quite unpleasant nightmare. The last time I went to the Birmingham Art Gallery, I met Lucifer again. He’s about five feet high and stands in the corner of the tea-room. If I’d been drinking I’d say that this was what life is like. Things that seem big and important and scary and insurmountable at one stage in your life can come to look small and trivial later on. But I haven’t been drinking, so I won’t.

The very life-changing game was a variation on one of the dangerous games. It was called British Bullsnog. It was basically the same rules as British Bulldog, except the teams were boys versus girls and, rather than wrestle them to the ground, the idea was that one of the assailants would snog the captured runner. If the African tribeswoman could have seen me playing British Bullsnog, I feel she would have said, with no visible signs of emotion, ‘My work here is done,’ and then walked off, tits out, pot on head, into the distance.

Despite having a big sister, I knew nothing of girls. One day, when I was nine, I was sitting in the classroom casually telling lies. Telling lies is a commonplace amongst children, even at a Catholic school. Don’t worry, I’ve grown out of it. I was saying that I’d been to a sex shop in London – remember I’m nine – and seen mugs that consisted of a big breast with a woman’s penis for the handle. Obviously, I didn’t say ‘penis’, I said ‘Peter Panda,’ but I don’t want to confuse you just for the hell of it. Either way, a kid called Brendan soon spotted the fatal flaw in my story and pointed out that he’d seen his little sister naked and she had no Peter Panda. ‘No Peter Panda?’ I said scornfully, looking round to confirm that everyone had heard Brendan’s ridiculous story. A little girl with greasy hair confirmed that Brendan speaketh sooth. I was shocked but, more than anything, embarrassed by my obvious lack of worldly-wise sophistication. If only I’d paid more attention when I was an upside-down shepherd. The greasy-haired girl could see I was crestfallen and clearly felt sorry for me. ‘Never mind,’ she whispered, ‘I’ll show you mine at playtime, if you like.’

Lucky old Edith Piaf, who could reach middle age and still, with seeming conviction, sing that she had no regrets. If I live to a hundred, I will always beat myself up for not taking up the greasy-haired girl’s offer. And it’s not as if I had a sudden burst of Catholic morality or became afraid of the unknown, or decided that football was more important. No, I just forgot. When I saw her again, after playtime, I remembered her kind words and went over to explain my scattiness but she cut me dead and flounced off in the opposite direction. I may not have seen my first vagina but I had had my first taste of playing a game that women of all ages love to play with men. More dangerous than British Bulldog and pile-ups put together, more disheartening than football and more life-changing than Bullsnogging. Yes, it’s ‘Guess why I’m upset’. Many’s the hour I’ve spent, at parties, on public transport, even in bed, playing that fucking game.

Looking back, I suppose the greasy-haired girl felt that I had snubbed her vagina, but why couldn’t I see it the following playtime? Did she only get it out on rare occasions so I’d have to wait till the next time, whenever that might be, like it was the Halley’s Comet of the vagina world? Either way, if Mr Hartley had been going past, I wouldn’t have been picked for the relationships team either. Come to think of it, over the years, I’ve probably proved to be better at football.

As far as the incredibly life-changing games were concerned, there were several, and they helped me to find, at last, a game I was good at, in fact, several games I was good at. You’ve guessed it. They were comedy games. Pointing at someone’s chest and then, when they look down to see what you’re pointing at, dragging your finger upward, so it goes in their face. Now, that is what I call a game. I probably played that thirty times a day. In fact, I still play it now. It makes me laugh. I even had my first experience of being in a double-act. This involved perhaps the funniest joke ever. If I could meet the man (sorry, but it just couldn’t be a woman) who wrote it, I’d like to shake his hand and thank him. It’s the joke when you talk to a kid and, meanwhile, your mate crouches down on hands and knees behind him and then you push the kid over. I’ve spent hours and hours writing and re-writing gags, but I’ve never come up with anything to equal that. I would still be using it but it gets dangerous with older people and I can’t find a willing accomplice. If Tony Bennett had been up for it, it would have been a great one to pull on Prince Charles during the Royal Variety line-up. But Tony would have been fretting about his wig coming off and the whole thing would have lacked the spontaneity of the playground version.

