Frank Skinner Autobiography (15 page)

One that always throws me is when they say, ‘Well, how did you feel that went?' If these fuckers are going to come to the dressing room, they can at least shoulder the post-show-critique responsibility and not try to switch it on to me.

An actor friend told me he was once waiting for a backstage visit from a fellow actor and was keen to see what his colleague would say about the performance. Eventually, the fellow actor put his head around the door and said, ‘You bastard. Fancy a drink?' That was his only comment on the show. That's one to dissect in the early hours.

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

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

‘Well . . .' I'm trying to sound cool. ‘Erm . . . no. I'm not going to put out.'

‘Thank you,' says the short guy with an air of impatience, ‘now will you tell him to come back with me?'

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

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

So ends the first day of my weekend. I'm quite enjoying the present tense. There isn't enough of that in autobiographies.

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

She takes the last bit quite well. Dave once said to me that our ideal situation would be if we had houses next door to each other. Obviously, that would have been ridiculous.

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

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

Caroline likes the house. So she should at two million fucking quid! And yes, I think that did deserve an exclamation mark. It'll be the first time I've lived in a house that wasn't owned by the council. Ooo, if me mom and dad could see me now. ‘Maybe they can,' says Caroline.

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

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

Then Caroline and me went shopping. She buys a slinky black top for the BAFTAs. I buy four hip-hop CDs. She buys two Madonnas and a Moby.

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

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

I leave Caroline to more shopping and head back to watch the FA Cup Final on my stupidly big telly. When I moved into this flat three years ago, the first thing I bought was the big telly. I had that telly before I had tables and chairs. When I watched it, all I had to sit on was the box it came in. You can put up with a lot if you've got a really big telly.

Oh dear, this next section is very bad timing as far as the book is concerned because I just got myself a bit upset about that dream and then the squiggly green line, and now it's ‘Abide With Me'. Sorry if this is starting to get like
The Champ
.

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

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

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

The 7 o'clock
Unplanned
show is shit. I'm glad it's ending tonight. A woman asks the same question three times: ‘Why is Frank really sexy but he's not good-looking?' I think there's a very obvious answer to her question but I don't have a bank statement with me.

The post-show visitor is a film director called Mark Locke. I was going to be in a film he made last winter but I wasn't available. I was pissed off. I really liked the script, about a seven-foot boxing shrimp. I was due to play its manager. I know Mark didn't like the show because he doesn't look me in the eye when he says he liked the show.

Dave tells me that Douglas Adams died today. He wrote
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
I was introduced to him once and I started singing ‘Bright Eyes'. He just looked at me. It's a song from the film
Watership Down
, written by RICHARD Adams. Whoops.

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

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

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

Jonathan Ross and his wife, Jane, are among the post-show visitors. As are Gerry the Mess-Stick man, and some of his family. All lovely people, but I go home early and wiped out. Tomorrow is the big one. West Brom versus Bolton in the first leg of the play-offs.

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