Frank Skinner Autobiography (43 page)

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.

Malcolm advised me not to do Edinburgh in 1991. He reckoned I would be better off going down to London and cashing in on the fact that most of the top turns were up in Scotland.

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.

Malcolm was very keen.

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.

Anyway, on the second Wednesday, I was leaving the flat around lunchtime, to have yet another crisis meeting with Malcolm, when the phone went. I had been nominated for the Perrier Award, along with Jack Dee, Eddie Izzard, Lily Savage, and an American kids' entertainer called Avner the Eccentric.

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.

A few years later, a journalist from the
Mirror
told me that Malcolm had been very talkative about my drinking habits, marriage, and other murky areas of my past. Journalists often lie about these things in order to get a juicy quote in response. I hope he was lying about Malcolm.

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.

That night, I went up on to Arthur's Seat, that tall, majestic hill that looms over the old town, and, underneath the twinkling stars, fucked the arse off a woman I'd met. Her original request was a bit more unusual, but I explained that I couldn't because they'd taken it back to be engraved.

Two days later, the
Guardian
said, ‘Skinner is the nearest thing to Bernard Manning to win the Perrier Award. He has taken the traditional Northern working men's club act, and subtly re-invented the genre as something fresh and right on.' I think I preferred being a Theseus.

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.