I just had a meeting about making a documentary about me for ITV. They heard about the autobiography and they thought a Frank Skinner bio-doc might be a goer. Of course, this would be a very good advert for the book so I thought I’d go for it and I made positive noises. Then I kind of forgot about it. ITV are also planning docs on Des O’Connor and Des Lynam, both non-controversial mainstream icons, so I’m expecting a fairly straight ‘this happened and then this happened’ sort of approach. Then, today, we had a meeting about it.

In the meeting was Jon Thoday, Lee Tucker, the head of production at Avalon Television (he’s the fanatical Albion fan I bumped into at the Albion–Bolton game), and the potential director/producer of the documentary, Paul Wilmshurst. I’ve worked with Paul before on a documentary about Elvis Presley, and I think he’s really good. He’s got a quirky outlook, and has done documentaries on, among other things, a famous Mafia lawyer and the guy who wrote the cult novel The Dice Man. Paul’s in his thirties, clean and unshaven, and in his battered combat-trousers and leather jacket looks like the England cricketer Michael Atherton in reduced circumstances.

I started talking about things the film might include. I could do a sort of Unplanned audience-thing in which people could ask me questions about my life. Paul could interview my family and some people from my past and cut in bits from these interviews at suitable points. I explain the ‘Our Nora’ problem. It’s one thing to have stuff like the piss-buckets revelation in a book, but if it was on national television, it really might kill her. Mind you, I did mention it to Tony Blair on BBC1, but I didn’t really relate it to me personally.

All this throws up a distinction which hadn’t occurred to me before the meeting. Even though I’m sticking a lot of private stuff in this book, it still seems, well, private. You need to buy the book and open the book and take time to read the book, in order to get right in there. You, the reader, make an investment, financial, intellectual and time-wise. The TV viewer just presses a button. I don’t like the idea of all that intimate me just up there. like wallpaper. I know a lot of my gags are totally true and, for example, Unplanned throws up all sorts of private stuff, but it’s a kind of comedy private life. I don’t have a problem with talking about wanking or shagging, or stuff a lot of people regard as private, but family and religion, that’s something else. This, however, seems to have answered a question I posed earlier in this book. I’ll bet porn stars do refer to their genitals as their ‘private parts’.

Someone wanted to write my biography a few years back. She was a good writer with a top magazine and I was very flattered. The contract was drawn up, but when the day came to sign, I changed my mind. I just looked at the headings: Family, Pornography, Alcohol, Catholicism, and I lost my nerve. The weird thing is that I’ve probably revealed more in this book than I would have in hers, but I feel better about telling you direct. Otherwise it has to go through a filter before it reaches you, a filter that might take some stuff out and might put other stuff in. That’s why there’s no ghost-writer on this book, even though it would have freed up my days somewhat.

I’ve watched translators on television. An interviewer asks a question that I understand. A translator says something to the subject that I don’t understand. I hear the subject give his answer, which I don’t understand. The translator gives an answer. I’m showing a fuck of a lot of faith in the translator here. How do I know what’s gone on in all the foreign bits? This is how it works with biographers, and documentary makers.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s the first I’ve heard of it.’ As soon as I’d said it, I started to wonder whether the tone was, well, slightly wistful. No, no, I’d recognise this tone anywhere. It’s called irritated. Oh, dear. For some reason I’d really taken against wistful. But there’s a good example. If I was working as Paul’s interpreter, I would have translated ‘wistful’ as ‘inclined to be a tortured, self-doubt-ridden, insecure nut-case’ and this might not have been exactly what Paul meant. Anyway, I was like a dog with a bone. ‘Is that what people say, then? Frank Skinner? Is he the Jewish one or the wistful one?’ Laughter, but with a sense of unease.

Then I asked Paul to elaborate on his vision of the doc. He said it could be a bit like that Geri Halliwell doc that everyone was talking about. Of course, the reason everyone was talking about it was that Geri came out of it looking like a tragic cow. At one stage we see her going through the newspapers to see if there are any pictures of her. This got her a lot of scornful criticism. Now that’s a worry.

