Frank Skinner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I went to 7 o’clock Mass in Osaka this morning, at the Cathedral of Santa Maria. As I walked in the back door with Bernie, also a papist, the first thing I noticed was a massive stained-glass window on the side wall showing St. Francis Xavier bringing Christianity to the Japanese. He stood there, in a blue robe, with his arms spread wide. At his side, but slightly behind him, was a man in full samurai-warrior gear, wearing a crucifix. The church was full of morning sunshine.

Bernie and me crossed ourselves with holy water from a massive sea-shell next to the door, and then I followed her to a pew. Dotted around the church were lots of nuns dressed in white, each one standing alone at least five or six feet from the next. I suppose they didn’t want to be distracted from their oneness with God, but it meant that in order to get to a seat, you had to pass through a sort of ‘nun slalom’.

I was glad Bernie had led the way, because it meant that the fact I’d ended up standing behind a leggy Japanese schoolgirl in a very short grey pleated skirt was purely accidental. Because, and I’m generalising here, Catholic women have a tendency to be better-looking than Protestant ones, this is a regular dilemma when attending a Catholic church. Usually, wherever I go – pubs, restaurants, football matches, public transport, crematoriums – I always like to position myself so that I have at least one attractive woman nearby who I can gawp at in a strictly non-intimidatory way, but in church this just doesn’t seem right. I have, accidentally, found myself with a good view of an attractive woman in church, and I don’t really enjoy it. I can’t help but think of Matthew 5:28, ‘But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.’ Well, that’s no good, is it? Not in a church.

Anyway, my point is that I try not to commit adultery in this way when I’m in a Catholic church. Which is a shame, really, because I’ve always thought that a Catholic church is, in fact, a fantastic place to pull girls. There’s a black girl who goes to one of my local churches who is absolutely to die for, but I’d never dare approach her in or around church, I mean if I was single, because it seems, well, improper. And yet I know that we already have one massively important thing in common. She would be one of the few girls I’ve been out with who didn’t think my Catholicism was seriously weird. At the same time, even if I saw her in another context, in a bar or something, I couldn’t go up to her and say, ‘Hello, we go to the same church,’ because modern prejudices against Christianity have forced so many of us into the closet that her friends would probably say, ‘What’s that? You go to church? You fucking weirdo. Don’t hang around with us anymore,’ and she’d hate me for exposing her. Mind you, I probably wouldn’t approach her, even if she was on her own, because I imagine that practising Catholics don’t put out. I mean, I know I do, but that’s because I’m spiritually flawed.

I’d like to add a small technical point here, Japanese schoolgirls in their school uniforms are everywhere in Japan. It’s not like in Britain, where school uniforms seem to slowly fade into street clothes as kids get to about fifteen. There are seventeen- and eighteen-year-old girls in school uniform all over the place. This is, it has to be said, a very good thing, especially in regard to socks. Many of these girls wear baggy white socks that look a bit like leg warmers. Phil, who has researched this subject, told me that the girls wear these because it makes their legs look slimmer, and that they glue them to their shins to keep them in place. This sexy-schoolgirl thing has been made worse (or is it better?) by one particular social phenomenon. Because of a Westernisation of diet in recent years, Japanese schoolgirls are much more curvy than older Japanese women. The latter tend to be often beautiful, but also very slim-hipped and flat-chested. Thus, the girls look like women and the women look like girls. I’m keeping out of it, but Japanese blokes must get very bewildered.

The schoolgirl in the pew in front had gone for the baggy white socks, but the effect was spoiled by the fact that her legs were a bit hairy. This was the first hairy Japanese woman I’d noticed. I wondered if, maybe, she was a feminist. But what would a feminist be doing in a Catholic church? In fact, this poor girl had got it bad. She even had thick black hairs coming out of the collar of her skimpy white cardigan. And when she turned to the side, I could see that she also had sideburns, and stubble, and a wig, and was a bloke. I whispered to Bernie, ‘This schoolgirl is a bloke,’ but she didn’t seem at all bothered. I think she was trying hard to be all grown-up and broad-minded about it, but I was really shocked. Thank God I hadn’t committed adultery on this occasion. It would have been a double whammy.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t have anything against blokes dressing up in women’s clothes if that’s what they like, but a middle-aged man in a schoolgirl uniform? In church? Maybe he had in mind Matthew 18:3: ‘Verily, I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.’

Then it came to the bidding prayers. These are prayers in which the congregation join together to pray for others: the heads of the church, the poor, the sick, and so on. The first of these was read by a nun, in Japanese of course, but there was a pamphlet which had the prayers translated into English. Her prayer was ‘Send messengers of love and compassion to countries suffering from drought and hunger, into slum areas, and among the poor and neglected.’ And we all replied, ‘Lord, your kingdom come.’ Then an old lady read a prayer, ‘Send messengers of peace into army barracks, weapons factories and rocket warehouses, strongholds of rebels and private armies. And so we pray.’ Amidst the response, I thought, ‘Wow! That’s what I call a prayer.’

Then the hairy transvestite spoke. I stood, mouth slightly open, as a middle-aged man in a schoolgirl uniform offered, in a voice deeper than mine, this prayer to God: ‘Lord, send messengers of tenderness to the dead-end streets, the furnished or unfurnished rooms of the lonely, and the attics of the abandoned in our cities. And so we pray.’ My ‘Lord, your kingdom come’ was said with a tightening throat. I imagined him, lonely in his furnished or unfurnished room, a figure of fun to most people, but embraced by this small Catholic community happy to encourage his active participation in the Mass, regardless of his bizarre appearance. I felt humbled and slightly ashamed. I suppose I had dismissed him as a freak, but he was, it seemed to me now, a brave and very honest man.

Japan is eight hours ahead of Britain, so when you’re next out, living it up, at eleven on a Saturday night, remember that, in a Catholic church in Osaka, there’s a middle-aged man in a schoolgirl uniform and wig, listening attentively amidst the whirr of electric fans to the word of God, and offering up his prayers for the lonely and the abandoned.

Malcolm had got me a second gig. This was an amazing thing in itself, but there were two things about it that made it even more amazing. Firstly, it was back at the Portland Club, and secondly, I was getting paid. Fifty quid for half an hour. I was to supply the comedy for the club’s New Year’s Eve Extravaganza. After my grim debut at the same venue, I decided that I would write a completely new set, and even chuck in a few old mainstream gags to get the audience on my side. I was glad I was going back to the Portland. It was like getting back on the horse that had thrown me. It would exorcise the devils that still lingered after December 9th.

When Malcolm and me arrived on New Year’s Eve, the party was already in full swing. All the audience, which ranged from twelve-year-olds to old-age pensioners, wore paper hats and blew little cardboard trumpets that made a high-pitched shriek. The DJ was playing sixties classics and everybody looked like they were up for a good time. I had learned a lot from my first gig. Now it was time to put those lessons into practice.

I stood in the wings and listened as the DJ faded out Herman’s Hermits’ ‘I’m into Something Good’ and told the audience that I was a ‘very funny local lad’. Then, in a much louder voice, he said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Chris Collins,’ and I bounded forth, on to the stage, to much applause and cheering. I went straight into my brand new opening gag: ‘I bought my girlfriend a lovely engagement ring for Christmas, but she dropped it on the floor and the dog ate it. And we’ve been just going through the motions ever since.’

How quickly an audience can turn from summer to autumn. There was mainly silence and some groans. Not just casual groans, but groans of profound disappointment and indignation. I hurried on to the second lamppost. ‘The manager told me to keep it short and sweet tonight, so I’ve spent the last half hour sitting in a bath full of ice-cream.’ Silence, except for a couple of cardboard trumpets. No groans. This was good. I was on an upward curve, but the street was still very dark. I decided to try and engage the audience on a more personal level. I turned to a bloke at a table near the front. ‘Just think, mate,’ I said, ‘in an hour’s time, it’ll be 1988. Doesn’t time fly when you’re going bald.’ I think he said, ‘Fuck off,’ but I couldn’t hear him over the shrill chorus of the now-deafening cardboard horn section. I looked into the wings. Malcolm, the DJ, and the manager of the club, were standing, shoulder-to-shoulder, frantically gesturing me towards them and mouthing ‘Come off’ with a look of desperation in their eyes. I turned back to the audience. The tenor trumpets had been joined by a baritone chorus of booing.

I could just make out an ‘Oh no we won’t’ over the booing and trumpeting. I looked into the wings again. Three grown men had passed through asking, continued through pleading, and had now reached begging. They really wanted me to come off. I turned back to the crowd. A little frail old woman stood at the front of the stage. She looked up at me, shook her head in disbelief, and then, slowly and shakily, made her way to the toilet. ‘Well,’ I said, still trying to get the crowd on my side, ‘I don’t think she’ll see another strawberry season.’

I had to hang around in the bar to get my fifty quid. I’d decided against joining in with the ‘Auld Lang Syne’. These people were old acquaintances that I really felt should ‘be forgot’ as soon as was humanly possible. As I stood there, with people pointing at me and sniggering, and that was just Malcolm, a young girl of about eleven came over and said, ‘Excuse me, I thought you was alright but my dad thought you was shit.’ It was my first-ever review.

We were two people pulled apart by love and rage. Even as she screamed at me I noticed how beautiful she was. The argument, as usual, was about almost nothing. She told me that earlier in the week she had been chatted up by Jerry Springer, which pissed me off. And I told her that, coincidentally, he had chatted up my previous girlfriend, which pissed Caroline off. But, of course, that’s not really what it was about. For the last six months, we haven’t needed much to start a row. In fact, ‘start a row’ isn’t quite the right phrase. It’s been like one long row that never got switched off. We just pressed the pause-button, so it was easy to resume at any moment. We had a love like cancer. The more it grew, the more pain and suffering it caused. But it was love, and I miss her already.

So now I’m taking down photos from the cork-board, removing sweet messages from the fridge, and pulling knives out of the wall, making my flat look like it never knew her. I’ve even tuned my radio-alarm into another station. Hearing her voice as I lie in bed would be too much. We’d been together nearly a year. It doesn’t sound that long, but I can’t remember how it feels without her. Well, I’ll soon find out.

There was a pub on the Hagley Road, not far from the Birmingham Oratory, called The Ivy Bush. On one Saturday every month, its upstairs room was the home of the ‘Ha Bloody Ha Comedy Club’. It specialised in alternative comedy and attracted a young, hip audience of students, ex-students, and generally broad-minded Brummies. Malcolm got me an unpaid ten-minute slot there in the January of ’88.

I decided I needed a completely new image. I was very skinny at the time as a result of running eight miles a day, and so I got some little, round National Health specs, incorporated my guitar into the act, and billed myself as ‘The Rockabilly Charles Hawtrey’. (You know, that skinny guy with the glasses in all the Carry On films.) When I turned up that Saturday night, the room was absolutely heaving. I was on just before the interval. I walked up to the microphone, looked at the crowd, and felt totally at home.

‘I took my driving test this week. I had a really polite examiner, which, to be honest, confused me a bit. Instead of just telling me what to do, like my instructor does, he said stuff like, “Would you like to turn left here, Mr Collins?” Well, I thought it was optional. (Laugh.) He said, “Would you like to turn left here, Mr Collins?” and I said (miming as if to turn left and then thinking better of it), “No, I don’t think so. (Big laugh.) There’s a bit of a nasty junction down the bottom, there. (Laugh.) I nearly killed some fucker last week.” (Laugh.)

Oh, joy of joys. They were laughing. They were really laughing. I felt my confidence rise up like one of those massive waves that big-time surfers ride. I was a comedian. I wasn’t getting paid and I was only doing ten minutes, but I was a comedian. Anyone who doubted that only had to listen. During the interval, people were coming up and saying how much they liked my stuff. I was so happy.

A few days later, I was in a club in Moseley when I noticed a really stunning woman, skinny but with big tits, looking at me and smiling. Eventually, like after about forty seconds, I went over. ‘I saw you at The Ivy Bush last Saturday,’ she said. ‘I suppose you get fed up of people telling you this, but you’re brilliant.’

My publisher asked me to put in something about love. This worries me, talking about ‘love’. Pop singers do it all the time, usually without even noticing because they’re concentrating on the tune and making decisions about their next sensual body-shape. Comedians are supposed to be above that sort of thing. You remember those ‘Love is . . .’ cartoons that were always stuff like ‘Love is . . . buying her flowers for no reason’? I was asked to do one once, for a Valentine’s Day something-or-other. Mine was ‘Love is . . . just about the only four-letter word I don’t use during sex’. It’s my job to undermine all that single-red-rose, teddy-bear-in-a-’I-Heart-You’ t-shirt bullshit. And to really talk about love, I mean properly, in terms like you don’t get at the card shop, well, that’s for novelists and poets, not for comics. Comedians are supposed to be below that sort of thing.

Despite all this, because my publisher is so keen on the idea, I’m going to give it a go. On Love. I once found an old diary of mine from the eighties. There was only one entry. On January 3rd it said, in a version of my handwriting that suggested the intervention of drink, ‘There can be no true love without the fear of losing.’ I don’t remember what caused me to write this, but I still think it’s true. As soon as that fear subsides, there is a short period of bliss, steadily undermined by complacency and ordinariness. How long can you sit atop a mountain before you start to miss the climb?

Some people ask me why I bother. I’m on telly, why don’t I stay single and free and dine only on fresh meat? Of course that has its thrills. Not knowing what you’re going to see at the unpeeling of underwear is breathtakingly exciting, feeling different lips against your skin, hearing a different sigh, smelling a different smell, tasting a different taste.

But what about the shared moments you re-live together, over and over, and the utterly unhelpful hot drinks you make when they’re ill, and the way your mouth opens slightly when you hear them fumbling for keys and know they’ll soon walk through the door, and the way you say ‘Let’s put the light off. We can still talk’, and you both know you’ll be asleep in thirty seconds? What about all that? What about knowing what her lips will feel like against your skin, and aching in anticipation of it? What about fucking someone, quick and hard, in a hotel toilet and desperately caring about them at the same time. That’s what love is, but it doesn’t fit on a teddy-bear’s t-shirt. And even as I write, I can’t remember how all that fades, or what it feels like when you gradually become aware that the shadows are lengthening. I know it feels bad enough to make me pretend it’s not happening, but it’s not shocking and sharp like a sudden fall. Either way, in my experience, it ends.

Malcolm decided I should try my act in London, so he booked a weekend of ‘open spots’ for me. All ten minutes, all unpaid. On the Friday night, I drove down from Birmingham after college and did a gig in a club in Notting Hill, run by Tony Allen, an alternative comedy legend. He had been on the bill the night the Comedy Store opened, and was known as The Godfather. He was very nice to me but I didn’t go very well. After the gig, because I didn’t know anyone in London and couldn’t afford a hotel, I drove till I found a quiet street and slept, or at least lay with my eyes shut, in my Vauxhall Viva.

The following night I did a club called Drummond’s, near Regent’s Park, run by a bloke called Ken Ellis, who had done a lot of TV work with Noel Edmonds. There were about twelve people in the audience and, as the night slowly progressed, one after another, they went up on stage and did a spot. It turned out that only five of the people there were actually paying punters. Again I didn’t go very well. After the gig, I drove to another quiet street and once again laid down my weary head in the Vauxhall Viva.

On the Sunday, I drove to Camden and bought a very fine brown-leather flying jacket with the fifty quid I had been paid for New Year’s Eve. I reckon I could have got the bloke to go as low as forty quid, but I was very keen to spend my exact fee on the jacket. I needed to feel something warm and lovely had come out of that terrible experience. Obviously, it wasn’t as warm and lovely as what had come out of my Ivy Bush gig, but then the jacket didn’t give me a sexually transmitted disease.

On the Sunday evening, I had my last gig of the weekend, at a club near to the Blackwall Tunnel. The club was called The Tunnel, and when I was on the London comedy circuit, everybody had a terrible tale to tell about it. This is mine. The Tunnel was run and compered by a comic called Malcolm Hardee. Yes, the same bloke who tipped me off about This is Your Life, ten years later. He was a chubby, affable bloke with thick horn-rimmed specs and greasy black hair. He usually wore a scruffy old suit covered in cigarette burns and beer-stains. Malcolm always said that he had the second biggest testicles in showbiz, second only, he once told me, to Jenny Agutter’s dad’s. Well, I never saw Mr Agutter’s, but Malcolm’s were enormous. I know, because he used to get them out on stage, fold his penis into a sort of nose, and do a fabulous impression of General Charles de Gaulle. On that fateful Sunday night at The Tunnel, Malcolm closed the show by having a piss from the front of the stage. It was that kind of club. But the real star of The Tunnel was the crowd, or, more precisely, that part of the crowd that did the heckling. It was the heckling that brought in the people, not the acts.

