Frank Skinner Autobiography (50 page)

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.

Now, making
The Frank Skinner Show
is not as piss-easy as it looks. I spend five days in the office writing it, one day rehearsing and recording, and another day editing it, plus an evening when I do two gigs to try out the stand-up.

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?

So, Series Four went great. The guests were mainly chosen because they were women I fancied: Kylie Minogue, Kelly Brook, Bjork, Katy Hill, Sam Fox, Denise Lewis and Debra Stevenson. What's the point of having your own chat show if you can't pack it with crumpet?

Anyway, I'm sure you've heard quite enough about
The Frank Skinner Show.
Fucking hell, we're not far from the end, are we?

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.

There is, however, one last professional project that I'd like to tell you about. I'll try and keep it pacey, and concentrate on the off-camera or cutting-room-floor stuff you wouldn't have seen on the resulting TV programme.

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.'

How long before Caroline's talking about me like that?

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.

You know, I could do this for a living.

Marty said that, when he watches a comedian on the telly, he still thinks stuff like ‘Elvis would have loved that joke' and he played me a couple of tracks from a Celine Dion album, and explained to me how Elvis would have done them.

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.

I remember when Gareth Southgate missed that penalty against Germany. The next day he said he'd been thinking about it, and when you considered all the disabled people in the world it put the whole thing into perspective. And I thought, ‘Oh, and that makes it alright, does it?'

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.'

Jimmy, all gold rings, perfect teeth and grey quiff, spoke a lot about the shirt and said that it was in worryingly good nick for a 1956 garment, because velvet doesn't normally age that well. I liked Jimmy a lot. He had all the energy and sparkle of a man who had recently left his wife for a much younger woman.

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.