Whenever I pick up a tabloid, I always have a look to see if I’m in it. I even check those ‘100 Sexiest Guys’ things that appear every now and then, and I’ve never been in one of them, ever. I check the Rich List, Great TV Moments, Quotes of the Week, any old bollocks. I’ve scanned crossword magazines for my name in answers or clues, and I check those pictures of celebs in the middle of the puzzles in case it’s me. I’ll even have the occasional glance at the birthdays just in case they’ve got the date wrong. What’s the problem? A local press photographer told me that his editor instructed him to cram as many people as possible into photographs because they’ll all buy at least two copies of the paper that week. It’s human nature.

I laugh when I read about celebs moaning about the pressures of fame. They want to try forty hours in a drop-forgings factory. I have – fame’s better. Whenever a celeb tells you about how the tabloids have been hounding them, the subtext is always ‘That’s how famous I am’. I know. My ex-wife has slagged me off in the Sunday Mirror, the News of the World and the People, and I can honestly say I was genuinely hurt and upset on each occasion, but through the tears I was still thinking, ‘Two-page spread? That’s how famous I am.’

I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag but fame is actually very nice. When people ask me for an autograph, they are often very apologetic and say stuff like, ‘I know this must be a pain’ or ‘Sorry to be embarrassing’ and I say, ‘I’ll miss it when it Stops,’ and they laugh as if I’m joking. These people could be bothered to ask me to write my name on a bit of paper. They’ll probably go away and tell their friends they met me. Fucking hell, that’s brilliant, isn’t it? I meet the odd tosser, but nowhere near as many as I met before I got famous. A lot of people treated me like shit in the old days. Am I supposed to miss that?

I was listening to the radio the other day and they were talking about how footballers live an incredibly pampered life. Some woman was going on about the fact that they get driven around everywhere, someone organises their plane tickets and passports, all their meals are laid on in hotels that someone else has chosen and booked for them. I thought, ‘What’s your point?’

I’ve got a personal assistant called Jenny who organises the paying of my bills, books my holidays, handles my dry-cleaning, buys my cinema tickets, reminds me about birthdays, the lot. Well, obviously, she doesn’t do my washing and ironing. I’ve got a cleaner who does that. Incidentally, some people who have a cleaner say, ‘I’ve got a woman who does,’ but if I say that, everyone will just assume that I’m talking about anal sex.

The other day, I went for a quick lunch with Robyn, who produces my chat show and Unplanned. Afterwards, we walked up the road to get some fags from the newsagent. On the way, we met a friend of Robyn’s. They were going to look at a house somewhere. Robyn suddenly looked distressed that I was now going to the newsagent on my own. I assured her I could manage, they drove off, and I carried on up the road. I was wearing an Hawaiian shirt and bright purple trainers. I suddenly felt like an exotic bird who had escaped from his cage and who would inevitably be torn to bits by the local sparrows, provoked by his colourful plumage. I made it, but when I got back in my office, I felt like I’d been on a bit of an adventure. Pampered? Like a prize poodle. But, again, I wouldn’t want to say so on the telly.

Anyway, I thought I’d better sound a bit more positive about the doc. In any meeting, power always goes to the negative person in the room, and I don’t know that that’s very helpful. I suggested that Paul could film my great-niece’s christening. I’m going to be her godfather. He seemed unkeen. He said he was more interested in things that were ‘uncomfortable’. My alarm bells were really ringing now.

‘Well, you know,’ he said, in a tone of calm-down-Frank. ‘I imagine there’d be stuff about drinking, women, football, about your work and your work-methods.’ It reminded me of the headings in the biography that never happened. ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t want it to be a puff-piece, Frank.’ A puff-piece, of course, is media-lingo for anything in the media which is there just to promote or praise someone. They avoid all touchy subjects and dark areas. He was right, of course, that would be crap.

Back in the sixties, British comic Tony Hancock appeared on Face to Face, a sort of early television version of In the Psychiatrist’s Chair. There were a lot of deep and meaningful questions and some people say that it made Hancock become very introspective and self-analytical. I haven’t read up on him but I think, basically, he hit the bottle and topped himself. That’s no good, is it? I don’t want to watch myself on a documentary and start thinking I’m all troubled and interesting.