For example, if a comedian called Jackson was having a bad time, the crowd would start calling ‘Cab for Jackson’ till he got off. Sometimes, the heckling didn’t even require words. Comics would get hummed off. The whole crowd would start humming loudly until the poor devil would just give up and walk offstage. Then Malcolm would come on and say something along the lines of ‘Well, he was shit. Nice bloke but shit. That bloke who was on earlier and went very well, he’s a cunt.’

They say that Jim Tavare, a comic who was also to be part of that plan to tip me off about This is Your Life, once opened his act at The Tunnel by saying, ‘Hello. I’m a schizophrenic,’ and someone shouted, ‘Fuck off, both of you . . .’ Anyone could die at The Tunnel, and anyone did. Every comic I had spoken to that weekend had warned me about it.

I had one routine that had been going relatively well. It was about Skippy the bush kangaroo. Yes, I was. still flogging the kids’ telly theme. The routine was fairly standard stuff, centred around the fact that Sonny Hammond, the little kid who was Skippy’s best mate, could understand everything Skippy said even though the only noise the kangaroo made was ‘Tut, tut, tut, tut, tut’. This gave me a chance to do my Aussie accent and a bit of kangaroo miming. Here’s kind of how the routine went:

‘Ooo! What’s that strange wheezing, slithering sound? Oh, it’s you, Flip.’ I then stuck in another elaborate mime: Australian schoolboy picks up slippery, wriggling dolphin. After much struggling, I thrust my index finger down the air-hole on top of his imaginary head, to keep him still. ‘They hate that,’ I explained. Then, at last:

Malcolm had entered me for a talent contest at a place called the Phoenix Club in Cannock. It was a small, dingy place, but I was impressed by the fact that the front of the bar was covered in fake leopardskin. It gave the place a sort of a Vegas feel. I suppose there were about forty punters in there, all eager to see the stars of tomorrow. The winner would go through to the Grand Final, in Wolverhampton. The show was hosted by a chunky comic stroke singer, who was billed on the poster as Marty Miller, ‘The man with the golden voice’. He opened the show with a light operatic number, which I think was Renee and Renata’s ‘Save Your Love’, told a few quick gags and then brought on the first of the turns. The act before me was a big fat woman who sang ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’, looking like some sort of chiffon mountain. No one seemed to mind that another woman, three acts earlier, had sung the same song. I went on and did ten minutes and went pretty well. By now I was writing new stuff every day. The obsession was starting to kick in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was, to be fair, my only blank sheet of the run, but my record attendance was only twelve, and over the two weeks I averaged about four. The show before me in that space was a kids’ show. They got two people in during the whole week’s run, and they were close friends of the cast. Every day, when I arrived, they’d be sitting around in clown outfits and jolly-face make-up, moaning about how much money they were losing and trying to work out how the rot could be stopped. It couldn’t.

I got two reviews during my two-week run. A newspaper called Review ’88 said, ‘He is a very ordinary, lad-next-door type of character, with a fairly sound repertoire of jokes, but he desperately needed an atmosphere to get himself and the audience going – something which a dingy bar upstairs in the Calton Studios doesn’t provide at one o’clock in the afternoon. Stick him in the corner of a busy pub, heaving with drunken revellers, and I’m sure he would go down a storm.’

And the Festival Times said, ‘His inexperience as a performer lets him down slightly. He never manages to move far enough away from the nice bloke approach to bring out the best in his material. He’s worth watching though, and with a bit more experience and slightly bigger audiences, he could be very good indeed.’ Not bad for an hour-long show from someone who’d only been doing comedy for nine months. Meanwhile, the ‘nice bloke approach’ was about to go out of the window. The Students’ Union building at Edinburgh University had a venue known as the Fringe Club. Acts of all types, musicians, poets, comics, would go there and do a bit of their Edinburgh show for free, as a sort of a taster so that people who liked it would go and pay to see the full show at a later date. The crowd could be very horrible, pouring beer on the acts from above, throwing paper aeroplanes, and generally being abusive.

When I turned up for my spot, that’s what they were like. Acts were leaving the stage in a state of shock. I was shitting myself. As it got to my turn, I could hardly breathe, I was so scared. Then, thank God, that which I like to call my ‘Oh, fuck it’ factor kicked in. I asked a friend for a cigarette, I hadn’t had one since I’d stopped drinking, and walked on stage with an expression not a million miles away from the one that Jack Nicholson had when he chopped down that door in The Shining. Though, I say it myself, I was fuckin’ unstoppable. I was belting out my usual stuff with a swagger that gave it new life, improvising, having a go at people in the crowd and dealing with hecklers like I’d been doing it for years. I wanted to be a comic, and these fuckers weren’t going to get in my way. And after a while, I realised they didn’t want to, they just wanted to hear me being funny. I fucking stormed it, got my first-ever encore and left the stage a new man. I had found my point of view: Mouthy Brummie, who couldn’t give a fuck. It was a slightly distorted version of my personality, but I can’t say it was a totally false one.

I’m worried you’re missing the journal bits. I figured that now I’ve actually become a comic in the story, you wouldn’t need my regular showbiz injections to keep your interest. I know playing to zero people in a bar in Edinburgh isn’t, strictly speaking, what you’d call ‘showbiz’, but bear with me and we’ll see how it goes. To be honest, I’m worried that I took too long to get you to this point, too much wilderness years and not enough razzmatazz. Oh, fuck it. You might as well finish it now you’ve come this far.

When I got back from Edinburgh, I found that my Equity membership had come through. An Equity card was still quite a prestige thing in those days, but there was one problem. I had to change my name. There was already a Chris Collins in Equity, a northern club singer, if I remember rightly, and they didn’t allow two members to have the same name. So, just as I was starting to think Chris Collins was finally becoming a comedian, I had to stick him in a drawer and find a new identity.

To be honest, this was not such a big deal to me. My parents, for some weird reason, always called us kids by our second names. At school I was known as Chris, my first name, because that was the name on the register. So when mates called for me, they’d say to whichever of my family opened the door, ‘Is Chris in?’ and the answer would be, ‘Yeah, I’ll call him. GRAHAM!’ So another name here or there didn’t make much difference. The question was, what name should I choose?

Then it hit me. When I was a kid, my dad was the captain of a local dominoes team (we were a very sporting family). Every week I’d watch him take a load of names, written on little bits of white card, from an old Strepsils tin, and pick his team. There was one name that always stuck in my mind. I used to go on to my dad about how much I liked it, but I’m sure he just thought it was little kid’s nonsense. Now was my chance to take that name for my own. Thus, I became Frank Skinner. I’ll never know why the name fascinated me so much when I was a child, but I’ve still got the tin, and the bits of white card.

Oh, for goodness’ sake. I’ve got to stop being so bloody melodramatic about my split-up. I’m sorry, it’s just that I’m at that odd, ‘What do I do now?’ stage that people go through when they’re immediately post-relationship. I just feel like a bit of a Billy No-Bird. But I’m desperately trying to avoid all those predictable things that just-got-single people do, stuff like joining a gym, phoning up your exes, and wanking so much that your cock drops off. Anyway, I won’t mention it again. Back to the name-change.

Malcolm suggested I could run a comedy workshop at the college on Monday nights. If we could get a dozen people who wanted to be comics, and give them the benefit of my massive experience, then we could finish the course with a showcase performance, hosted by me and helped out by a couple of pros from the London circuit. He’d got the idea from a play he’d seen, Comedians by Trevor Griffiths, but the difference was that, in the play, the bloke who ran the workshop had been doing comedy for about thirty years. Our version was more a case of the near-sighted leading the blind. I justified my role as comedy-sensei by telling myself that these hopefuls would be better off with someone who could still remember his first, faltering steps into comedy, rather than someone who had left his early days far behind him. I mean, I’d be shit at running a comedy workshop now. If anyone showed promise, my advice would be ‘Do a couple of eighty-date tours and then get your own chat show.’ Hopeless.

Anyway, we advertised the course and the response was really good, not only from potential students, but also from the media. All the local papers and telly were interested, and even the Guardian wanted to come and watch a workshop in action. We filled up the twelve places straight away, each of them paying £31 for the privilege. The theory was that stand-up is made particularly difficult by the fact that you have to do all your rehearsals in public. Actors have a few weeks, locked away with a director, to get it right before they show their stuff to a paying audience. This gives them the chance to leave a lot of the shit in the rehearsal room. The comic just walks out there and does it, and if it goes badly it’s kind of awkward to ask the audience for a de-briefing.

Then, on the Saturday morning before the course was due to start, I picked up a nasty injury whilst washing my hair. I was leaning over the sink in the communal bathroom at my bedsit in Ravenhurst Road, when my back went. I mean really went. I was holding on to the sink to keep upright, and the shampoo was running down into my eyes and mouth. Lisa, who had moved in a few weeks earlier, mainly because there was no room for her at her mom’s new place, just stood and looked at me. Four hours later, I was lying on the floor of my room, full of pain-killers, watching Grandstand. There was a sort of a newsflash. Apparently there’d been a bit of trouble at the Liverpool–Forest Cup semi-final at Hillsborough. I watched, still in agony, as the commentary team gradually realised that people were dying. Bodies were being carried on advertising hoardings, and laid on the pitch. Any human being that watched it would have been moved, but for a football fan, it was inexpressible. It was the first time I’d cried for years. But this was to be a big week for crying.

The next day, a couple of friends of our Nora’s turned up at the door. (I didn’t have a phone.) My mom had been taken to hospital. It sounded serious. My mate Paul drove me there. It was the hospital where my mom had given birth to me, thirty-two years earlier. The nurses gave me some injections for my back, and a walking stick. For five days, as the country was wrapped up in the aftermath of Hillsborough, I watched my mother slowly die. I arrived, each day, with my pockets full of Hubba Bubba bubble gum. If I thought I was going to break down, I just shoved a couple of pieces in my mouth and breathed through my nose, and it went away. I didn’t want to cry in front of her, or my dad, for that matter. I did cry at home, suddenly, with no warning, mid-meal. Poor Lisa, she looked at me in shock with tears dripping off my chin and food falling out of my mouth. She just didn’t know what to do.

My dad wouldn’t accept that all this was happening. He kept saying that she’d pull through. I sat at my mom’s bedside, remembering all my childhood hugs and goodnight kisses. I held her hand and leaned in towards her. She told me that she loved me, and I told her that I loved her. I had lots more to say, but I felt like she knew anyway. There was an Indian doctor there and my dad said to him, ‘Hey, do you know who this is? It’s Frank Skinner.’ Of course, the doctor had no idea what he was talking about. I had only just got around to telling my parents about my comedy thing. I never told them anything much about my life after I moved out. They didn’t even know about Lisa, the woman I was living with, until I turned up with her at my mom’s deathbed. They didn’t know that I’d gone back to the Church. I wanted to be all independent and free. But I didn’t want this.

Then on Thursday, April 19th, I watched the priest read the last rites, and she was gone. I leaned over for one last kiss. The pain in my back didn’t seem very important now. I kissed her soft, warm face. I recognised the familiar feel of it against my own. All my life, I had associated that kiss, that soft cheek, with love and caring and security. All my life. I touched her hair and looked at her face for the last time. And then I hobbled out of the room.

The comedy workshop was quite a hit. The group were an incredibly varied lot. There was Tom, a fifty-nine-year-old ex-brewery worker who told comical stories about the war and wanted to specialise in doing old people’s homes; Ron, a retired British Leyland foreman who wrote Stanley Holloway-type monologues, including one about a haunted house that had about seven puns on the word ‘ghoulies’; Suzanne, a busty club-singer who talked about the horrors of marriage; Terry, a trendy systems analyst from Land-Rover, who did mainly politics and PMT; and Evo, who developed a special-needs-type character called Norman.

Evo, six-foot-three and sixteen stone, did a few open spots as Norman. He would turn up in character, with bad clothes, unnerving stare, and mysterious carrier-bag, and genuinely scare the punters before he went on. He then dumped the character-comedy, became a working magician, and now makes a balloon-animal second to none. Shame about Norman, though. A special-needs magic act is something I would pay to see.

I have no idea what happened to the rest of them, but week after week, they turned up, did their stuff, and talked comedy. The showcase was, as you might imagine, a bit of a curate’s egg. Malcolm Hardee, one of the London special guests, made the audience squirm with guilt when he told them that Tom, who had just gone down quite badly, was dying of cancer. It was a complete lie. But one very interesting thing happened during that workshops period. One night, out of the blue, Jasper Carrot turned up. Apparently he’d met the college principal on a train, and the conversation had turned to the comedy workshops. The idea had fascinated Jasper, so he made the forty-five-minute drive and dropped in to check it out. He stayed for about three and a half hours, listened to all twelve acts, and offered advice and encouragement to all of them. I decided that night that, if I ever got to be a top TV comic, I’d remember my roots and try to be a nice bloke like Jasper. Oh, fuck it.

A new alternative comedy club had started in Birmingham. It was called the 4-X Cabaret, named after the sponsors, Castlemaine 4-X lager. It took place on Thursday nights in, inevitably, a room over a pub: the Hare and Hounds in King’s Heath. The show was hosted by the same double act who’d run and hosted the club in the Ivy Bush, where I’d done my third-ever gig and pulled the skinny bird with the big tits and the venereal disease. They were a nice pair (the double act, I mean), but they didn’t have much time to write new stuff together, so the audience, many of whom were regular attenders, soon got a bit over-familiar with their material.

I got booked to do the 4-X and had a bit of a stormer, so much so that the brewery phoned Malcolm and asked him if he’d like to run the club with me as the regular host. Thus began one of the happiest spells of my comedy career. I’ve won awards, had hit TV shows, and got laid in the changing room at Bloomingdale’s in New York, but none of these were quite as joyous as the twenty months I spent hosting the 4-X Cabaret. If I could ever get across, in a TV show, the specialness that permeated those 4-X nights, I’d be the highest-paid . . . oh . . . well, anyway, I’d be more successful than I am now.

Of course, you couldn’t do it. One of the great things about the 4-X was that it was profoundly local. I used to do gags about Bearwood Fruit Market, the mad bloke with the long scarf who hung around the Hagley Road, and the nearby chipshop that sold bright-orange chips. I wrote more exportable material as well, but I found the fact that I put so much effort into writing gags I knew I couldn’t use anywhere else in the world was incredibly liberating. We didn’t need London or telly, it was fuckin’ party-time every week, and most of us lived close enough to walk home afterwards. I used to get so adrenalined-up at the gigs that when I got home, I’d watch old boxing videos into the early hours just to bring me down slowly. Because King’s Heath sold out its two-hundred-seat capacity every week, we opened a second 4-X club, at the three-hundred-seater Bear Tavern in Bearwood on Wednesday nights, and that sold out as well. So then we took the show to the Fleece and Firkin in Bristol on Tuesdays for more wild nights. There was no holding us. Malcolm started a fourth club called Pillar Talk at Cheltenham Town Hall on Monday nights. It was another smash.

So this was my schedule: Monday – Cheltenham, Tuesday – Bristol, Wednesday – Bearwood, Thursday – King’s Heath, and then, at the weekend, I would do every Friday and Saturday in London, often three or four twenty-minute sets each night, jumping on and off tube-trains and often turning up as the compere was just getting ready to introduce me. I usually did only one London gig on a Sunday. Lisa felt more confident about watching my gigs by now, but I wouldn’t say we were spending a lot of time together. Especially as I had to find the time to write half an hour of new material every week, including specially tailored bits for Birmingham, Cheltenham and Bristol.

I’m sorry. I felt that just had to be an end-of-paragraph. But it’s true. People whose houses overlooked the college playing-fields had phoned the police and said that a man was having sex with the caretaker’s goat, which was tethered there. By the time the coppers turned up it was all over, but the next day, everyone at college was talking about it and the CID had been called in. There was one obvious suspect, a local bloke who was known for being particularly weird. Let’s call him Nick. He did all his own tattoos, badly, and had a habit of jumping on a complete stranger’s back, without warning, and aggressively demanding a piggy-back. In the case of the goat, this habit had obviously got totally out of hand. The caretaker, understandably upset by the incident, said that the goat would have to be put down, because he wouldn’t want to drink her milk after she’d had sex with Nick. It says something when a man fucks a goat and people are worried about the goat catching something.

