Frank Skinner Autobiography (45 page)

If something's funny, I laugh at it. If it happens to be my gag, so what? I've had to read this book through a few times before publication, and I always laugh at the line about someone fucking the college goat. Even though I know it's coming.

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.

Anyway, there was one bit on the
Blue Heaven
tape when I really laughed. I was talking to a barmaid about my brother, Brian. He had murdered somebody, and she'd seen the whole thing.

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:

Life is like a goldfish. It may sparkle and shimmer but, if you look closely, there is usually a long piece of shit hanging off the back of it.

The series passed by virtually unnoticed. I was starting to wonder, how many unsuccessful TV series could I make before broadcasters lost faith in me? The answer was quite a lot, actually.

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'.

Anyway, the reason I lump these three big tours together is because I think I should say a bit about my tours in general.

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.

So, if a club gig is like a degree, a tour gig is like a Ph.D. I have more scope to specialise.

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.

Anyway, eventually, the ‘In' drawer fills to the top, and then I go on tour.

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
.

That night, I walked on stage at Cliff's Pavilion, Southend-on-Sea. You could feel the tension in the air. It was like following Sean Hughes at the 4-X multiplied by about twenty. I had made my decision. It was, I felt, possible to do jokes about what had happened, without making fun of her actual death. I went for it:

‘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'.