Obviously, some shrink-type could read this book and start going on about my relationship with my father and my need to get approval from others and my thinly disguised self-loathing. You buy the book, you can do what you like with it. Use it for a door-stop if it makes you happy. I’d actually prefer that to the psychoanalysis thing, but it’s really up to you. I’m not very bothered if people watched the doc and thought I was a bit of a mentaller, but I’m very wary of celebs who are desperate to be seen ‘warts and all’ on documentaries, like Elton John in Tantrums and Tiaras. Actually, that was probably the only ever TV doc to be ‘warts and all’ and a puff-piece.

When I first arrived at Moat Farm, I had my hair in a long fringe. Two kids from the second year, called Martin and Vincent, decided that it would be fun to call me Beatle, and generally rough me up and make me sing Beade hits and the like. Martin was a short, mouthy kid with bags under his eyes and a dark crew-cut. Vincent was fat, rosy-cheeked, and very much the brighter of the two. When I arrived in the morning or when I went out to playtime, my stomach would be knotted up with the dread of meeting Martin and Vincent. They were always arm in arm and would approach me, smiling and laughing before going into bully-mode. I had to do a Scouse accent for their entertainment. I loved showing off and entertaining kids but not when it was for all the wrong reasons. It’s a feeling I still get today, every time I do corporate entertainment.

One morning I pointed Martin and Vincent out to my mom and she warned them they’d be in trouble if they bullied me again. They looked scared and I was very relieved. The next playtime, I got a double dose for telling on them. I suppose, in reality, this lasted for a couple of months, but to the little me it seemed like a lifetime. But thank God it ended when it did. Shortly afterwards, the Beatles went into their Sergeant Pepper phase, and Martin and Vincent would have killed me because I couldn’t grow a moustache. It was a horrible time for me, but it is interesting that, in 1965, I was being forced, against my will, to live the life of a Beatle whereas, up in Liverpool, Pete Best was being tortured by exactly the opposite experience. I should think that bullying has rarely been so ‘of its time’ as it was in my case. If there are any short-haired albino kids reading this who are being forced to do Eminem numbers every playtime, they have my deepest sympathy.

As I moved up a year or two, the school bully, David, began to take an interest in me. Being bullied by the ‘school’ bully gave me a certain credibility, but it was still pretty unpleasant. David’s approach was fairly standard bullying stuff, arm up the back, Chinese burns, dead-legs, with none of the originality of Martin and Vincent’s enforced Mersey-moptop regime. But David was big and, like most big strong people, he had no sense of humour. Everything was done through narrowed eyes and bared teeth. He was really scary.

At this time, I was obsessed with Muhammad Ali. My boxing-fanatic dad plus the whole family would gather around the telly for the Ali fights, and had done since they were Clay fights. I had Ali on my wall and I used to do an impression of him. He was everything I wanted to be – funny, good-looking, and capable of beating people up. Incidentally, I met him a couple of times in the nineties. On the first occasion, he was doing a book-signing (Oh, I’ve got all that to look forward to) in Sportspages on the Charing Cross Road. He sat behind a desk with his close friend, Howard Bingham. Because Ali’s Parkinson’s Disease had made his speech very hard to understand, he was muttering to Bingham, and Bingham would converse with the punters. I turned up wearing a Muhammad Ali t-shirt and Ali was clearly very interested in this. He opened his eyes ridiculously wide like he used to do when playing the fool in his glory-days, and grabbed my shirt for a closer look before muttering something to Bingham. ‘He didn’t get any money for this one,’ Bingham explained. Ali signed my book and my shirt (it hangs in a frame in my hallway) and I left feeling like I’d seen the face of God. A few months later, I went to a theatre show about Ali’s life at the Mermaid Theatre. Both Ali and his old adversary, Henry Cooper, were there. I was drinking in the bar before when Ali suddenly appeared at my side. I turned and said something that came out as ‘Mam mamblee mooha mamali mmmmmm . . .’. I fully expected him to offer me Howard Bingham’s business card.