Now, the English department at Halesowen had quite a strong politically correct contingent. One woman in particular had had a bit of a go at me because I once held a door open for her. I thought this was a little extreme, but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to be seen losing a fist-fight to someone in floral leggings. I wasn’t one of these bitter anti-feminists. One of my best friends, Olga, was an extreme women’s-libber, as I still like to call them, but she also had a heart of gold and a sense of humour. This woman at college was certainly a bit short on the latter.

I’d come up against the politically correct lobby on some of my London trips and I found the whole thing a bit crap. Of course, women had taken a lot of shit over the years and some things needed to be put right, but I once got hissed at the White Horse pub in Brixton, which was, of course, full of white middle-class people, because I used the phrase ‘my girlfriend’.

The big deal for comedians on the London circuit in the late eighties was the comedy section of Time Out, a local listings magazine. Every week the comedy specialist, Malcolm Hay, would write a little profile of a circuit-comic. Every Tuesday, comedians would flick through the new edition to see if it was their turn. In late ’89, it was mine. After pointing out that I lacked originality and went for ‘easy laughs’, he closed by saying: ‘The positive reaction he got recently at the Comedy Store to a spoof quote by a reviewer about his routine (“I laughed my bollocks off”, Fatima Whitbread) was a reason for despair.’

Now who’s getting the bad review here, me or the audience? The fact was, when I hit the London circuit there were a lot of comics doing stuff about Thatcher and ecology and things, but I wasn’t interested in all that stuff. (Though I admit I did get the whole 4-X audience to dance and sing ‘Ding, dong, the witch is dead’ the night Mrs Thatcher resigned.) I liked gags about shagging and football, and, at the end of the day, so did most of the audience. Some people saw me as a backlash, but if I was, it was an accident. I was a working-class bloke from the Black Country. Why should I pretend to be anything else? In my opinion, I was definitely non-sexist and non-racist. The problem is that some people hear a topic come up and their politically correct siren goes off before they’ve actually stopped to hear how that topic is being treated. One socialist London comic described me as ‘symptomatic of the New Right’, but for fuck’s sake, I was doing nob-jokes, not invading Poland.

On Friday, January 19th, 1990, against the advice of hecklers everywhere, I finally gave up my day-job. Suddenly, I was a full-time professional comedian. That night I went to Sainsbury’s with Lisa and we combed the shelves for half-price offers and ‘eat within the next twenty minutes’ stickers. I had explained to her that things were going to be tough. I had ten gigs lined up for the last twelve days of January, and another twenty-five lined up for February. We’d probably be OK.

The 4-X gigs were going from strength to strength. We were even getting ticket touts outside. One visiting comic described it as being like a ‘Frank rally’, but most of the acts seemed to have a good time. One exception was Sean Hughes, now a regular on BBC’s Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Sean, an Irishman, was a very good stand-up, and he was booked to close the show in King’s Heath with a half-hour set. I introduced him and then wandered off into the corridor to have a fag. I was still smoking on stage at this point. I wanted to quit, but the brilliant Scottish comedy-magician, Gerry Sadowitz, a man who would sit with me in the back-bar of the Comedy Store talking comedy into the early hours, and saying very supportive things about my act, advised me against it. He reckoned that my comic timing had become reliant on the rhythm of my smoking. If I lost the ciggie, Gerry maintained, the whole thing could collapse like a house of cards.

Anyway, Sean Hughes at the 4-X. About ten minutes into his set, Sean began a bit about the IRA. Now I’d seen this routine before, and I knew that it very cleverly avoided all the pitfalls of talking about such a touchy subject, and was, in fact, really funny and not offensive. However, Birmingham, at that time, was not a good place to do IRA material. The Birmingham pub bombings in the early seventies had hit everyone very hard. It was a horrible time, and the memory lingered, as it probably will for many years to come. I had drunk in the two pubs that were blown up, and, like a lot of people, I knew it could easily have been me that night. Consequently, two blokes went off at Sean, gave him a load of abuse and, when they felt they had had their say, noisily stormed out, shoving their way past me in the corridor. Sean was understandably a bit thrown, and when he finished, although he got good applause, there was a tense atmosphere in the room. When it gets tense in a comedy club, it is the compere’s job to release the pressure-valve a bit. ‘Well,’ I said on my return to the stage, ‘what happened there? I was standing in the corridor having a fag and two blokes came past, shouting about somebody called Iris Hunt.’

The crowd at the 4-X were generally top-notch, but it could get a bit lively at times. I was doing a routine about bouncers one night, saying I resented someone in a tan-leather bomber-jacket and a red dickie-bow telling me I couldn’t come in because I wasn’t dressed properly. The massive blonde-haired bouncer from the pub downstairs, who had sneaked up to watch the show, took exception to this. He walked on stage and got me in a friendlyish bear-hug. ‘I suppose this is what Fay Wray felt like,’ I said to the crowd. There was a laugh, but they were clearly worried in case this very big man didn’t appreciate being compared to a brutish, ignorant giant ape. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘He won’t get it.’ He didn’t.

I was still getting bits of telly, guest spots on comedy shows and the like. On one occasion, I did the local debate show, Central Weekend, hosted by Nicky Campbell. I did five minutes of stand-up about a pilot who, that week, had been sucked half out of a plane when the window in the cockpit shattered. He wasn’t badly hurt. I even showed a picture of him sitting up in his hospital bed, and said that when he was fully recovered he should come and get his tunic off my satellite-dish. It was a squeaky-clean routine and it went really well but, once again, people who heard gags about a potentially touchy subject, in this case, a near air disaster, didn’t hang around to hear what was actually being said. The show got a hundred and thirty-one complaints, including one from local MP Edwina Currie, and one from the head of the airline.

During those twenty 4-X months I felt myself becoming more and more at home on stage, till the line between on and off became very blurred. When I did that first gig at the Portland Club, I thought I could just go on and be like I was with my mates in the pub and everyone would be pissing themselves. I was very wrong. So then I became Mr Please-like-me, trying far too hard to get the crowd, all five of them, on my side. After the university Fringe Club epiphany, I became Mr Fuck-you, almost resentful of the audience for having made me act like Mr Please-like-me. It was pay-back time. On stage, I was arsey and quarrelsome. Now the pendulum, having swung high in both directions, had settled back where I started. At the 4-X, I became me with my mates in the pub again, but this time it worked. I had found my point of view and it was basically just me. Me, with some of the dials turned up to ten, and others down to two, but, essentially me.

I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that I did hours and hours of compering during that 4-X period. The compere’s job is a very underrated one. I’ve been to a lot of comedy clubs where they don’t really bother with it. The bloke who runs the club will often just get up and introduce the acts with no attempt at patter or performance. Sometimes they will use a very inexperienced comic, because they come free or very cheap, to fill the compering slot. I’ve even been at places where nothing happens between acts except an offstage announcement. This all seems very wrong to me. A good compere is the bridge between the audience and the acts. He’s a bit of both and a bit of neither. At the 4-X, it was like I was out with a bunch of mates, and during the course of the evening I would introduce them to a few funny new friends I’d met in London. At the same time, I was doing material which kind of made me a bit of an act myself. But, because I’d brought these professional comics to see them, anything funny I said felt like a bit of a bonus. Often I’d go up to do a link I’d written and something would happen, or someone would say something, and I wouldn’t do any material at all, just improvise stuff around this new theme.

All this gave me the confidence to mess about on stage, and developed in me the need to talk to the crowd, to engage them. Stand-up is not a spectator sport, it’s a participation event. The audience, indisputably, is a crucial part of the evening. If you watch a dress-rehearsal for a play, or a band sound-checking, it’s not very different from what you get when there’s an audience there. Stand-up doesn’t work that way. The crowd is everything. If any young stand-up comes up to me and says, ‘How do I get better?’ (OK, maybe it’s happened three times in ten years), I say, ‘Compering.’ Unless, of course, they already have loads of stage presence and good material, in which case I say, ‘Quit now, you’ll never make it.’

Don’t get me wrong, I’m hardly the comedy oracle, all I’m saying is that my personal comedy journey to my current position (which I would describe, without being too ‘Aw! Shucks’ about it, as ‘Comic who is fairly well-known, and who some people think is funny and some people think is alright, but not as good as Blah! Blah!’) was massively influenced by compering all those 4-X Cabarets.

In March of 1990, Malcolm got a phone call from Sandy Gort, Steve Coogan’s manager. Steve was a fairly well-known impressionist, who’d done a lot of the voices on ITV’s satirical puppet-show, Spitting Image. He was going to do a show in Edinburgh that August, and he wanted me to be his support act. Furthermore, there would be a national tour to follow, sponsored by Cutty Sark whisky. It all sounded great but there was a slight hitch. A woman called Judith, who worked at the Pleasance Theatre where we were to perform, had heard tell of my act and said, ‘Frank Skinner will play the Pleasance over my dead body.’ As I didn’t walk around much on stage, this wouldn’t really have been a big problem. If you’re gonna make an omelette . . . Anyway, in the end she relented and the deal was done.

Meanwhile, I was still doing the London clubs at the weekend, sleeping on people’s floors and sofas, friends I’d met on the circuit. One comic who gave me a regular settee-slot at his place in Islington was a guy called Patrick Marber. Patrick was one of the circuit’s top turns, with an act which had a lot to do with a suitcase of silly props like plastic ears and toy trumpets, and a lot to do with Patrick’s ability to improvise. When I virtually stopped doing the circuit in 1992, I more or less lost touch with him. The next thing I knew, he’d become a big-time playwright, director and actor, in the West End, at the National Theatre, and on Broadway. I wonder who sleeps on his settee nowadays.

One Saturday night I was at the Red Rose Club and the performance-poet from Manchester, Henry Normal, was on the bill. Henry seemed a bit edgy in the dressing room. He explained that he had been having talks with Channel Four about doing a comedy show set in a theatre, a bit like the Muppet Show but with humans, so you’d get real acts on stage and a sort of sit-com going on behind the scenes. The saucy blonde-bombshell comedienne Jenny Eclair was up for a regular part in it as well.

The woman from Channel Four was in the audience that night and Henry was feeling nervous. At the time, there were always dressing-room conversations going on about TV ideas and projects. Television companies were really getting into the alternative comedy thing. I think they liked the idea that when they hired a comic they automatically hired a writer as well, and that his gags would tend to be ‘his gags’, not ones that he’d heard someone else do at a working men’s club in Salford.

I loved comedy-circuit dressing rooms. Once you established yourself as a circuit regular, they were a joy to inhabit. Because the same comics did so many gigs, there were always people on the bill who you knew really well. Jack Dee would come in, his motorbike helmet under his arm, having sped from a gig on one side of London to a gig on the other. He was all jeans-and-jumper in those days, no flashy suits, but already dead-pan and dead funny. Eddie Izzard might be having an incredibly intense conversation with another comic about why some rooms suited comedy and some didn’t. Steve Coogan would be telling someone how much his designer sport-jacket had cost, and getting all excited about a new pair of tan-leather driving gloves he’d seen in Big Fast Car magazine.

It was a real comedy community, with everyone having stories about weird gigs in weird places like, for example, Bungay, where Malcolm Hardee, I think just to be awkward, had started a club. This particular line of chat would usually end up with someone quoting that part of the comic’s code that says, ‘Never do a gig in a place where they still point at aeroplanes.’ Then there’d be stories of student gigs, getting sucked-off by an Economics fresher in a phone-box in Bolton, or seeing a stage-hypnotist make a female volunteer describe having anal sex, in front of 700 students at a May Ball in Scodand. It was heaven. And every now and then, one of us would get up to do his twenty minutes, and the ‘Have a good one’s would echo around the room, or an act would return from the stage and everyone would ask, ‘How was it?’ In the tiny Comedy Store dressing room, the trivia quizzes and anecdotes would occasionally be punctuated by someone getting up to have a piss in the sink in the corner of the room.

Anyway, back at the Red Rose, Henry said, ‘Have a good one,’ and I walked towards the stage and, boy, did I have a good one. Though I say it myself, it was an absolute belter. Within a few days, Malcolm had a phone-call. How would Frank like to be a regular character, and co-write an eight-part Channel Four series, with Henry Normal and Jenny Eclair?

I’d been a bit worried about my dad. He’d never really got over my mom dying and I’d watched him slowly crumbling since she’d gone. There was no more searching for timber, no more trays of seedlings. His garden, for the first time in my life, was overgrown and neglected. The only gardening he did now was tending my mother’s grave, which he visited every day.

He had always been a robust, barrel-chested bloke who liked to have a good drink before deciding whether he fancied a punch-up or a sing-song. Even in his sixties, I remember him coming home one night, after a few pints, with his right hand swollen and bruised. I asked him what had happened. He explained that a bloke had approached him and asked if he knew the time, so my dad hit him so hard in the face that the bloke went over a garden wall. This, to me, seemed an overreaction. I asked him why he’d responded so violently to someone asking him the time, but all he said, enigmatically, was, ‘Ah, I’ve seen that trick before.’ I wondered what kind of conversation was going on at the other bloke’s place.

One Sunday afternoon, Lisa and me turned up at my dad’s house for tea and a chat. It was about two in the afternoon. As we walked towards the front door, I noticed that the Sunday Mirror was still in the letter-box. I felt my stomach go into a knot. I rang the bell over and over but there was no answer. I walked across the lawn and looked through the front bay-window. I could see my dad, dressed in a suit and tie, sitting on the settee. ‘Please God,’ I whispered, ‘let him just be sleeping.’ My brother Keith lived just around the corner, so we went to his house. I don’t know exactly why. I suppose I needed some family with me. I told Keith what had happened and the three of us walked back to my dad’s. Keith and me went around the back of the house and decided to break a window. As I was the smallest, I clambered in. Keith distinctly told me to walk straight down the hall past the door leading to the front room where I knew my dad was sitting, and let him in. Then we would go into the front room together. I jumped down from the window and was in the kitchen. My heart was beating hard. I started to walk down the hall. I stopped at the door to the front room. I could see Keith trying to peer through the frosted glass of the front door to make sure I came straight through, but I had to see my dad. I walked in. He was sitting there. He really looked like he was sleeping, like he was just sleeping. Then I touched his hand. When I kissed my mother just after she had died, I was reminded of all the times I had kissed her and she had kissed me. All that warmth and love. My dad’s hand was hard and cold, like stone.

He was my hero and now he was gone. I cried like only an orphan can cry. I could hear Keith, outside the house, banging at the door and telling me to let him in, and he could hear me, inside the house, crying for our dead father. All through Keith’s tears and Lisa’s hugs and the policewoman’s stupid questions, all I could say, over and over, was ‘I just want him to be alive. I just want him to be alive.’ He’d been so strong, so big and loud and funny and more alive than anybody. But not just lately.

He had died of a heart attack earlier that morning, one year and seventeen days after my mother. They don’t use the phrase ‘broken heart’ on death certificates. Often, when my mom and dad had an argument, he would throw the brakes on, half-way through, and say, ‘Well, anyway, there’s only one thing I want. If you die on the Monday, I want to die on the Tuesday.’ In many ways, that’s exactly what happened.

On the night of his funeral, I did a gig at the Fleece and Firkin in Bristol. I’m sure no one there would have suspected a thing. Once I was back on stage, I felt a lot better. I knelt in the Catholic church in Stourbridge the following Sunday and prayed for help. When I was a kid, I had watched TV footage of an astronaut walking in space. I remember thinking what it would be like to do that and have the cord break, to be left floating in dark nothingness, totally isolated, totally alone. I had been thinking about it a lot since my dad had died. How could I get rid of that feeling? How could I replace that bond? Then I got it. Of course, I’ll get married and have babies of my own. I told Lisa. She was shocked but sort of went along with it. I told my priest. He suggested I thought it over. What’s the rush? But I had made my mind up. I was thirty-three. I would marry my nineteen-year-old girlfriend on September 29th, 1990, Jerry Lee Lewis’ birthday.

The Edinburgh show with Steve Coogan was a great success for me. To be honest – and Steve is very open about this – I blew him off the stage most nights, which, in the end, I think was the best thing that ever happened to him. Steve is an incredibly talented bloke, but he was a lazy bastard. He was making so much money out of easy voice-over jobs that he never took the time to work on his act. Our Edinburgh show, and the resulting tour, was the kick up the arse he needed. As he’s won about fifty awards in recent years, I don’t suppose he’s too bitter.

