In the evangelically ordered world of reformed drinkers, times and dates
matter, and Frank Skinner has emphatically not had a drink since September
24, 1986. Except that he has one every Sunday morning, as the chalice is
tipped towards his lips at the altar of a church in north London. For devout
Catholics such as Skinner, Communion wine is miraculously transformed into
the blood of Christ and is therefore far less likely to reawaken a fearsome
thirst than sherry trifle for tea.
When we meet, he has been reading Isaiah for Lent, it being apparently passé
in his faith merely to forgo a treat. “My priest says that’s just another
version of Weight Watchers,” he says witheringly. Rarely with Skinner does
the punch line fail to arrive: where is the lad’s lad, you are thinking, the
Three Lions fanatic and dirty comic? To be honest, so am I.
He looks much better than he deserves, more groomed, boyish and trim in his
Sunday-best jacket, sober trousers and weirdly clashing, greige-coloured
slip-on trainers, which might be Prada but apparently are not. Where are
they from? “Not sure. Someone sent them to me. What do you reckon?” You
don’t expect Skinner to be interested in his wardrobe, but then nor do you
expect him to be quite so fast with the Swift quotations and fierce in his
criticism of Ann Widdecombe for converting to Rome in protest at the
ordination of women. “We shouldn’t let them in, simple as that.”
Since he came back to the church a decade ago, Skinner’s faith has been the
constant in a life that, though successful, can seem unfulfilled: his loner
quality belies the impression of cheery companionship with mates such as
David Baddiel and his Fantasy Football get-togethers. Just as he was
completing his 2001 autobiography, strewn with affectionate references to
his then girlfriend, Caroline Faraday, she published her tabloid account of
how he had been too old for her. There have been two failed relationships
since then, but today we find him “immensely single” and not hopeful. “I’m
just not very good at relationships with women,” he shrugs. “You accept that
some people can’t swim — and since I split with my last girlfriend, I have
thought about just accepting that I can’t do it. I’m fed up of watching
people cry.”
But we are here to talk about making them laugh with his latest writing
venture, an ITV sitcom called Shane, in which he also stars as an embittered
minicab driver whose wife is taking the Educating Rita route, leaving him to
mourn his boring marriage and wasted chances. “The best he can manage,”
sighs Skinner sympathetically, “is an On the Buses-type refuge by fancying
the barmaid or his daughter’s friends.” It’s an old-fashioned format spiked
with arty references that might be lost on the primetime Emmerdale audience.
Cracks about fat birds, combined with a spoof on American Beauty, make for
an untested format, but one that illustrates the divided halves of Skinner,
who grew up in unremarkable poverty yet appeared for the boffins on a gown v
town University Challenge for Comic Relief. “There was a time when I thought
that to be a comic, you had to turn the graphic equalisers down on certain
parts of your personality and up on others, but not any more.”
Skinner loves his contradictory new creation, his stab at matching the morose
philosophical genius of his hero, Hancock. “People used to say to me, ‘You
are so much funnier when you split up with your girlfriend.’” He grew up
loving “working-class sitcom” — Steptoe and Son, Till Death Us Do Part,
Rising Damp — and has borrowed their innate pessimism, dubbed laughter and
curiously reassuring certainties about the madness of men in middle age. “A
lot of today’s sitcoms are literally very bright, with big performances.
Typically, they feature a graphic-designer father and two kids at
university. I wanted to get right away from that.” Shane is untroubled by
fashions in comedy, coming from another, older, more certain world to the
single-camera realism of The Office or The Royle Family (and he seems never
to have heard of Rob Brydon’s award-winning Marion and Geoff), though the
writer’s ego is just as central.
Skinner had always earmarked the title role for himself. “I wouldn’t want to
take the risk of writing something that was really good and not being in it.
My rationale was, if Samuel Beckett wrote a Carry On film... I wanted it to
be dark. Shane says that he and his wife used to fancy each other, but now
the main thrill is studying each other’s physical decay. It’s not the kind
of line you’d normally get in an ITV sitcom, but it is true in long-term
relationships.”
He is, however, almost romantic about his relationships with men such as
Baddiel, with whom he shared a flat, and a pornography collection, for five
years — until the girlfriends got in the way. Baddiel ended up with one,
Morwenna Banks, and a baby. Skinner, who for years fretted about not being
asked to the best parties, tired of attending premieres in Hawaiian shirts
and now stays home to watch arts documentaries and play pinball. Lonely? He
smiles: “I don’t go places I don’t want to go. Al-Qaeda are for ever
hovering. Maybe I’ll look back and think, I wish I’d gone out with a Page
Three girl. I haven’t avoided them, but why would they want to go out with
me?” He insists that he has never had famous friends apart from Baddiel, and
Jonathan Ross, and Eric Clapton, who shepherded him towards sobriety for a
while. “When he was convinced I wasn’t going back on the drink, he moved on.
Part of the reason I did a chat show was to meet celebrities. I’ve never
thought people would know who I am if I approach them in a bar.”