At the end of the play, Ali stepped up from his front-row seat and began sparring with the actor who had played him. It was an astonishing moment. Ali staggered towards the actor with everyone fearing he might fall at any moment, then, suddenly, he did an Ali shuffle and his hands became a blur. It was as if the whole Parkinson’s thing had been some terrible hoax. The whole audience was stunned and started chatting frantically about what had just happened. Afterwards in the bar, Ali and Henry Cooper were posing for photographs with the punters. I had mine taken, standing between them. I was wearing a tuxedo and bow-tie but Ali and Cooper had ignored the dress-code and gone for ordinary suits. I was so proud of this picture that I sent a copy to Nora, Terry and Keith. After a few days, I heard from Jason, Keith’s son. Having seen the picture, with me in the middle in my bow-tie, he asked in all seriousness, ‘Have you started refereeing?’

Anyway, one afternoon, in the playground, David the bully approached me and started shoving me around. Out of the blue, I did what everyone should do at least once in their life, I took on the school bully. I hadn’t really done any fighting, I wasn’t that sort of kid, but I’d seen a lot of fighting, so I started to dance. ‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ is what Ali used to say, and that’s what I did. Kids gathered around to watch and I could hear them saying stuff like, ‘Why is he bouncing around?’ and ‘He thinks he’s Cassius Clay.’ I even remember including an Ali shuffle. David was confused and maybe, dare I say it, slightly afraid. For a few minutes there, I was Ali. I could almost hear the crowd. Thus, I beat the school bully, and as I walked away a friend said, ‘I think you need to do a bit of work on your footwork.’ But no one could spoil my special moment. I looked back at David. His face suddenly looked like he had a heart and a soul, just like I did. I didn’t hate him anymore.

I was in a pub ten years later when a bloke at the bar said hello to me. It was David. He was instantly recognisable. He’d grown big and muscular and, worryingly, he had a scar on his throat which suggested that someone had slit it from ear to ear. I decided, early on, that I wasn’t going to ask him about this. I shook his hand and smiled, already thinking to myself, ‘Don’t remember the fight. For fuck’s sake don’t remember the fight.’ After about two minutes of small talk he said, ‘D’you remember when we had that fight?’

‘Yeah, you remember, you had really long nails and you sort of scratched me to pieces.’ There’s memory for you. I was definitely Muhammad Ali but he thinks I was Edward Scissorhands. Then he said, ‘I wonder who’d win if we had a fight now.’ I looked at him and wondered if I could still summon up the old Ali magic if it came to it. Before I could answer, though I don’t know what that answer would have been, an attractive woman approached us and put her arm around David. Saved by the belle. He introduced her as his girlfriend and I noticed she was pregnant. He became preoccupied with her and I took the opportunity to leave. I saw him a few more times but the subject never came up again. It spoilt things a bit, though. Special moments should end with a nice neat full-stop, not with an epilogue ten years later that just clouds the issue.

When I moved to the big school, bullying left me totally exhausted most days. Well, those first years took some catching. Yes, it’s a terrible confession but it’s true: when I got into the second year at the big school, despite my previous experiences, I started bullying. I didn’t do much physical stuff because I was still as gyppo’s dog-like as ever. Generally, we would bully in packs, with me as some sort of sinister court-jester figure. I had a nasty streak in me which I’ve tried hard to erase as I’ve got older. I suppose I would spot a psychological weakness in a kid and then concentrate on that. It’s something kids often do to each other, but when you can turn it into gags, comedy songs etc, then you can really do some damage. In my defence, my main motivation was to make my mates laugh. The ugly, the fat, the spotty were just my raw materials. Everyone took the piss out of these kids, such is the way of the world, but I found I had a natural gift for verbal bullying, comedy-style. I don’t know whether the bullied hated me more than they hated the big kids who carried out the physical element of the bullying, but it must have seemed particularly unfair to be bullied, albeit only verbally, by someone who had trouble opening crisps. At least, as I found with David, if you’re being bullied by bigger kids there seems to be some sense of the traditional about it. Eventually, the bullying gang I court-jested for took to carrying thick lengths of electrical wire which we called ‘strops’. My own particular strop was known as the ‘Black Baron’. We’d uncoil these whenever an opportunity arose and let the bullied have it across their backs, arms and legs. This was the only physical bullying I ever really took to and, although it was fun, it didn’t fire me up like the comedy stuff.