The show was simple. Basically, I would do the first twenty-five minutes, storm it, introduce Steve, and then he would do half an hour of material he’d been doing for about six years, a lot of it on national television, which he was clearly bored with. We’d close the show with a song we’d written, called ‘It’s Over Now’, a sort of Hope and Crosby spoof, and that was that.

On tour, we did mainly student gigs, all offering half-price Cutty Sark whisky to the kind of kids who could get drunk on half a lager. To be fair, it was always going to be easier for a dirty-mouthed, heckle-if-you-dare comic like me than a subtle, clever character-comic and impressionist like Steve, but he was much richer and better-known than me, so fuck him, I thought to myself.

After a tour gig one night, as me and Steve sat nattering in the student canteen, a woman came up and said to him, ‘You know, I came here specifically to see you, but he was much funnier.’ Then again, on another occasion, a much better-looking woman came up and asked Steve to sign a poster. After he’d done so, he passed it to me, but she snatched it back. ‘No, thank you,’ she said to me. ‘I don’t want yours.’ I remember thinking that being in a comedy double-act must be a bit of a nightmare.

I got married in St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Vivien Road, Harborne, at five in the evening. My best man was my old drinking-partner, Shane, and Steve Coogan did a couple of readings from the Bible. Happily, he resisted the temptation to do Jesus as Ronnie Corbett, or anything of that sort. The disco was about as West Midlands as you can get. There was a sort of DJ double-act, two fat blokes with moustaches, who both wore those baseball hats with false hands on the top that clap when you pull the strings. And they pulled the strings a lot. Lisa and me had the first dance, to Elvis singing ‘Love Me Tender’, and the rest of the night was all Black Lace and ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ with the volume turned down for the chorus.

My wife and I spent the next day, Sunday, sitting around reading the papers and getting the confetti out of our hair. The honeymoon had to be put on hold. On the Monday morning, I set off for ten days of touring with Steve. My ‘stupid fucking comedy’ couldn’t be put on the back-burner, especially if it was going to pay for the new house we fancied and all those kids I was planning to bang out.

We filmed the Channel Four show in June 1991. It was called Packet of Three. To be honest, although we had a great time making it, in front of a live crowd at the Wakefield Opera House in West Yorkshire, it didn’t really work. I had had my usual dreams of earth-shattering success, but it didn’t happen. We had some decent guest turns, with early TV appearances for Harry Hill and A1 Murray, a whole show based around the Reduced Shakespeare Company, who performed the Complete Works of Shakespeare in ten minutes, a French stunt-motorcyclist, and a sixty-five-year-old yodelling accordionist called Billy Moore. We just never managed to successfully marry the onstage and backstage stuff.

During the filming of Packet of Three I started to get panic-stricken about my very sudden decision to marry, buy a house, and have children. It all seemed to have happened in a bit of a blur. I decided that when I went home, I’d suggest to Lisa that we pull out of the house-deal and wait for a while before making any decisions about kids. It was all very tough on her. I’d railroaded her into a marriage she wasn’t at all sure about, just because I didn’t want to feel like an orphan anymore. My professional life was faltering – one bad TV series can finish someone for good – and my personal life was even worse. To complicate matters even further, I was becoming slightly besotted with a woman who worked on Packet of Three. Her name was Jane.

I’ll always feel bad about the way I treated Lisa. She was a young, funny, and lovable girl, and I let her down badly. When I told her about my decision to slow things down a bit, she lost faith in me and we drifted apart fast. We tried going to Relate, the relationship counsellors. I’d never tried anything like that before. The counsellor told us to be totally honest in that room because everything was totally confidential, so I opened my heart and spoke more openly about myself than I ever had before. But there was no saving our marriage. When I got married, especially considering the Catholic Church’s teaching on divorce, I thought it would be forever. Ours lasted ten months. We had fucking cake left.

At the time, my working relationship with Malcolm was going about as well as my relationship with Lisa. I didn’t feel he was really coping very well with the increase in workload. He’d taken on some other acts, Tim Clark, a regular compere at Jongleurs, Alan Davis, who became a star in BBC’s Jonathan Creek, and Caroline Aherne, who was destined for great things with Mrs Merton and The Royle Family, so he was doing pretty good. But I wasn’t happy. I didn’t feel very ‘managed’. I once drove all the way down to Battersea for a gig at Jongleurs, only to find that someone had got the dates mixed up. On another occasion, I got a lot of grief from one promoter for not turning up for my gig the previous weekend. I’d known nothing about it.

We had lots of crisis meetings. At one of these, I suggested that Malcolm should perhaps hire a secretary to look after the nuts and bolts of the business while he could take a more general overview. I was being diplomatic. It’s not easy to tell an old mate, especially an over-twenty-stone, bad-tempered one, that you think he’s messing up. He dismissed my secretary suggestion by saying, ‘I think attention to details is one of my strengths!’ This was the last response I had expected. I remember telling David Baddiel what Malcolm had said. Dave’s response was, ‘I think he’s got the word “details” mixed up with the word “sausages”.’

I bumped into Jon Thoday at a comedy club. We had become friendly at the Montreal Comedy Festival, where I had gone down pretty well earlier in the year. He was absolutely astonished when I told him that Malcolm had advised me not to do Edinburgh. Two days later, he phoned Malcolm to suggest that Avalon could, with his permission, promote a Frank Skinner one-man show in Edinburgh, with Malcolm and me working out a financial arrangement between us. Avalon would do all the work, accommodation, posters, venue-booking, leafleting, the lot, and take fifteen per cent of the box-office. I suggested that I would pay Malcolm a further fifteen per cent of whatever I earned.

So, off I went to Edinburgh. I was to play the Pleasance Cabaret Bar, the same room where I had decided to become an alternative comic at the 12:12 Cabaret, four years earlier. On my poster it said ‘From Channel Four’s “Packet of Three”’. By now the first few episodes had gone out, and the response had not been great. One critic wrote, ‘May God forgive everybody involved in the making of this Texas-sized turkey.’ It was quite a setback. Maybe a good Edinburgh might put me back on the right track. My poster also said, ‘Don’t miss this outstanding natural comedian’, the Independent. It was a completely fictional quote that Avalon had made up to give me some extra cred.

The opening night felt very different from my first Edinburgh stand-up show, three years earlier. The 4-X, I believed, had prepared me for anything, but my one doubt was whether or not I had built up enough material. Obviously, in twenty months I had written loads, but lots of it would never work in Edinburgh. It was a bit too Birmingham, both from a local references point of view, and from a ‘Brummies laugh at dirty jokes but sophisticated festival-goers don’t’ point of view. Anyway, I put together a routine that I thought would work and hoped that it would fill the hour. The show started and I was going great. Eventually I realised I was about half-way through my material. I looked at my watch to see how long I had done. It was fifty-five minutes. Phew! I had loads of stuff to spare. I felt the weight lift off my shoulders. In those days I always performed in a leather biker-jacket, t-shirt and jeans. I liked to perspire a little onstage. It made it look like I was working. The cabaret bar was hot, sweaty and heaving most nights, but I liked seeing the condensation running down the walls. It made a nice change from the cold emptiness of the Calton Studios.

Now I was really rocking. About half-way through the run I got fed up with doing the same stuff, so I did the other half of my joke-store. That all went down great as well, even the really dirty stuff I thought I’d never get away with outside of my 4-X circuit. There was one routine I tried as an act of bravado one night, fully expecting a bad reaction, but it got exactly the opposite response. I’ll run it by you, but it’s against my better judgement. The problem with quoting stand-up, or any kind of verbal comedy, in a book is that so much depends on the tone, delivery, facial expression and body-language of the comic. If stand-up worked as well on the page as it does on the stage, I would have bought a fax machine years ago and saved myself a lot of petrol money. Nevertheless, here’s the bit I’m talking about:

Now one thing I’ve always tried to do in life is to put other people’s feelings first. For, example, sometimes, when I’m just about to perform oral sex on a woman, I’ll notice just a tiny piece of toilet-paper. Not a large, just a tiny, piece, like a cloakroom ticket tucked behind a lapel. Now, in those cases, I don’t point and go ‘Urrrrrgh! Guess what?’ No. I eat it. Yes. Put other people’s feelings first. I’ve eaten fuckin’ rolls of the stuff over the years. Doesn’t bother me.

And the odd thing about that routine was not so much that it went well with an arts festival crowd, but that I could always tell by the sound of the laughs that it was the women in the audience who really went for it. The laughter was like a cheer at a hockey international, a good octave higher than normal. I don’t have an explanation for this, but it was definitely, night after night, true.

Pretty soon a whisper was going round the Pleasance. Lots of the Perrier panel had been in to see my show. Let me explain this. The Perrier Award is, or was in 1991, the most prestigious award that a British stand-up comic can get, bar none. It’s kind of like the stand-up comedian’s Oscar but more so because they only give one a year. It is decided by a panel of so-called comedy experts and the odd token punter, and, though they may deny it, it’s what every stand-up at the Fringe is dreaming of. At that time, the five nominations were announced halfway through the second week, and the winner was announced on the Saturday afterwards, giving them a further week to sell out every night on the strength of their achievement. The word on the street was that Jack Dee was an odds-on certainty to lift the silver bottle that year.

I was sharing a flat in Edinburgh with the American comic, and now film and TV sit-com star, Denis Leary, who was doing his No Cure for Cancer show at the Assembly Rooms. I had met Denis at a gig in Windsor months before and at the Montreal Festival in June. We got on really well, chiefly because we both liked sport, John Wayne, Columbo, TV Westerns and each other’s acts. A magazine called The List had done a survey to find ‘The Filthiest Man on the Fringe’, and Denis and me had tied with 26 out of 30. I scored Sexually Explicit: 9, Lavatorial: 9 and Sick: 8. Denis lost a point on Lavatorial but made it up on Sick. Bill Hicks came a close second with 25, and the Australian Doug Anthony Allstars third with 24. I felt like I was flying the flag for good old British smut. The List said of me, ‘Max Miller would have been like this, if he’d come from Birmingham and had a much filthier mind.’ What a compliment.

The funny thing was that Denis and me also had the filthiest flat in Edinburgh. We found a great fish and chip shop and a great pizza place, and that was us sorted. Soon the chip-papers, pizza-boxes and dirty cups were everywhere. It was two joyous weeks of blokiness until Denis flew home. We would hire videos to watch in the early hours, but it always seemed to be Goodfellas, The Godfather, or The Wild Bunch, and then we’d spend the days talking about women and sport. This was exactly what I needed after my marriage break-up: bloke-therapy. For the third week, Denis was replaced by Dave Baddiel, and a very strange American musician called Mitchell Zeidwig, who arrived wearing two pairs of shades. I remember sitting in the kitchen, baring my soul to Dave about my marriage, while Mitchell stood eight feet away, balancing the ironing-board on his chin.

That afternoon, Malcolm and me finally parted company. We were both slightly teary. It seemed like a long time since that first night at the Portland Club. We’d had some rows but a lot of laughs. People tell me that he doesn’t speak too well of me nowadays, but him and me shared a fantastic adventure and he’ll always have a place in my heart.

At that time, the convention was that the Perrier winner was surprised at the end of his show by the entire Perrier panel storming the venue and presenting the trophy onstage. I finished my show on that Saturday night, and there was no sign of them. Oh well, it was as I’d expected. To be honest, in the inside pocket of my biker jacket I had a ‘Congratulations’ card that I intended to fill in as soon as I found out the name of the winner.

I took my bows and walked to the dressing room, with the audience still applauding as I went. I was getting ready to leave when the stage manager came in. ‘Frank,’ she said, ‘they want you back on stage.’ In the distance I could hear a voice on the microphone, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have a very pleasant duty to perform here tonight . . .’. I walked back on to a massive cheer, and they gave me a bunch of flowers, a bottle of champagne, and the little silver bottle on its wooden plinth. I handed the champagne to a bloke in the front row who I’d been taking the piss out of all night, and then I left to a hero’s applause. One of the panel asked me if I’d like to phone my family to tell them I’d won. I explained that not only would my family not have heard of the award, they almost certainly would not have heard of the product. Another panellist told me that what had really swung it for me was that all the Perrier panellists have to watch the nominees again, after the nominations. They all sat through four shows they’d seen before and then came to see me. By a fluke, of course, I’d changed my material because I was getting bored with it. When they turned up and saw a whole new show, they decided that I was the man.

Having lost my manager, I spent the rest of the festival wondering where to find a new one. Avalon was the obvious choice, but everyone on the comedy circuit told me they were the evil empire, so I was a bit wary of joining them. The broadsheets would occasionally run a feature about Avalon’s ‘no-nonsense approach’ to comedy promotion, usually accompanied by a picture of Jon and his business partner, Richard Allen-Turner, looking like the Kray twins. The alternative circuit had a kind of hippyish attitude to ambition and success. They were slightly dirty words. Any comic who appeared to be in any way career-minded was viewed with at best suspicion, and at worst downright scorn. There was one comic named Mike who people were always slagging off because he’d done a couple of telly shows and taken to wearing a suit and tie.

To be honest, I kind of agreed with this prevailing attitude. One thing I didn’t like about the Montreal Festival was the lobby of the Delta Hotel, where all the acts were staying. It was always full of American agents in designer suits, on their mobiles talking loudly about gameshow deals with KFRRDTY, or one-off specials for WXTJO. The British comics, wearing badly chosen shorts and ankle-socks, would all sit around the same table, smoking and drinking tea, and taking the piss out of these tossers. I didn’t want a flashy manager who sold me like he was selling toothpaste. At the same time, I really wanted to stop worrying about whether I was heading to the right gig on the right night, and whether the other acts on the bill were getting paid three times more than me for doing the same job.

Seamus Cassidy, the then Channel Four Head of Comedy, told me that if I signed with Avalon he wouldn’t want to work with me again. For a still relatively new comic, this was quite a big deal, but I didn’t want a broadcaster to pick my manager. One thing I liked about Jon was that he didn’t seem scared of anybody. A lot of managers and agents are so thrilled that they’re talking to broadcasters and signing fancy contracts that they worry more about upsetting the TV people than they do about fighting their act’s corner. I knew I wasn’t equipped to deal with some of the tricky fuckers who run telvision, so I thought it might be a good idea to get my own tricky fucker to do it for me.

I asked, in turn, every Avalon act, including Dave Baddiel, what they thought of the company and, especially, Jon Thoday. Of course, as is traditional, they all moaned about expenses and the like, but every one of them said that, to be honest, they thought Jon did a great job, and that his main priority was always his acts. When I got back to London, I decided to throw in my lot with the evil empire.

I know what you’re thinking. ‘What does he mean, “back to London”? I thought he lived in the Black Country.’ Well, after my marriage went bust, I just wanted to walk away from everything. Lisa was living with friends by now, and I left the flat and all its contents, and drove out of town. Most entertainers move to London because it is the centre of Britain’s showbiz universe, but I just went there to escape. I asked Jane, the woman I’d met when working on Packet of Three, if I could stay with her. She thought it was a bad idea, but I talked her round and suddenly I was living in London N1.

Alternatively, one could suggest that I got a bit of success and a bit of telly, dumped my poor young wife who’d stuck with me through the hard times, and replaced her with some fancy London bird who worked in telly. And then dumped my old mate and manager, who had been with me from the very start, and replaced him with the most despised, ruthless and cynical comedy agency in Britain. I think if you’ve read the book this far, you’ve earned the right to decide for yourself.

In November, I was back in Birmingham, doing a sell-out show at Birmingham Town Hall, one of my regular haunts for watching bands back in the 1970s. It was a really special, local-lad-makes-good occasion. Even Lisa turned up to congratulate me in the dressing room afterwards. Then she asked if she could have a quick word outside. I stepped on to the landing, right next to the stage, and she asked me for a divorce. She left, and, after a quick ‘ma’, I stepped up on to the big empty stage, and stared into the big empty auditorium.

The divorce was a horrible drawn-out process. I desperately wanted to treat Lisa fairly, but my lawyer kept trying to rein me back. Lisa and me and our lawyers finally ended up, two years later, in the Birmingham Magistrates Court. I was told that, although I needed to attend the hearing, I wasn’t allowed to say anything. The magistrate said he felt that my final offer to Lisa, a £15,000 lump sum, was ‘extremely inadequate’. This was at a time when I earned about £40,000 a year. He said she was unemployed, with no savings and no source of income, and it was only right I should give her enough money to make a fresh start.

