How badly does Frank Skinner want to be centre-stage? It's a question that,
not long ago, wasn't hard to answer. Skinner, it seemed, was rarely off our
screens, whether hosting his ITV chat show, acting in his own sitcom or
working with David Baddiel - talking about football or shooting the breeze,
even getting to No1 with their football anthem Three Lions.
Today, he's no recluse - he sold out all 69 dates of his comeback tour last
year. But television work? Not so much. “When I first started doing
interviews,” he says, “the question was always, ‘Do people recognise you in
the street?' Well, I've just started speaking to journalists again, and I
notice that question is coming back.” At which the affable Skinner
temporarily loses his composure in a fit of the giggles. “It's brilliant!”
he insists. “I love that! People know that I'm alive, but they're still not
absolutely certain that they'll ever see me again.”
Well, it's their loss. Skinner's live show, after a cautious start, proved he
was as good a comic as he ever was. And now he's written a book about it.
Frank Skinner on the Road, to be serialised in The Times, takes us from his
tentative try-out gigs to his triumphant trio of homecoming shows at the
Birmingham NIA. If you want to know how a celebrity stand-up gets himself
back in the swing, it's even better than Comedian, the documentary about
Jerry Seinfeld's painstaking return to the night job. But as the 700,000-
odd readers of Skinner's autobiography will know, he is pathologically
self-revealing. He talks about the job. But he also lets us squint at his
insecurities, his bouts of prickliness, his up-and-down relationship with
his girlfriend and at the once-prodigious promiscuity he's decided to put a
cap on. So to speak.
“Well,” he says, “me talking about my sex life, that's irrelevant, I do that
all the time. But me talking about the fact that I worry about reviews and
stuff - comedians want to appear bulletproof, they want people to think they
don't mind if a joke goes badly. And there is some truth in that, I do still
think I'm the king of comedy in exile. But I have doubts about every area of
my life, this one is no different.”
Indeed he does. As he geared up to go back on stage last year, this
Perrier-winner, the man whose previous headlining gig was playing to 6,000
people at Battersea Power Station in 1997, wondered if he'd lost it. He
tried out material in clubs alongside comics less famous but more match-fit.
“I really don't know if I'm good enough,” he writes at the start of the
book, “if I've lost it.” But after seven years with ITV, after starting but
not finishing writing a novel, he knew he had to do it. “I think of myself
first and foremost as a stand-up,” he says, “but can you say that for ten
years if you haven't actually done it? That's like Michael Winner being a
film director still.”
It's not as if he needed the money. After all, his bank manager had just told
him he was rich enough to never work again. He hates to think it was ever
about the money. “But when you know that you don't have to work, there is
something that changes, there just is. If I want to learn French, or the
lute, if I want to do that I can do it. I mean, I think the tour has shown
me that I do have to work. But for other reasons.”
Once upon a time, he toured for a mixture of pride, money and sex. Now he's
settled down with his girlfriend Cath - “It's going brilliantly,” Skinner
says, ten months after she moved into his riverside flat near the Houses of
Parliament. They are even considering having kids. But Cath has to read a
story or two from his past in the book, and sit through some unrelentingly
graphic shagging stories in the show. She may be used to him talking about
sex with other women, but she can't relish it, can she?
“No,” he says, “I don't think she did relish it. But in the show I'm quite
non-lecherous: I say the time's got to stop for one night stands. A lot of
comedians are advertising for sex: I've even seen comedians say, look, I
would like to have sex with someone after the show if anyone wants to come
back. I think that's a little bit forward. I had to turn a few people down
on tour but it wasn't difficult. I didn't sit in bed pining for fresh meat.”
As the show made clear, he has had a lot of sex - a lot of it with groupies.
“But when people think of groupies, they think of Kate Hudson in Almost
Famous. Whereas what they should think is Michelle McManus. What you do -
and this doesn't sound great - is decide that having sex is more important
than who it's with. So you get good nights. And you get nights when you have
to think, well, I don't want to not have sex, because at breakfast the sound
man and the tour manager will think I'm a failure. So it's like collecting
Green Shield Stamps, it's not about the individual any more, and looking
back I don't think that's very good for the soul ... But it means that a lot
of ugly women get to have sex, so it's not all bad.”
Skinner, a slim and fresh-faced 51, is a mix of endearing self-deprecation and
enormous strength of will. The youngest of four children, a former factory
worker, college lecturer and drunk, he gave up alcohol almost overnight
without recourse to Alcoholics Anony-mous, then forced himself into stand-up
at the age of 30 by booking himself an hour at the Edinburgh Fringe before
he even had an act.
His rise was swift, from that first Fringe in 1988 to winning the Perrier
three years later. Behind the confidence, there's the self-doubt - and then
behind the self-doubt there's another reserve of confidence. “For all the
insecurities I talk about,” he says, “I have a massive self-belief. I always
think it's going to turn out all right.”
And yet people still ask him about how he feels not being on telly - most
recently, Skinner notes wryly, The Times's photographer, half an hour
earlier. He could, he reckons, be on TV every fortnight if he fancied it.
“But why?”
So while Skinner would still like to be a mainstream attraction, as he was in
the heyday of Fantasy Football League and the chat show, he is no longer
interested in the kinds of compromises he might need to get there. “I don't
want to do cookery programmes or live in the jungle. Why do it? I don't know
why people want to keep up their profile if the profile is ‘embarrassingly
s***'.
“I interviewed the boxer Marvin Hagler years ago, and he said to me, ‘To be a
champion you have to think like a challenger.' And I instinctively think
like a challenger. It's almost harder being well-known. Everyone's waiting
for the ‘he's lost it' moment.” He admits he wasn't thinking like a
challenger any more towards the end of the chat show, or doing Baddiel and
Skinner Unplanned. “No, I wasn't. When you've got Westlife on for the third
time, you start thinking, why am I doing this? But then half an hour ago
your photographer asked me ‘Do you mind not being on telly any more?' and I
start thinking, oh, it's worth doing telly just to stop people saying that.
Maybe I'll say yes to Strictly Come Dancing next time just to shut people
up.”
So it's hard to know how seriously to take Skinner's witty worry about his
gently faded fame. His dream, he enthuses, would be to be a Saturday
early-evening entertainer in the Bruce Forsyth mould while secretly writing
“quite difficult novels. Fabulous! It would be like having a secret
identity, like being Batman.”
He admits that he's a control freak - television crews came to hate him, he
reckons, because he could be so stroppy: “Come Judgment Day, I would not
want to be judged on showday behaviour. I'm a lot more chilled since I
haven't been on television three series a year. My girlfriend thinks I'm a
nicer person. It's a very big price to pay!”
Still, whatever his TV prospects, Frank Skinner is going to hang around. He'll
tour again. He'll still flit between thinking he's no good and thinking he's
the best. But that's all right. It's what being a comedian is about. “When
Eric Morecambe died,” says Skinner, “he was doing a gig. He'd always said to
his wife, ‘I'd hate to die like Tommy Cooper.' So when he thought he
was having his heart attack he crawled offstage so he wouldn't die onstage;
he died in the wings. For me, if I was dying in the wings, I would need to
crawl onstage.”
Frank Skinner appears at the Secret Policeman's Ball at the Albert Hall,
London SW7, on Oct 4 (www.protectthehuman. com/ball); Frank Skinner on the
Road will be published by Century on October 2. See T2 for extracts from
Monday. Frank Skinner Live (at the Birmingham NIA) is released on DVD on Nov
10