My behaviour at that time was very unpleasant in lots of aspects. At one stage, I acquired the nickname Sir Snide. I didn’t like that very much. Like my own verbal attacks, it’s the true ones that really hurt. During my whole bullying period, I guess it lasted from about twelve to fifteen, I never remember thinking back to how I felt when I was the Beatle boy, or was being terrorised by David. A couple of kids at the big school got transferred to other schools because of the bullying. I wasn’t directly involved in either of these cases, but I was a key part of the general bullying environment that existed there.

I just went away with Caroline for a weekend in Venice. This is, of course, traditionally the most romantic city on earth but the trip is a bit of a risk for me. I’ve taken three different women to Venice over the years, and I split up with all of them within three months of getting back. And these were not short fly-by-night relationships. In fact, one of them was my wife. But Caroline and me risked it. We had an idyllic smoochy ride in a gondola and sighed at the Bridge of Sighs and it was lovely. We did have one big row, about whether or not we should have flowers on the balconies at the new house, but we survived. We do argue a bit but we put it down to passion, and, goodness knows, she has a lot to put up with.

For example, I went into pun-overdrive when we got to Venice. The ruler of Venice was known as the Doge. When we learned that there was no longer a Doge of Venice living at the Doge’s palace, I sang ‘Who let the Doge out’ about fifty times before I got it out of my system. When we saw an incredibly fat woman sitting on the steps next to the Bridge of Sighs, I said that she looked so miserable because she had misheard and was expecting the Bridge of Pies. Even on the flight back, when the captain announced that if we looked out to the left, we would be able to see Luxembourg, I was soon singing ‘Pass the Duchy on the left-hand side’. (If you’re under thirty, just trust me that that’s funny, and ask your mom who ‘Musical Youth’ were.)

Caroline and me were once walking down Hampstead High Street when a girl from Greenpeace approached us for a please-join chat. I went into joker mode and after about five minutes she looked at Caroline and said, ‘How do you put up with him?’ Caroline took some imaginary cotton wool out of her ears and said, ‘Sorry?’ I pissed myself laughing. I think the Greenpeace girl got her answer.

When we got to the top class at St. Hubert’s, we had to try out for the school choir. I quite fancied being in the choir. I loved singing and as, traditionally, ninety-five per cent of the top class got selected, I had to fancy my chances. We all lined up at one end of the class and started singing ‘Soul of my Saviour’. Mrs McGee wandered up and down the line, listening closely to each kid in turn. When she came to me, she listened for a while and then put her hand on my shoulder. ‘We’re not American,’ she said. I’d blown my chance. She obviously wanted sweet, angelic children’s voices and I was trying to be Elvis.

In fact, I’ve spent most of my life trying to be Elvis. There was a time when I wouldn’t have bought an article of clothing unless I could imagine Elvis wearing it. Luckily, white flared jumpsuits were fashionable in the West Midlands right up to the late eighties. I’ve spent too much of my life with my hair swept back into a quiff, even though it doesn’t suit me because my head is shaped like a light-bulb. I’ve spent too much of my life with sideburns that start about an inch below where my hair stops, leaving a stupid gap at the top. During my last attempt at sideburns, in 1998, the make-up person on Fantasy World Cup used to colour in the gap with mascara. Whatever music I dance to, my dancing always comes out like an under-rehearsed parody of Elvis’s ‘Jailhouse Rock’ routine. Every school exercise book, pencil case, duffel bag, even my First Communion card, had ‘Elvis’ written on it.

I kept an Elvis scrapbook, forced my mom to buy his latest single, learnt the words to all his songs, and not only went and saw all the dodgy movies like Clambake, Speedway and, of course, Paradise, Hawaiian Style, but whenever the Oscars rolled around, I was outraged when Elvis didn’t get a nomination. I really believed in those movies. I really thought life was like that. I thought I could get a job as a barman or a pool-attendant (once I’d learned to swim) and then hang around the club at night until someone asked me to get up and sing a song. Then, within seconds, the whole place would be rocking, and people, instinctively clapping along, would turn to each other, smile and nod. When I left school, it wasn’t quite like that.