I felt really misrepresented and demanded to speak. My lawyer got very agitated and warned me against this, but I felt I had the right to defend myself. The magistrate gave in and sat back to listen to my explanation. I said I was sad that my marriage to Lisa had failed and that I had chosen a lawyer from the list of ‘Family Lawyers’ I had been given, because I was told that this would reduce the chances of a messy divorce and help ensure that Lisa got a fair settlement. I told the magistrate I was ignorant in all these matters. I didn’t know what a ‘fair settlement’ was. If, I went on, the magistrate told me what he believed was a fair sum, I would write a cheque for that amount here and now, and hand it over to Lisa.

The magistrate looked stunned. He said he had been in the job for fifteen years and he had never heard such a speech. It was a real shame, he said, that a marriage that had produced such sentiments hadn’t worked out. All this conversation went on in front of Lisa and the two lawyers. The magistrate said he thought that £30,000 was a ‘fair’ settlement, so I wrote the cheque and handed it over. My lawyer had gone purple. That was on the Friday.

Two days later, Lisa was in the Sunday Mirror, saying how horribly I’d treated her and quoting loads of stuff that I’d said in those ‘totally confidential’ counselling sessions at Relate. The headline was ‘My Half-Time Sex with Fantasy Frank’. She said that, on one occasion, we’d been watching football when the half-time whistle blew, and I’d immediately turned to her and suggested that we squeezed in a quick shag before the second half. Well, so what? It was a televised game, we weren’t on the fuckin’ terraces. I think it makes me sound quite loving, and remember, these were the days when the half-time interval was only ten minutes long. I’d get two in now. There’d even be the opportunity to change ends.

A year later, she was in the News of the World, telling a similar tale but with a bit of extra spice, which I imagine was added by the journalist. In this version, I would only have sex if there was football on the radio, and after we’d done it, I’d run around the bedroom, kicking a football and shouting, ‘Skinner has scored.’ If anyone accused me of that now, I could bring in Mr Keepy-Uppy as a character witness. He’d testify that I could never get all the way round the bedroom without losing possession to an inanimate object.

And then, in late 2000, Lisa spoke to the papers again, this time the Sunday People. She would soon be able to list her profession as ‘columnist’. Having used up all the true stuff in the first two stories, she moved into fiction. She claimed I had tricked her into taking a lump-sum divorce settlement and that our relationship put her off sex for life. She had two children and one on the way. She also stuck in a personal message to Caroline, telling her to get out fast before I ruined her life as well. Here, hold on a minute . . .

Anyway, I guess she got her own back. In my defence, I was devastated by my parents’ death, and I stupidly thought that marriage would make everything better. As the balance of power was heavily weighted towards the rising TV star, I suppose she had to use what methods she could. I got a bit pissed off after each of her articles, but I still wish her well. After all, what is this, or any other autobiography, but an elaborate kiss-and-tell. Maybe one day she’ll forgive me my mistakes. She might as well, she’s running out of Sunday papers.

Following my Perrier success, and despite my move to Avalon, Channel Four were very keen on a second series of Packet of Three, but they felt that some changes needed to be made. Their first suggestion was a bit of a shock. They wanted to get rid of Henry. I thought this was unjust. The first series had been a flop, but it was hardly Henry’s fault. The show just didn’t work. And anyway, if they dropped Henry, who would host the show? They had a suggestion. Me.

Their argument was that it was a waste to have the Perrier winner on the show and not let him do any stand-up. This was really difficult for me. First of all, Henry was my mate and I didn’t want to stab him in the back, even though Channel Four insisted that they would do the show without him whether I hosted it or not. Secondly, my now girlfriend, Jane, was set to produce the new series. I didn’t want people thinking that I’d got the job because my bird was running the show. It was all a bit grim, but I did want to do a second series and prove the critics wrong.

I got asked to appear on the BBC satirical panel show Have I Got News for You? Y’know, I like those little introductions I’ve started slipping in just lately – ‘the BBC satirical panel show’, for example. Maybe I could make a feature of them. I should try something like ‘the disjointed, disappointing variety show Packing Them In, hosted by ‘the ruthless, back-stabbing, gone-all-la-di-da Perrier Award winner, Frank Skinner’. Actually, maybe I’m being a bit harsh here. Packing Them In wasn’t all that bad.

I have to stop for a moment. Throughout this book I have tried to be completely honest, even if it hurts, but now I’m doing something else. When that Henry Normal thing happened, I felt a bit uneasy at first, but I never felt like I was doing a bad thing. I spoke to Henry while it was all going on, and he seemed totally fine about my part in it. So there’s being honest, and there’s that Catholic hitting yourself with a cat-of-nine-tails to try and prove how pious you are. Oh, I don’t know. Maybe this is another one for you to call.

Anyway, I got asked to do Have I Got News for You? which was at the very peak of its popularity. The show was made by Hat-Trick Productions, at that time the Man United of independent television companies, certainly as far as comedy was concerned. Hat-Trick had tried out another panel show earlier that year, called The Brain Drain and I had really rocked on one of the episodes. One question was ‘What never happens in movies but you wish it would?’ I said that when, in Robin Hood films, Robin and his merry men, dressed all in Lincoln Green, leap from the Sherwood Forest trees to ambush the Sheriff of Nottingham’s men, I wish, just once, one of the baddies would point at Robin and say, ‘You just wait till autumn.’

Even twice-bitten Channel Four were still showing faith in me. They were planning a series called Bunch of Five. The idea was based on the old BBC Comedy Playhouse format. The series would consist of five sitcom pilots, and the one that went down best would become a series. The five included Dead at Thirty by Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, The Weekenders by Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, and Blue Heaven written by and starring me. Guess which one got the series?

Blue Heaven was about an unemployed West Midlands bloke in his early thirties called Frank Sandford (played by me, obviously), who still lived in Smethwick with his parents. My dad was played by John Forgeham, who I remembered as Jim Baines in Crossroads, and Paula Wilcox, who I had fancied for about thirty years since she was in Man About the House and The Lovers, played my mom. In fact, she was still pretty stunning, which is the last thing you want from someone playing your mother.

I took the name Sandford from Teddy Sandford, an old Albion player, and the whole series was my sort of love-letter to the Black Country. It was mainly shot on location around Oldbury and Smethwick, and the scripts included lots of incidents from my life, including Celine and the earrings, and Fez asking at the Social if it was where you got the free money.

In the show, I was half of a pub duo called Blue Heaven. The other half, my onscreen mate Roache, was played by the Irish actor Conleth Hill, a good Catholic boy who became one of my closest friends. I spoke to the camera, mid-dialogue, like Michael Caine in Alfie and there was no laugh-track. It was sort of like The Grimleys, but with jokes.

To be honest, if you’d asked me a few years ago what I thought of Blue Heaven, I would have said it was no more than a fair try by an inexperienced writer, but six months ago, a fan at a stage door gave me all six episodes on one VHS. I was really chuffed because I didn’t have any of it on tape, and the next night Conleth and me watched the whole series, straight through. I didn’t remember any of the gags seven years on, so it was like watching someone else’s stuff. As a great athlete once said, I laughed my bollocks off. It was the funniest sit-com I’d seen in ages.

I know this sounds terrible, but it’s a problem I have. When I was in that Edinburgh flat with Dave Baddiel in 1991, we watched a TV show called Edinburgh Nights, hosted by Tracey McLeod. Tracey was a friend of Dave’s and I had got to know her during that Edinburgh. She was one of the unfortunates that I would sit down and tell about my broken marriage. I remember explaining to her that I was still upset but I wasn’t crying anymore. I called it my post-blart stage.

Anyway, that’s by the by. Dave and me were watching Edinburgh Nights, mainly because I was on it. They did a short interview and, as usual, I sat looking at myself and thinking, ‘Fuck off, Baldy.’ Then they showed about five minutes of my stand-up. I laughed like a big fool. Dave was amazed. ‘Why are you laughing?’ he said. ‘You’ve heard all the jokes before.’

I know it’s not a story that shows me in a great light. I just thought I’d add egomaniac to my ever-growing list of self-abuse. Self-abuse? No, I must get on. The fact is, I’m a very good comedy audience. I laugh at other comics so why shouldn’t I laugh at me? Besides, I once read that my all-time comedy hero, Stan Laurel, used to laugh like a drain at Laurel and Hardy movies. That made me feel a lot better.

While I’m in the mood, I should tell you something else about myself. I’m not very good at watching my shows with other people. I spend too much time watching their reaction. Sometimes they don’t laugh where I think they should, and then they talk over really good bits. I once switched off a video of the previous night’s Fantasy Football after one of my friends had talked over a really good gag, and said, ‘Well, look, obviously no one’s interested in this so let’s just talk.’ I was half-joking, but only half. Stop looking at me like that. If ever you see me on the tube, and you’re reading this book, my advice is start looking enthralled.

Every episode I, or at least my character, would bump into my old Asian mate, Prem, (Nadim Sawalha), who was also unemployed. His last job was working for BT as ‘the Asian bloke who answers the phone when you dial a wrong number’, but they had made him redundant and replaced him with samples from old Peter Sellers records. Prem would always offer a piece of Eastern-sounding philosophy, which never sounded quite right, like:

In August 1992, I went back to Edinburgh with a brand new stand-up show, then took that show on a national tour with Al Murray as my support. I suppose we played around thirty dates. In ’91, I’d done a post-Perrier tour of around twenty dates. In ’94 I did a sixty-date tour, and then, in 1997, a one-hundred-date tour, culminating in a show at Battersea Power Station in front of five and a half thousand people, which was, at the time, according to the Guinness Book of Records, ‘the World’s Biggest Solo Comedy Gig’. I know because I’ve still got their official certificate on my wall. Maybe I should get that Return Form from the Calton Studios in 1988, and frame them together, so every time I walk past, I can ‘treat those two imposters just the same’.

Firstly, apart from the chat show, which I’ll discuss later, when I do stand-up nowadays, I do it as part of a national tour, usually in venues that seat between one and two thousand people. Whether this is, at the end of the day, a good thing, I don’t know. There is part of me that thinks stand-up belongs in a poky little room above a pub, rather than a plush two-thousand-seat theatre (or, indeed, in Battersea Power Station, with the show projected on to two enormous screens on either side of the stage). But I also think that a two-thousand-seater theatre can feel just like a room above a pub, when the force is with me.

On tour, the show opens with a support act who does about twenty minutes, then there’s a short interval, and then I come on and usually do about an hour and a half. Sometimes, I wonder if this is too long. It sounds a lot, doesn’t it? People do seem to laugh all the way till the end and ask for an encore, but it could be that they’d be just as happy with an hour. Then the show would take less time to write and I could tour more often. How am I supposed to know? Oh, anyway, what do you care about this? Honestly, sometimes this stops being a book and just becomes chit-chat.

Anyway, when I wrote the material for the Perrier show, I didn’t know I was doing it. I was just writing stand-up for the 4-X and then Edinburgh came along and I thought, ‘Well, I can use all this stuff I’ve already got.’ Now I have to aim my writing deliberately towards a long theatre show. This means, if I fancy it, I can write quite long routines. One review of a show I did in 1994 said that I’d done nineteen minutes on football, and twenty-three minutes on anal sex.

In this case, I feel the subject somewhat dictates the duration. With football, I have to allow for the fact that some audience-members may not be knowledgeable about the game, so some time is taken up by explanation. Anal sex is a similar case. The latter routine is slightly longer than the football stuff because I also need time to discuss the health issues. I always make a point of telling the women in the audience about the, in my opinion, hare-brained theory that anal sex is dangerous. I try my utmost to be completely objective in this, explaining that, if they wish to discover whether it is indeed dangerous, they should ask around their female friends, nip in the Citizens Advice Bureau, or even phone up This Morning. After all, it’s best that the woman doesn’t leave such enquiries to the last minute. She’s hardly likely to get an unbiased response from a man with a bottle of Johnson’s Baby Oil in one hand, and his nob in the other.

At the same time, a funny gag is a funny gag and they all get in on that merit. Not that it’s my choice. I have the most reliable editor in the world, the audience. When I’m preparing for a tour, I write about twenty-five minutes of new stuff a week, a target I’ve stuck to since the days of the Pie Factory. Naturally, some of this will be shit. I have to find out which and get rid of it. If thy shit jokes offendeth thee, pluck them out. So, I’ll do a couple of circuit gigs a week to try out my new twenty-five minutes and then, depending on the response, I’ll split the stuff into three categories.

Firstly, God willing, there will be some jokes that get good laughs. These go into the drawer marked ‘In’. Secondly, there will be some jokes that go quite well but not great. These go into the drawer marked ‘Potential’. As I’ve said before, my jokes are like children to me, I want to give them a fair chance. This is why I try virtually all of the new stuff at least twice. Maybe I delivered a new gag badly and didn’t do it credit; or maybe it’s not right in its present form, but it could be slightly re-written into a better gag. If one of these methods works, the gag gets transferred into the ‘In’ drawer. Thirdly, there are the gags that die on their arses. I mourn them, briefly, and then bury them in the drawer marked ‘Shit’. I don’t literally have drawers for these gags, obviously, but that’s how I split them up.

After the gigs, I’ll scribble a note next to each gag, signifying its allotted drawer. Incidentally, all my stand-up gags are written free-hand. Everything else I write, sit-coms, sketches, this book, is written on a computer, but that just doesn’t feel right with stand-up. I’ve never really worked out why. Perhaps it’s simply that I was writing stand-up before I owned or knew how to operate a computer, and old habits die hard.

But sometimes I think it’s because stand-up has such a special place in my heart. It was seeing live stand-up that inspired me to go into comedy in the first place. It was stand-up that I was writing in my dirty bedsit in Ravenhurst Road, and if I hadn’t been writing that stand-up I wouldn’t be moving into my two-million-pound house in North London next week. All through my career, it’s been the constant, the one link between the beginning of the journey and where I am now. And I’ll tell you something, when it works, it’s the best fucking feeling in the world. Yeah, OK, I get a bit romantic about stand-up. Still, you get the picture.

The tour-show building process is something of an emotional journey. You’d think that some bloke off the telly who turns up to do a gig in a room above a pub would be holding all the aces, but it doesn’t work like that. When I appear at those circuit gigs, I’m on the bill with comics who are doing material they do every night. It’s slick and, what’s more, they aren’t worried about forgetting half of it. I go up there, people settle down to watch the amazing famous bloke, and all I have with me is my completely new and unfamiliar stuff that might possibly be total shit. This, it has to be said, gives the whole experience a bit of edge.

Putting tours to one side for a moment, I also perform new stand-up at the beginning of each Frank Skinner Show, and I use the same method to build that material. But because it’s a topical television chat show, trying out the stand-up in circuit clubs gets even trickier. Firstly, the material is all based on that week’s news. If ever you try topical news stuff in a comedy club, you soon realise that no one actually knows any news at all. Well, maybe the really big stories, but that’s it. Then, on top of that, it’s only worth trying material I can get away with on telly. So, for the first time in my career, I’m the clean act on the bill, and sometimes my written-for-telly stuff sounds pretty tame when the previous act has been shouting ‘Cunt!’ for the last twenty minutes. I mean as part of his act, not as part of my introduction. Now how in the world am I supposed to compete with them and their easy laughs?

Either way, the main thing about this perform-and-then-prune process is that it’s the audience who make almost all of the decisions. I show them what I’ve managed to come up with that week, and they identify the good stuff. When I was preparing for my ’97 tour, my regular try-out places were The Spot Club in Covent Garden on Tuesday nights, and the Oranje Boom Boom in Soho, on Wednesdays.

One Tuesday at The Spot I died on my arse. I kind of hid the fact with some ad-libbing mainly about the fact that I was going badly: ‘You know that when the Titanic sank, there was an orchestra in the main ballroom, who kept playing as the ship was going down. This is what it would have been like if there’d been a comedian on instead.’ When this got laughs I stuck with it, making it up as I went along. I asked them to imagine the Titanic comic, trying to save his act like I was now trying to save mine. ‘Are there any fish in tonight? (PAUSE.) Well, give it five minutes.’ It enabled me to leave on a laugh, but I knew it was only cosmetic. I didn’t sleep much that night. Comedy is like a little bird on your shoulder. One day, for no reason, it could just decide to fly away.