Things have turned out well for the factory worker from Oldbury in the West
Midlands who, after two degrees (the second an MA on Samuel Johnson) and
years of drunken oblivion, was on the scrapheap at 30. When he stopped
getting paralytic and started telling the same jokes he’d told at the glass
factory and the pub to paying audiences, escape finally beckoned. “The only
thing I was aware of being good at was making people laugh,” he says. “I
can’t ride a bike or roller-skate. It was almost as if God was saying, don’t
even bother looking at anything else — it was the only way I could be above
the rest of the crowd.”
Still using his real name, Chris Collins, he became “world famous in
Birmingham”, and impressed the Edinburgh Festival and London’s
alternative-comedy scene. He won the 1991 Perrier Award and caught the mood
of a cheeky lad-mag audience primed for the views of a non-racist Bernard
Manning on anal sex and the offside rule, two not necessarily related
obsessions. The chronic no-hoper ended up being voted the greediest man in
Britain for his allegedly huge contractual demands from the BBC.
“Welcome to my world,” he smiles as I enter an elegant hotel room with tweedy
sofas and a flickering fire. He nibbles daintily at a fruit platter. But at
47, Skinner has not changed much. At great expense, he had the recording
dates of Shane moved so that he could attend West Bromwich Albion home
games. Even in his dapper tailoring, he carries the homely whiff of pork
scratchings and — figuratively speaking (in reality, he is highly fragrant)
— the bedroom “piss buckets” his elder sister was embarrassed for him to
mention in his autobiography.
When he went to university, he had never heard of Shelley or Auden, and didn’t
read his first novel until he was 21. “It was amazing — I could feel my
brain exploding.” Not to mention his liver. He stopped drinking out of fear
that it would kill him. When the breakfast sherry became Pernod, alarm bells
finally sounded. He still sniffs the tops of freshly uncapped beer, dreams
about cider and would love to do his Unplanned double act with Baddiel while
drunk, as an experiment. “But it’s a big price to pay, and I probably
wouldn’t turn up.” He misses the drink, as if, for all the pretty women the
“stick-on good looks of celebrity” have brought him, he has never quite
matched the thrill of the death-defying bender. The decision of Nicolas
Cage’s character in Leaving Las Vegas to drink himself to death he
found heroic. “If my career goes down the pan,” he says, “I’ve always felt
that alcoholism was something to fall back on.”
Somehow you know he has touched a dark place — he bears the scars in his bleak
view of the human condition. As a comic, he can be cruel and crude.
Witnessing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s mortification on the chat show when asked
to comment on his own perceived ugliness was wretched; barely more endearing
is his opinion that single women over 30 are “rough as arseholes”. In Shane,
the sleazy masturbation gag made by a middle-aged minicab driver about his
daughter’s teenage friend has you longing for Joyce Grenfell and a mug of
cocoa. In the past, he did a joke about buses of mentally handicapped people
doing the thumbs-up sign that made you bark with laughter and then feel bad.
Skinner, who was offended by the blasphemy in Jerry Springer — The Opera, is
unrepentant. “The thumbs-up sign has been completely adopted by the mentally
ill,” he chuckles. “You never see anyone else using it, apart from Paul
McCartney. I wouldn’t say anything insulting about them. I’m a moral comic —
I didn’t do any one-legged jokes about Heather Mills when she had her baby.
It’s just that my line is not where other people’s line is. And the funniest
jokes are always near the edge.”
His early years might sound tough, but they have also been his salvation:
Skinner has inherited the quick, cutting, mickey-taking masculine humour
whose template you find on any factory floor or football terrace. He says he
barely noticed his material disadvantage until he wrote his autobiography,
never wanted to make political statements about the lack of baths and bog
roll. “When I went onto the alternative circuit in London in 1988, everyone
was doing anti-Thatcher jokes, but mine were the same ones I did in the
factory. One comic described me as symptomatic of the new Right, because I
wasn’t shouting ‘Ya, ya, Nicaragua’. I did one joke about politics, and a
comic called Tony Allen said to me, ‘I knew that if I listened long enough,
you’d say something worth saying.’ But I think jokes are worth telling for
their own sake.
I started meeting people from Oxbridge and I thought, how fabulous to be part
of a really bright community. Patrick Marber asked me if it got on my nerves
that he’d had privileges I hadn’t, but no — if I have kids, I want them to
have those privileges.”
At one point, he thought he might be inhibited by the deeply Catholic belief
that he was still married to his ex-wife, Lisa, whom he feels he treated
unfairly, their short marriage torn on the horns of his emerging stand-up
career. “Two years ago, I got the marriage annulled, but I haven’t noticed
any improvements.” One hopes he finds his girl, preferably a cross between
an MTV babe and a holy sister, with raucous humour and skills at keepy-uppy.
If not, there are always the good works of a professional dirty mind.
“There’s only one laugh in the Bible,” he says. “God tells Isaac’s
60-year-old wife she’s going to have a baby and she laughs, and God gets a
bit pissed off. It’s a pity, really. I wish Jesus had done a couple of
cracking one-liners. That would have completely justified my existence.”
Shane begins on ITV on April 21