The next morning, I went to Budgen’s to get some milk and a newspaper. At the checkout, an old lady recognised me and said, ‘Oh, you’re that comedian, aren’t you?’ I had to stop myself from saying, ‘Well, actually, I’m not sure that I am. I used to be a comedian. I used to make people laugh and all that, but now, I can’t actually do it anymore so no, I am not that comedian. I used to be, but now I’m not.’

Had I said this, I think the old lady might have been slightly alarmed, and it wouldn’t really have helped me much either. So, instead, I smiled and chatted, paid for my things, and then went home and re-worked and re-worked the previous night’s shit material. This was totally against my usual practice. Stuff that has gone that badly would normally have been straight out, but I had a point to prove. When I went on stage at Oranje Boom Boom that night, none of the sixty or so people in the audience had any idea how significant the gig was to me. In my head, it was more important than Battersea Power Station. And I fuckin’ stormed it, with a re-vamped version of the previous night’s rejected goods. I was back. I suppose it looked like just another day at the office.

For each town on the tour, again learning from my 4-X days, I add a bit of local stuff, produced by scanning the local papers, reading guide books, and, on the day of the gig, checking out the town centre and any local landmarks. I also keep an eye on the national news so I can add topical stuff to the mix. On the ’97 tour, I was able to cover the Louise Woodward verdict and the Gary Glitter scandal, hours, or, in Woodward’s case, minutes, after the stories broke.

But news can cause you problems. I was due to start that ’97 tour in Jersey, on a Wednesday. On the previous Sunday, Princess Diana died. Ticket sales just stopped. It’s easy to be cynical now, but at the time, it really felt like the whole nation was in shock. I had a sold-out gig in Southend on the following Saturday. Now it was to be the night of Diana’s funeral.

The manager at Southend asked if I wanted to pull the gig. I asked if it was definitely sold out. He said yes. I said no. Besides, if I could do a gig on the night of my dad’s funeral, I wasn’t going to let this stop me. I watched the grim ceremony on telly in my Southend hotel room. There were tears in my eyes. Diana had been around for a long time, in the papers, on the telly; I’d got absolutely arseholed on the day-off-work I got for her wedding, she was part of my life. I know this all sounds a bit over-the-top, but they were strange times. Imagine, in five years’ time, telling someone how worked up you got about Big Brother.

‘In case you’re wondering, I did watch the funeral, and, I’ll be honest with you, I cried. I really cried. I kept thinking about that flower-shop I sold, three months ago. I wouldn’t mind, but I invested the money in a land-mines factory. Elton John, he was good. I’m really glad he did that ‘Candle in the Wind’ song, really glad. I kept thinking he might completely misjudge things and do ‘I’m Still Standing’.

So, that’s touring. Well, except for one crucial topic that I feel an obligation to cover. Sometimes, I find myself on tour when I’m single. In these circumstances, I feel duty-bound to, how can I put this, fuck anything that moves. I’m not saying that this is a good thing, and I’m not saying that it’s something that I’m proud of, but then I’m not exactly proud of the fact that I imagine, in quite a lot of detail, whilst on the toilet, that I am generally acknowledged as the greatest footballer in the world. But I still told you about it.

I’m not a good-looking person. I’ve struggled to get girls for most of my life, and then, suddenly, I win the casual-sex lottery by getting famous. Imagine how that feels. Becoming a celebrity is like suddenly becoming handsome. It’s alright for Robbie Williams or Brad Pitt. They were always used to women paying them attention, with little or no effort required on their part, but for me, it’s like I suddenly found a magic after-shave that draws women towards me. I really want to use it up before it evaporates. Obviously, it doesn’t work on all women, but then I haven’t got the time to shag ALL women.

Suddenly, the ugly duckling has turned into a swan. OK, not the best-looking swan you’ve ever seen. In fact more like just a bigger duckling, but still with the long neck and some of the stateliness and that. And it is in the context of touring that I am truly able to flap my wings. Imagine how it feels, for a man who had to kill himself to get so much as a slow-dance in a Birmingham nightclub, when a beautiful young woman not only agrees, at once, to spend the night in his hotel room, but, gesturing towards the dressing room fruit-bowl says, ‘And why don’t you bring along a couple of those bananas?’

I think I need to make a point here. This is not payback time. I’m not suddenly getting revenge for years of rejection. I mean, let’s be philosophical. I think I appreciate my job more because of the shit jobs I had in the past, and I appreciate my Guinness Book of Records certificate more because I’ve got my Edinburgh Return Form, and so I appreciate an upturn in my popularity because pulling girls used to be like pulling teeth. And, joking aside, the improvement is not as dramatic as I’d hoped, but it is an improvement and, just occasionally, it’s like being ‘cute in a stupid-ass way’. Besides, they get a good story to tell their mates, and I don’t begrudge them that. I went out with a TV presenter a few years back, and, whilst watching her on a particularly jolly, all-round-family-entertainment game-show, I still recall the very special pleasure I got from nudging a mate and saying, ‘I’ve fucked her up the arse.’ I imagine James Hewitt makes similar remarks every time he passes a souvenir-mug stall.

I met one woman, nineteen years old and dressed from head to toe in black PVC, in a club quite near my hotel. Within fifteen minutes we were in bed. She had so many piercings, so many metal rings and rivets, that we had to shag next to the window so that I could keep an eye out for lightning. She was beautiful, and it was a fantastic night. At one point, she said, ‘I’m often attracted towards older men.’

But, anyway, too much metal. Her vagina, as it clanked open, looked like one of those wallets people use to keep their keys in. I must admit, it put me off a bit. I approached cunnilingus the way, as a child, I approached a Christmas pudding that I knew had got silver threepenny bits in it. She was a very likeable person, though. As I get older, I find a woman’s personality becomes more and more important.

I have tried the odd threesome. This is really not all it’s cracked up to be. On one occasion, the women involved both swooped in for oral sex at the same moment, and there was quite a nasty clash of heads. One of them was actually too shaken to go on. Also women, especially when they’ve been drinking, are inclined to squabble, even if one of them is having intercourse at the time. I can remember two women I was with in a hotel room suddenly marching off into the bathroom to have a big row. Well, who needs it? And whispering and sniggering is another turn-off in this situation. It always makes me think I’ve got something on my bum.

When I was still with the BBC, I wrote a sitcom pilot called Heavy Revie, about a heavy-metal star, played by me. It never went to series. As I’ve said before, even Homer nods. I made the main character, Frank ‘Heavy’ Revie, a slightly tragic, still-single Brummie in his early forties. Ergo, I was able to take lines that I’d used when chatting with my tour manager or support act during a hotel breakfast, and give them to him. Here he is, talking to his brother, Dennis, after it’s been discovered that Frank has had a threesome with two eighteen-year-olds:

DENNIS: It’s the morality of it. You’re forty-one. And there were two of them at the same time.

FRANK: Well, I don’t think an eighteen-year-old girl should be alone with a man of my age.

DENNIS: My point is, it might be legal but it’s still a scandal.

FRANK: But there’s no logic to that. If I’d had sex with a thirty-six-year-old, no one would have minded. Surely it’s only the difference between a pint and two halves. Anyway, if you’re going to take a woman back to your hotel room, I think it’s nice if she’s got somebody to talk to.

There was a woman who used to write to me on a regular basis, very obscene letters suggesting all the disgusting things we could do if we ever got together. Some of her plans for us even made me blanch, but I wrote her off as a nutter and thought no more about it. Then, after a tour-gig one night, there was a message from a fan asking to meet me backstage. This woman, small, blonde and curvy, came in, I’d guess she was in her early twenties, and started chatting in a very normal, friendly way. Then she said a couple of things which reminded me of the letters, not crude or sexual things, just a couple of turns of phrase. I sensed that this was deliberate. I got slightly edgy. Steve, my regular tour-manager, was still on stage telling people how to roll up wires, or whatever it is that he does, and I felt slightly exposed. I reckoned this was the sort of woman who could pull a bread-knife if she didn’t get her own way. Anyway, I got brave and confronted her about the letters. She admitted she’d written them, but said it was just a silly phase that she was going through, and she wouldn’t be doing it anymore. Then she asked if she could spend the night with me. I actually laughed. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I don’t mean to be unfriendly, but you are a nutter. I don’t trust you, and there is no way in the world that you are going to spend the night with me.’ She seemed slightly hurt by this and said that she wasn’t a nutter and that she would never do anything to harm me and that if I’d just spend one night with her, she’d tell nobody, and I’d never hear from her again.

I was amazed at her perseverance. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘for the last time, there is no way in the world that I am going to spend the night with you.’ At this point, she lifted up her t-shirt and showed me her tits. I said, ‘And I definitely wouldn’t hear from you again, you say?’ She nodded. And then I took her back and shagged the shit out of her.

It’s weird. When I was asked to write this book, I spoke to Caroline about it, and told her that, if I wrote it, I felt I should be really honest. I explained that this might mean the book would include things about me which she might well find upsetting. She said that I should write what I want to write, that I should tell the truth, and she would handle it as best she could.

I chose these particular incidents because I think they give a reasonable flavour of life on the road for the single man. I admit that, although they’re true stories, I’ve highlighted the humorous aspects in order to make them seem slightly less sordid. Whether I’ve succeeded in that, I don’t know. Still, I kept my promise to myself and told the truth. But, I’ll be straight with you, I don’t know if I’d have put these stories in the book if Caroline and me were still together. Oh well, every cloud . . .

I was at a party once, bending some bloke’s ear about touring, not the sexual side of it but the thrill of playing two-thousand-seater halls and staying in flashy hotels. I realised I’d gone on a bit, so I thought I’d better ask him – his name was Nick – about his job. He looked, to me, like a bank clerk. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’m in a band.’

FRANK: I mean, I’m no oil painting, I’m aware of that, but I’m famous, and that gets me in. If it wasn’t for famous people, all the beautiful people in the world would only shag each other. They’d form some fabulously attractive élite and people like me would be nowhere. We’d be stuck with all the other ugly people, rutting in our own filth like pigs. Banging out one ugly kid after the next, while the beautiful people stroke each other’s unblemished skin, and close the window to stop the smell coming in. No, Dennis, it’s my duty to stop that segregation happening, and, by glory, I’ll infiltrate as many of those bastards as I can. Yes, two at a time, if I have to. Shag the beautiful, Dennis. So few of us ever get the chance.

In 1993 I got my first taste of hosting a chat show, or, at least, co-hosting one. Late Night With Wogan got me on a few times to co-host with Terry; they even sent me on trips to Euro-Disney, and also Los Angeles to interview Robin Williams. I never got on a plane till I was thirty-four, for a belated honeymoon in Italy, and now, at thirty-six, I was virtually jet-set.

Terry would call me into his personalised dressing room at Television Centre, with the wooden carving of him playing golf in the corner, give me little cigars and tell me stuff about telly being ‘chewing gum for the eyes’ and how I shouldn’t worry too much about what I said, because viewers hardly ever listen. I was never sure whether Terry really believed this incredibly dismissive view of television, or if he just pretended that he didn’t care as a way of coping with criticism. Maybe he was just being kind and thought that playing down the importance of the show would put me more at ease. Or maybe he was just bored. He’d already interviewed most of the guests two or three times before on his early evening chat show, and he’d lost a bit of interest. However, when Terry spoke about radio, his face lit up, and all the cynicism disappeared. Clearly that was his first love.

One night, the guests were George Best, Cliff Richard and Sister Wendy Beckett, the nun who did those art-appreciation programmes. Sister Wendy had been in a closed order for years so had had little or no contact with the outside world. I don’t think she really knew who any of us were. Anyway, I had read in a magazine interview with Cliff that he disapproved of women priests. It was just one line and I think it had slipped past virtually unnoticed, but it was right up my alley. Half-way through the interview, I asked him about it. He looked edgy, but admitted that he did not believe women should be priests because there was no biblical precedent; all the disciples were male. Sister Wendy was outraged. She said all the disciples were Jewish, so where does that leave biblical precedent? She went on to say that she hoped a time would come when people would be no more shocked by a woman priest than they would by a woman doctor or a woman teacher. The audience applauded. I thought this was great television. The Catholic nun in her seventies, more broad-minded and forward-looking than the pop-star.

However, when I watched the show go out the following night, my question and Cliff’s answer had been removed. In the broadcast version, Sister Wendy, suddenly, out of the blue, started talking about women priests, for who knows what reason, and, get this, they had even stuck in a shot of Cliff, nodding his apparent agreement as she spoke.

The time I spent living with Dave was one of the happiest of my life. It was like those two weeks with Denis Leary in Edinburgh, but it lasted one hundred and thirty times longer. When I first moved in with Dave, he lived in a very grotty flat in Kilburn, north London. Shortly after I arrived, he went on tour with Rob Newman and left me on my own in the flat. Within a few hours of his departure, I found a flea on my arm from his cat, Zelda. I hated cats and I wasn’t that keen on fleas. I found some flea spray, completely soaked an armchair in it, and stayed on that till Dave returned. The flat was full of videos, but I presumed they were just old movies and tapes of Dave’s TV appearances, so I didn’t bother watching any of them. Little did I know that my flea-proof fortress was surrounded on all sides by tape after tape and hour after hour of relentless hardcore pornography.

To be honest, I hadn’t seen that much pornography in my life. Years earlier, a friend in Birmingham had dragged me along to the Taboo Cinema Club, where you had to sign a membership form stating that you were not a member of Her Majesty’s police force or The Festival of Light, but it wasn’t long before my mate regretted taking me along. As soon as I saw the first film’s title, I started giggling. It was called Stuffed Arseholes. ‘Is this the menu?’ I said, loudly, expecting to get laughs, but getting only a hard elbow from my mate. For the rest of the programme (the films showed from midday to midnight, but you were given a ticket with a time on it, and only allowed to stay for an hour), I couldn’t stop giggling. My mate said, in a bit of a huff, that he would never take me to a pornographic cinema again.

Now, I’m not one of those blokes who pretend they only watch pornography for a laugh. That’s not true. I only watch pornography in order to masturbate, and as I couldn’t really pull that off, so to speak, in the crowded Taboo, I was forced to watch the films as if they were, well, films. If you do that, they soon become ridiculous. Dave, however was a connoisseur. He would no sooner have suggested that we watch pornography together than fly in the air. We worked out a very civilised rota system. It gave Dave the lion’s share of the viewing time, but that only seemed fair, considering that he owned the property and, indeed, the pornography. However, when we discussed the various films, Pissing Party, The Bottom Dweller, Buttman’s Moderately Big Tit Adventure, usually at meal times, we made a remarkable discovery. Dave and I liked exactly the same moments in each movie. When I watched a new batch of porn, I could tell instantly what tapes Dave would like, and what bits on those tapes he’d like best, and the reason I could tell was because his views tallied so exactly with mine. It was slightly scary.

Meanwhile, I managed to fit in another couple of TV series, this time for BBC1. Like my three Channel Four efforts, they bombed. I think my appearances on The Brain Drain and Have I Got News for You? had led people to think that a panel show was the right vehicle for me. I was re-united with Terry Wogan on a prime-time moral dilemmas show called Do The Right Thing. Terry hosted and I was his naughty sidekick. Two guest panellists and me would be shown a short film depicting someone facing a moral dilemma, and we had to say what we’d do. I, of course, always kept the money and shagged my best friend’s wife. The show got a second series, but I didn’t fancy it so I jumped ship.

Then I did another prime-time panel show called Gag Tag. Devised by my mate Tracey McLeod, the idea was to break down the barriers between mainstream and alternative comedy by having teams combining comics from both schools and getting them to complete various comedy tasks. So, we might be given a classic gag-format, and then have to produce some examples.

I was one team captain, Bob Monkhouse was the other, and Jonathan Ross was the host. Jonathan was already a mate of mine, so I was looking forward to working with him, but Bob was an unknown quantity. A few weeks before we recorded the series, I met an old Birmingham mainstream comic called Dave Ismay. He said to me, ‘I hear you’re going to be working with the master.’ I thought I’d got a part on Doctor Who. Turned out he was talking about Bob. The following week, Bob invited me to have lunch with him at his club. He was totally charming, and when I told him I’d broken my watch by accidentally putting it in the washing machine that morning, he reached into his briefcase, took out a flashy gold Seiko, and gave it to me. I was well chuffed, not because it was a flashy gold Seiko but because it was Bob’s.

I was also really impressed with his knowledge of comedy. He had all the videos and tapes of my TV shows, knew all about the various alternative comics and their material, was a bit of an expert on silent film comedy, fifties American comedy, British comedy since the war and, oh, you name it, if it’s comedy, Bob Monkhouse will have three books, twelve tapes and thirty anecdotes about it. A journalist once asked me about the watch. I said it was like Bob: ‘The timing’s impeccable, but it’s gone a bit of a funny colour.’ I’m not sure that Bob took it in the spirit that it was intended. Mind you, he once introduced me as ‘a man that hasn’t let success go to his clothes’, so that makes us quits.

BBC Radio Five asked Dave and me if we’d each like to manage a fictional football team on a new show called Fantasy Football League, hosted by Ross King. The show was based on a postal game, where you picked a team of footballers from the Premier League. We did the show a few times, talking a little about our hand-picked teams but mainly just chatting about football.

After a few appearances on the show, Dave and me became convinced that it was a good idea that would be even better suited to telly, especially if we were hosting it. We could still have ‘guest managers’, celebrities who liked football, but we could also have funny clips and sketches, and all sorts of things that wouldn’t work so well on radio. Most importantly, we could do on telly what we did every day in the flat, sit watching football and taking the piss. Accidentally, we’d been in rehearsal for this show for the last year.

Dave knew a guy, yes, Jewish, who he felt could produce the show. He was called Andy Jacobs. We met up and Andy thought it was a great idea. The BBC gave us a small amount of cash and we made a pilot with guest managers Nick Berry and Shelley Webb, wife of the England international Neil Webb, and no set. The whole thing looked terrible, but it was funny. We showed the pilot to BBC2 and they said they liked it. Then they said they’d like eighteen episodes, and my latest attempt at making a good TV show was up and running. This time it was Fantasy Football League.

I remember the pre-publicity for Fantasy Football League was all centred around Dave in a sort of ‘New vehicle for David Baddiel, also features Frank Skinner’ sort of a way. I felt this was fair enough. Dave, with Rob Newman, had had cult hits on TV with The Mary Whitehouse Experience and Newman and Baddiel in Pieces, and had sold out Wembley Arena with their live show. It was them that inspired Janet Street-Porter to say ‘comedy is the new rock ’n’ roll’. I was a good stand-up who did bad television. I think a lot of Newman and Baddiel fans saw me as a sort of Yoko Ono figure who broke up the band, but I reckon they would have split anyway. Besides, I thought it was nice for Dave to be the good-looking one for a change.

It was decided, by Jon Thoday, BBC2 and us, that we wouldn’t do loads of publicity to promote the show. It was felt that it would be better to leave our new project to quietly find its feet, to be a slow-burner. That’s a luxury you can afford when the series is eighteen episodes long, three times longer than most new comedy series. This took the pressure off us while we found our way around the format. The director was Peter Orton, who’d done The Last Resort with Jonathan Ross and Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out with Reeves and Mortimer. We recorded the shows on Thursday nights at Capital Studios in Wandsworth, edited through the night, with Dave and me in every edit, and the show went out at 11.15 p.m. on Fridays. Fantasy Football League’s theme tune was an instrumental version of ‘Back Home’, that first single I’d bought twenty-four years earlier.

The guest managers on that first series included Peter Cook, Bob Mortimer, Sue Johnston, Lennox Lewis, Roddy Doyle and Basil Brush. Basil, then operated by Ivor Owen, was, as you may know, a puppet, which posed problems we didn’t have with the other guests. Ivor, now, sadly, dead, had been with Basil from the beginning. It was strange to meet this frail old man, who spoke with what was basically Basil Brush’s voice. In rehearsal, it was discovered that the hole that had been sawn for Basil in the kitchen work-surface wasn’t quite big enough, so we rehearsed with Ivor’s old man’s hand sticking up eerily out of the counter. As Ivor could still be heard doing Basil’s voice, it made the whole experience a bit unnerving. When we finally got Basil fitted in place, Ivor got uncomfortable in the box under the table that he was hidden in, and withdrew his hand. I had grown up with Basil Brush, and watching him now, minus Ivor’s hand, slowly imploding before my eyes made me feel like crying. When we finished the recording that night, poor Ivor was in agony. His knees had locked as he knelt in his box, and four of the crew had to lift him out. It was like carefully unpacking a sculpture that’s arrived at an art gallery.

We soon made one of the major discoveries about Fantasy Football League: football people will do stuff you never thought they would do. There was a famous old football moment, captured on TV, when Luton Town narrowly avoided relegation, and their manager, David Pleat, ran on the pitch in his seventies beige suit and did a funny little skipping, running dance. We got Andy Jacobs to phone David Pleat and ask him if he’d come and recreate that dance in the studio. He not only said yes, but that he still had the exact same outfit in his wardrobe and would be happy to wear it. On the night, we showed the old clip of Pleat’s dance and it got a good laugh, then we moved on to something else. Ten minutes later, the doorbell went. We opened the centre-stage front door, always a scene of much coming and going, and Mr Pleat skipped in. He did a complete circuit of the studio, past the bemused guests, and then skipped out through the door again. It absolutely brought the house down.

One interesting thing about this is, when I describe Pleat’s dance as a ‘famous old football moment’, I mean famous amongst hardcore football fans. It was hardcore football fans who were our target audience. We never talked down to them or bothered to explain an obscure football reference. If you didn’t know about football, that was tough. But the amazing thing was that loads of non-football fans watched it. People would stop me in the street and say, ‘Well, I’m not really into football, but I love your show,’ and I’d say, ‘But don’t loads of the gags go over your head?’ and they’d always reply something like ‘Oh, yeah, but it doesn’t seem to matter.’

Andy Jacobs was our secret weapon. He was only a little man, with glasses and a moustache that gave him a slight Groucho Matx appearance, but his knowledge of sport, acquired partly from working in sports TV and partly from just being obsessed with sport, was phenomenal. Football, however, was his speciality. He would watch the games and football-related programmes on the telly and spot the most obscure and wonderful things. He’d put all these moments on one VHS tape and then bring them round the flat for me and Dave to see. We’d pick the ones we liked and they went into the show. We’d also spot the odd clip ourselves, but Andy was the man, and not only in the clips department. He’d come up with ideas for guests, subjects for the aforementioned ‘Phoenix from the Flames’, and discovered Statto. Me and Dave were the star strikers, Statto and the soon-to-be-recruited Jeff Astle were the creative midfielders, but Andy was the midfield dynamo, the boiler room, the Jewish Roy Keane.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul was heavily tattooed, mainly with images of significant people and places from his life. He referred to his body as his ‘inky diary’, and agreed to have a tattoo of me put on or near his bicep. He still had the bandage taped over his sore arm when he walked on, but when it came off, there I was, next to his ex-wife. I sometimes wonder if people from my past ever think of me. I bet Paul Sayce fuckin’ does.

The BBC had extended the series to nine shows, but half-way through we hit problems. The broadcasters felt that the show was straying towards bad taste. Firstly, in the stand-up. It had been in the papers that charities for the deaf were not getting their fair share of lottery money. I claimed that a spokesman for the lottery had said, ‘Well, if they don’t answer the phone. . . .’ This got several complaints. Secondly, in the sketches. There was, at the time, a TV advert for IKEA in which several housewives threw floral-patterned curtains and furniture out of their windows and dragged them into a skip as they sang a song called ‘Chuck out the Chintz’. I parodied this, but with them singing ‘Chuck out the Chimps’, and including several scenes of chimpanzees flying out of bedroom windows and even, in one case, being finished off with a baseball bat. This got a lot more complaints and, in fact, a spokesman for the BBC was asked to defend these items on a Right to Reply-style TV show. He just apologised and said it wouldn’t happen again.

I was pissed off. There had also been several complaints about the Japanese inventor, all along the lines of ‘I don’t know how you could have one of those people on after what they did during the war’. Were we also supposed to apologise for that? One of the problems about having a public-funded broadcaster is that anything you do can be described as a waste of licence-payers’ money. On ITV, it’s not like that. When did you ever hear anyone complaining about a waste of advertisers’ money?

Everyone who buys a licence has the right to an opinion. Fair enough, but the only people who ever bother to phone in are, in the main, angry and confused sex offenders who live alone in desolate high-rise flats, or terrified, valium-popping old spinsters, whose dead pets lie decaying all around them. Are these the people whose opinions programme-makers should be listening to?

Anyway, it got worse. On the show that followed the ‘Chuck out the Chimps’ controversy, I apologised profusely for the sketch and then said, slightly under my breath, ‘Thank God I didn’t do that version set in Chinatown.’ Then I sat down and introduced the first guest, ‘No stranger to controversy herself. Ladies and gentlemen, Rose West.’ The band (I’ll come to them in a minute) played ‘Go West’ and the audience applauded. I pissed myself. Not only did they believe that Rose West was coming on, but they applauded her! I sneaked through the under-the-breath remark, but the Rose West bit was cut. On the next show I interviewed a married couple who were swingers. Y’know, they went to fetish clubs and bondage parties and had group sex with other like-minded couples. We had no graphic details and no swearing, but it still had to go. Then there was Mr Methane.

Mr Methane, a very tall thin man in a tight lime-green lycra body-suit and a lime-green mask, was a stage-farter. At the end of the show, I launched into the Phil Spector classic, ‘Da Do Ron Ron’. When it got to the bit where they sing ‘Da Do Ron Ron’, the camera cut wide to reveal, on a table at my side, his legs raised high, Mr Methane. He provided the ‘Da Do Ron Rons’ as only he could. Yes, he farted them. As this duet continued, the audience were, many of them, literally in tears of laughter. We played it totally straight, which, of course, made it even funnier.

Admittedly, I had cracked up earlier, but only because while we waited to begin, Mr Methane did an enormous, completely unrestrained and tuneless fart, in the same way, I suppose, that an operatic tenor might clear his throat just before he begins to sing. I wasn’t expecting this and I just lost it. The BBC insisted that the duet was cut, and I was on my final warning. The headlines in the paper included ‘Clean it up, comic warned’, ‘Frankly, who needs good taste’, and ‘Beeb pulls plug on bum notes’.

Now, I am aware that even if I worked for days, honing and polishing a joke until it was technically flawless, it is impossible to create anything deliberately that is as intrinsically funny as a loud fart. However, I have always felt that jokes about farting are almost always unfunny. Even to hear a comic use the word ‘fart’, for some reason, always makes me cringe. I don’t even like reading it here. But Mr Methane was pure music-hall, like a sword swallower or a contortionist, and the audience, still my editors-in-chief, absolutely loved him.

Some months later, I got an e-mail from a friend of mine, Janet McLeod, who lives in Melbourne, Australia. She had been watching an awards ceremony on Australian TV, where Phil Spector was getting a ‘Lifetime Achievement’ award. Halfway through his speech, the famously eccentric Mr Spector suddenly started going on about the shabby way that ‘artists’ were treated nowadays, and launched an attack on ‘the British comedian, Frank Skinner’ who had, Speco explained, taken a work of art and desecrated it by turning it into a duet with a stage-farter. Listen, Phil, you have your ‘Wall of Sound’, I’ll have mine.

I was referring, of course, to my house-band, ‘The Skinnerettes’. These four ageing musicians, Bob Rogers on guitar, Ken Penney on keyboard, Ron Seabrook on bass, and Ronnie Verral on drums, were the great discovery of Series Two. They were put together (Yes, they’re a ‘manufactured’ band, like The Spice Girls) by my musical director (Oh, I love being able to say ‘my musical director’) Richard Thomas, and they have been on the show ever since. They accompany any songs, play the guests’ walk-on music, and appear in sketches playing everything from Eminem’s homeboys to, well, The Spice Girls. Not bad for four blokes with a combined age of nearly six hundred.

But what I love best about the Skinnerettes never makes the screen. In rehearsal, whenever there’s an enforced break, I’ll start singing, usually an old standard, maybe Glenn Miller’s ‘Chatanooga Choo Choo’ or Frank Sinatra’s ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, and, gradually, I’ll hear the Skinnerettes working out the key and smoothly gliding in underneath my vocal. Y’know, if there was no Frank Skinner Show, I’d happily pay them to come round my place, and we could spend the whole day just doing that.

Shortly after that second series of The Frank Skinner Show, Dave hit me with a bombshell. He announced that he was going to live with his girlfriend, Sarah, and it was time for me to move out. I always knew this day would come, but it still hurt. I had lived with Dave for five years. I never managed to live with any woman for two. My marriage only lasted ten months. In our time as flatmates we only really had one nasty row. In a game of Trivial Pursuit, I asked Dave what Elizabeth Taylor historical epic had lost so-and-so millions at the box office. Dave said, ‘Antony and Cleopatra.’ I said this was wrong. The film was called, simply, Cleopatra. Dave protested. After some debate, I explained that if Dave didn’t want to play the fucking game by the fucking rules then he could stick the fucking game up his stupid fucking arse. Dave walked out of the room and there was a terrible silence for some time. In case you’re thinking that I over-reacted, I should point out that it was a ‘pie’ question.

There were, inevitably, rumours that Dave and me were gay. Two single blokes, over thirty, sharing a flat, people are bound to talk, aren’t they? On one occasion, I was leaving The Ivy, a very celeb-heavy restaurant just off the Charing Cross Road, when I bumped into a gay television celebrity. We chatted and he said, ‘You know, I always thought that you and Dave were an item.’ I explained that this was not the case. ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘I always thought you were. In fact, I’ll be honest with you, I’ve had more than one wank on the strength of it.’

I moved out of Tanza Road in May, 1997, and into a flat about ten minutes’ walk away. Shortly afterwards, Dave bought a house about five hundred yards away from my flat. He moved in with his girlfriend. A few months later, she moved out. Next week, I move into the house next-door-but-one to him. In about six weeks, he is due to become a father. I had always dreamt that one day, Dave and I might have children.

I was round his house last night, helping him assemble a Mothercare cot. You should have seen us, two of the world’s least practical men, passing each other bolts and screwdrivers, and realising half-way through that we were building some of it the right way up, and some of it upside-down. All we needed was a couple of bowler hats. At one point, I stood, watching him fitting the right bracket in the wrong place, and listened to him talking about the table he’d bought for changing nappies on, and how his insomnia was finally going to come in handy.

My old mate, who’d said I could sleep on his settee for a few days, who’d been shoulder-to-shoulder with me when Brigitte Nielsen ran riot on Fantasy Football, who’d shared the terror of that harrowing first episode of Unplanned, and who’d stood, with his arm around me, singing ‘Three Lions’ at Wembley in 1996.1 could see the grey in his beard and I imagined how he’d look with his own tiny baby in his arms. Even New Lads have to grow up eventually.

In 1998, I finally made a series of The Frank Skinner Show that I was really proud of. Jilly and Juliet were missing documentaries, so they went back to specialise in that line of work. The new producer was John McHugh, a short, stocky bull-terrier of an Irishman, who was something of a chat-show veteran, having cut his sharp teeth with Irish chat-show superstar Gay Byrne back in the old country. John was slightly scary, but he really knew his stuff and didn’t mind telling me if I was talking bollocks. At the same time, he had real faith in my comic judgement and would often take the big risk if he could see that I was really keen.

I had some ideas for the new series. Firstly, instead of a specially filmed title sequence like we’d had on the first two series, I wanted to open the show, in the studio, with a song. I had specially written one for the job. It was called ‘Funtime Frankie’. Of course, it’s just a light-hearted singalong, but the lyrics have a certain truth about them:

The first show was a Christmas Special, and I had an idea for a sketch. A few days earlier, I had got out of the bath at my flat and put on a pair of white briefs, at which point the Venga Boys came on the radio, so I started dancing in the bathroom, just in my white pants. Then I saw myself in the mirror. I absolutely pissed myself. I tried to carry on dancing, but it just looked too ridiculous. Now, imagine trying to pitch that as a sketch-idea to your Irish bull-terrier producer.

The guests were great. I explained to country-music megastar (there I go again, with my little descriptions) Kenny Rogers what the verb ‘to roger’ meant, and then asked him about his fast-food chain, ‘Kenny Rogers Roosters’; I gave Eric Clapton a demonstration of how to play air-guitar; asked David Essex, when you’re in a car with loads of sex-crazed, hysterical, screaming girls’ faces pressed against the window, what facial expression do you adopt; and, after holding a metal-detector against Martin Kemp’s head to see if it registered the metal plate he’d had fitted after his brain-tumour operation, (it did), I said, ‘You wouldn’t get this on Parkinson.’ And then there was Tara Palmer-Tomkinson.

They say that lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but when It-girl and all-round socialite Tara Palmer-Tomkinson walked on to The Frank Skinner Show, I had a flashback to Brigitte Nielsen, just ten months earlier. Again, I don’t know what Tara was on, but it wasn’t Earth. After some garbled nonsense which made me wonder whether she’d had a snort, a stroke, or just a very posh upbringing, she admitted that she was expecting Frank Butcher, not Frank Skinner, and that when we’d met in the corridor, she thought I was someone from wardrobe. How camp am I? Her eyes were all over the place, she kept standing up and asking companies to send her free stuff, knelt down to demonstrate how her dog kisses her, and suddenly became transfixed by her image on the studio-screen. After stopping to re-arrange her hair and adjust her clothing, she turned to me and said, ‘I’ve just seen myself on the monitor.’

‘I haven’t said that since I was at school,’ I replied. At one stage, she asked me if I was single, and what I was doing after. I was sure she was just kidding, but I explained that we could never be, because she was part of the in-crowd and I was part of the Berni-Inn crowd. Mind you, if she’d been serious, I would have happily shagged her, but only as an act of class-war. The photograph of her, wild-eyed and sitting on my lap, was in every newspaper over the next week. Two days later she flew to Arizona, to go into rehab.

Series Four had one big addition to the show: a commercial break. I had moved, lock, stock, and barrel, to ITV. There was a time – Morecambe and Wise are the example that everyone quotes – when people switched channels and everything turned to shit. The problem then was often that, because people were on the staff of either the BBC or ITV, you had to leave your talented team behind, but in these days of independent production companies and freelance short-term contracts, you just take them along. Of course, it can still all turn to shit, but it can do that at any time for any number of reasons. That’s why I wear a gaunt and worried look.

However, for Series Four, I still ended up needing a new producer. John McHugh had been poached, lured away by the offer of an executive post with, you guessed it, the BBC. Honestly, there’s no loyalty in this business. He’s still my mate, though. I see every lapsed Catholic as a long-term project. Speaking of which, the new producer was another one, Robyn O’Brien.

The good thing about this is, when the new team is assembled, I can make my usual promise that I won’t ask anyone to work harder than I do. But Robyn comes fucking close. She is my producer, confidante, big sister, nurse, sternest critic, biggest fan, supplier of fags and tea and all-round morale-booster. She worked on the previous series as one of McHugh’s lieutenants and has since produced two Unplanneds, which is a piece of piss to produce, and one Frank Skinner Show, which is a fucking nightmare. She has to deal with guests pulling out and me asking for complicated last-minute props and researchers being off sick, and me telling her that extra weight she is getting on her upper arms is known as ‘bingo-wings’. I know, because I read it in Viz. If all this sounds more like a tribute than a description, that’s because it is one. Honestly, do you begrudge a woman who works her tits off to help me to make you laugh one measly paragraph?

There’s a lot of other showbiz moments I could have put in this book: my theatre career, acting in two West End plays (Art at Wyndham’s Theatre, in Charing Cross Road, and Cooking with Elvis, at the Whitehall); my success as a stand-up in Melbourne and Sydney in 1997; my appearance on the first-ever Celebrity Stars in Their Eyes when, after performing as Elvis Costello, I scared the backstage staff by storming off as the winner was announced, camply screaming, ‘Well, they might have stars in their eyes but they’ve got shit in their fuckin’ ears’; and my scooping of the much-respected ‘Rear of the Year’ award in 1998, but enough is enough.

It began with a slightly mental piece of extravagance. In 1997, at Christie’s, I paid £11,200 for a blue velvet shirt that, according to the accompanying letter, was a stage-shirt worn in 1956 by Elvis Presley. The picture which accompanied its listing in the Christie’s catalogue, was of Elvis performing at the Mississippi State Fair, in Tupelo, Mississippi, September 1956. The implication was clear. This was the blue velvet shirt that Elvis wore in Tupelo. This was especially significant. Elvis was born in Tupelo and spent his early dirt-poor days there. In 1956, he had just become a big star. It was a classic local-lad-makes-good homecoming.

Now, obviously, I mean, obviously, there is no comparison between the professional success that I’ve had and that enjoyed by Elvis. Well, there is, but it’s meagre versus mega. Still, a rags-to-riches, local-lad-makes-good story always has a special significance for me. I still think of that Birmingham Town Hall gig in 1991. So I bought the shirt.

Then, after a few weeks, I was looking at some photos of the Tupelo gig, and I noticed that the velvet shirt Elvis was wearing seemed to only have three buttons at the top. My shirt had buttons all the way down. I was gutted. The evidence wasn’t conclusive, the shirt in the photos was largely covered by guitar, but it didn’t look good. Then I had an idea.

All this was begging for a documentary. I’d travel round America, talking to people who knew Elvis in 1956, and end up meeting Elvis’s 1970s bodyguard, Dave Hebler, who had signed the letter claiming that the shirt was a ‘stage-shirt worn in 1956’. It would be a dream job, two weeks of pure Elvis. ITV were dead keen, and we signed up Paul Wilmshurst, the bloke who still thinks I’m ‘wistful’, to produce and direct.

The journey started in Memphis. Well, it would have done, but I got food-poisoning on the plane and had to spend an unscheduled night in Houston, Texas. I was there for less than twenty-four hours but I made one fascinating discovery. If you phone Room 70451 at the Houston Sheraton Hotel, the tune the keys make sounds exactly like the melody-line of ‘Three Lions’. This cheered me up, and I was soon feeling well again. Paul had kept me in the dark about the nature of the shoot. I still didn’t know if the shirt was the one from Tupelo, where we were going, or who I was going to meet. Nothing. Paul wanted my reactions on camera to be real and spontaneous.

My first meeting wasn’t at all what I expected. It was with a sixty-nine-year-old Memphis head-case called Jimmy Denson, ‘Jimmy D from Memphis, Tennessee’ as he kept saying. Jimmy, white-whiskered in shabby denims and a battered baseball hat, looked like an ex-boxer who had either had too many punches or too many drinks, probably because that’s exactly what he was. He’d lived in the same housing project as the young Elvis, who he still insisted on calling ‘the baby’. Everything Jimmy said was at ninety miles an hour, very critical of Elvis, and a bit mental. One breathtakingly fast speech went:

‘The baby was weak and retarded. He couldn’t walk down the street without staring at his feet. In fact, he never raised his head until Dewey Phillips gave him speed in 1954, and then he couldn’t sleep for four days. He was a truck-jumping, drug-taking, infantile half-wit, just like his grandmother, Minnie Mae. Her husband deserted her because she was an idiot, with the mind of a five-year-old. She went to my father’s church, seven days a week. The author John Grisham has assured me that he will act as my lawyer in a case to show the world Colonel Parker’s trickery and Elvis’s drug-sickery, and Elvis had to wear a colostomy bag on his last two tours.’

Then we drove out to meet Marty Lacker. He was one of Elvis’s posse, or the ‘Memphis Mafia’ as they called themselves. He was fat and balding, with glasses, and his eyes looked like they had cried a lot. Talking to him reminded me of talking to an old ex-footballer. He spoke of a special, exciting time that had gone forever, and his tone was coloured by both celebration and mourning, each bleeding into the other.

I asked him about when the Beatles visited Graceland. He said that, despite stories to the contrary, Elvis got on especially well with John Lennon. Lennon had told Marty he got a lot of invitations to meet stars but usually said no. He was once invited to join Frank Sinatra at his table in a restaurant, but soon realised that Frank only wanted him around to attract young girls. Marty said Frank had tried exactly the same thing with Elvis, back in the fifties. Who’d have thought that Frank Sinatra would need to stoop to such tactics? I wonder what restaurant Robbie Williams eats in . . .

Anyway, Marty thought my shirt could have been the real one, but wasn’t sure. Then we went to Tupelo and met the woman who was curator of the Elvis Birthplace Museum. Since the Elvis documentary went out, two or three Elvis fans have taken me to one side and told me that this woman owns the real Tupelo shirt, but, rather than display it at the museum, she keeps it hidden and tells no one of its existence. I didn’t know about this rumour at the time. When I asked her about the Tupelo gig she said it was a great day but not as exciting as the birth of her children. Oh, for fuck’s sake. I hate it when people come out with that sort of shit.

Then I drove my Buick Le Sabre out to the deserted fairground where the gig had been in ’56. There were a couple of battered old wooden grandstands there. They had been packed with Elvis fans on the day of the show. I sat on the splintered seating with an old guy named Bill, who had been a cop on crowd-control duty that day. He was still dapper, grey hair greased back, but looked like he’d had a tough life. I asked him a lot about the gig but he kept switching the subject to his days as a ‘champion old-time-country fiddler’. Obviously, this was fascinating, but I really wanted to know more about that day in ’56. Could he remember what Elvis was wearing?

Bill paused for a while, and then explained that, in competition, you were only allowed to play tunes from what he called ‘the old-time-country-fiddling bible’, 1001 Fiddle Tunes. Having completely given in, I said to Bill it was a pity that he hadn’t brought his fiddle along with him, so that he could have given us a tune. He said he didn’t play anymore because he had low blood-sugar.

Then I drove to Nashville to meet Jimmy Velvet, an old friend of Elvis and an obsessive collector of showbiz memorabilia. Or at least he had been till he’d had to sell a lot of it to pay for his recent divorce. Jimmy took me to a massive warehouse where he still had Elton John’s platform-boots and feathered hat, Christopher Reeve’s Superman outfit, John Travolta’s white suit from Saturday Night Fever, Liberace’s mink bedspread, Jackie Gleason’s Rolls-Royce golf-cart, and a hat that had been made for John Wayne, with a note that said, ‘This crown is too damn small. OK for museum or something. John Wayne.’

Then I drove out to see Lamar Fike, another member of the Memphis Mafia. Lamar reminded me of a sixty-year-old version of my ex-manager, but with a southern drawl. He was a big fat man. So much so that, when we were filming him, we didn’t need to mark where he was previously standing because you could still see the indentation in the carpet. No kidding.

When I showed him the shirt, he began talking about Elvis and clothes. He explained that Elvis never bought people clothes. Instead, he bought people cars, ‘because he always knew what size they wanted’. Lamar was not a fan of Elvis’s ex-wife, Priscilla. I said she was beautiful. He described her as ‘biologically fortunate’. He also talked about how Priscilla was fourteen when Elvis fell for her: ‘Hell, he’d got underwear older than that.’

Lamar said the shirt was definitely the one from Tupelo and that he’d sign a letter to say so. ‘I’m a walking authenticator,’ he declared. He left me with one last story, of how he was stricken with fear when a plane he was on with Elvis ran into turbulence. Elvis asked him why he was so scared and Lamar replied, ‘I don’t want to die in a plane crash with you. I don’t like the billing.’

That night, I drove through dense woodland on the outskirts of Nashville till I arrived in a house in Blueberry Hill Lane, the home of Elvis’s old guitarist, Scotty Moore. My heart was thumping when I heard the front door begin to open. Scotty was a lot thicker-set than he had been in the fifties, but still with the same haircut and a nose that couldn’t make up its mind where it wanted to go. I was totally star-struck. I began by thanking him for his guitar-playing on ‘Mystery Train’. I said it was the best record ever made. He looked genuinely chuffed. We chatted, about the shirt and other stuff, but as I came to leave, I did something I don’t think I ever did before in my life. Maybe it’s because he was a musician, I don’t know, but as I said goodbye to him, I unironically used the expression ‘man’. ‘You changed the world, man,’ I said. He looked kind of shy.

Just as I reached ‘weary’, this rich swell of voices lifted me up until I felt like I was floating on a cloud. It was The Jordanaires, joining in like the Skinnerettes do when I sing an old standard, and like they themselves did when Elvis held impromptu gospel sessions around the studio piano. I think I knew then that Elvis had worn this shirt. It was an almost supernatural moment. I felt closer to my life-long hero than I had ever felt.

I finally met the slightly scary karate-black-belt former-bodyguard, Dave Hebler, in a car park near the beach at Santa Monica. He looked kind of old, but when I put my arm around his shoulders, he felt like he was made of granite. He said he’d told Elvis about a fancy-dress party he was going to, done up as Elvis, and Elvis had walked into one of his cavernous wardrobes and come out with an armful of clothes, including the shirt, and told him to take his pick. He couldn’t recall any mention of 1956, even though he had said so on the letter. I pressed him on this but he could hardly recall the letter, let alone the gift thirty years earlier. In the end, he wrote me a new note of authentication. I found it very moving. It said:

I know this last section has gone on a bit, but that documentary meant a lot to me. Just think of it as being like when your mate feels the need to show you ALL of the photos from his dream holiday in one go. As I said to a journalist just before the documentary went out, ‘It’s always great to work on something you’re really passionate about. I’ve done a football show, I’ve done an Elvis show, now all I need is a show about anal sex and I’ve got the hat-trick.’

There are some lovely photos of us, wrapped up in each other and kissing. There’s that smile that made me forget to breathe. There’s that bracelet I bought her. She tells the journalist, Polly Graham, that she’s off to Genoa this weekend, to watch Watford with her friend, the one who visited me and Dave backstage when we were doing Unplanned.

All this sounds like a logistical nightmare to me. Just getting hold of the phone numbers will be bad enough, but then trying to explain to various Italian barmen, over the noise of clinking glasses and Europop, in what I’m guessing will be indifferent Italian, why the arrival of one woman will require an unscheduled trip to the cash-and-carry, well, it doesn’t bear thinking about. I just hope Polly knows what she’s taking on. I know I didn’t.

I wish I hadn’t let my publisher talk me into writing that bit about what love is. It sort of celebrated domestic realities like making hot drinks for your poorly bird and talking in the dark. Turns out I was boring the arse off her. What a berk I am. Still, everything in the book represents how I felt at the time of writing and I’m not changing it now.

I’m going to the Albion tomorrow, it’s a pre-season friendly against Sunderland. I’ll be all self-conscious about the Mirror article and make a fool of myself by trying too hard to look sprightly and youthful. Still, you’d better ring the Albion refreshment stall and tell them to get some extra tea in. You know me, Polly, I’m a middle-aged alcoholic. I just love to have a good time.

Oh, don’t mind me. I have to have a quick wallow before I bounce back. I have, of course, a classic opportunity here to give you the cautionary tale that is my side of the story, but you know I won’t. Ours was a very public, tabloidy, OK-magazine-type love-affair and, as my mate Jack always says, ‘If you dance with the crocodile, you have to be prepared for what happens when the music stops.’

I wouldn’t mind, but only yesterday I broke my pledge of non-contact and sent her one last e-mail, thanking her for all the good times and wishing her happiness for the future. She said she’d spoken to the Mirror, but only to tell them what a nice bloke I am. It’s Birmingham Magistrates Court all over again. Speaking of which, there’ll be champagne corks popping round my ex-wife’s house tonight.

Well, that’s about it. That’s my life. I thought I’d better write it all down now, in case I start drinking again. That option is never far from my thoughts. I sometimes think of doing a one-off West End show called Frank Skinner Starts Drinking Again. I imagine myself strolling on stage, glass in hand, as they play that old cowboy number, ‘Back in the Saddle Again’, and steadily getting smashed in front of an appreciative crowd. Maybe if the book bombs.

Speaking of the book, I’m sure there are parts in here where I’ve sounded cocky, or grand, or even downright unpleasant, but I’m not going to go back through it, cleaning myself up. I’ve really tried hard to tell the truth because I think, in a book like this, that’s important. Like Polonius said, ‘This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.’ At the end of the day, I’m just an ordinary bloke. I know that, because I still say ‘Whoops!’ about nine or ten times when I watch You’ve Been Framed. But I think the life of an ordinary bloke can still be, in a way, sort of extraordinary.

It took six months to write, so if you’ve taken longer than that to read it you need to question your commitment. By now, all being well, I will have moved on to the next project, my ex-wife’s response in the tabloids will have bought her a new kitchen, and Caroline will be lying on a beach somewhere with a Genoan bloke in his early twenties. Still, it’s better than Jerry Springer.

I hope our Nora is still speaking to me, and I hope I haven’t put off any woman who could have been the great love of my life. Who knows, maybe the woman who could be the great love of my life needs to have read this and still think I’m OK. After all, this is what she’ll be getting. I’m not really ashamed of anything in here, well, except the stripy blazer on the cover, but I just borrowed that for the photo-shoot. Honest. So, anyway, maybe I should start carrying copies around with me, and handing them out to attractive women in bars.