Frank Skinner Autobiography (6 page)

So, piss-buckets in the bedroom. Shortly before he became Prime Minister, I interviewed Tony Blair on my chat show. We were discussing working classness and I explained my theory that, of course, when it came to criteria for identifying someone as working class, profession, accent, education, and leisure interests were all important, but the best rule-of-thumb definition is, if you grew up with a bucket in your bedroom, you're working class. Mr Blair looked puzzled. ‘Bucket in the bedroom? What for?' I explained that as most council houses had an outside toilet, people slept with a bucket or similar receptacle in their bedroom to piss in during the night, rather than have to go downstairs and outside. I wasn't trying to cast doubt on his socialist credentials but he seemed a bit edgy about this.

Afterwards, Mr Blair's public relations man, Alastair Campbell, asked if we'd take that bit out but we refused. Fair play to Mr Blair. He didn't ask for any veto before he did the interview, and when he turned up, he was accompanied only by Mr Campbell. No fancy entourage, minders or starry demands. I really liked him, and I'd still vote for him, piss-bucket or not. 181 Bristnall Hall Road has an inside toilet now but I remember when the idea to install one, as part of a local council modernisation programme, was first mooted. I suppose it was the late seventies. I remember the bloke from the council sitting my dad down and explaining to him that they were going to put the toilet inside the house. A very serious look came over my dad's face. ‘Isn't that a bit unhygienic?' he asked.

It's not a bad question. The bucket-in-the-bedroom method was ‘a bit unhygienic' for all sorts of reasons. For a start, sleeping in the same room as an uncovered bucket of piss does tend to get on your chest a bit, and this isn't helped when your two elder brothers go through their ‘discovering alcohol' phase.

The most common problem of sharing a piss-bucket with a drunk is that, more often than not, they can't be bothered to pick the bucket up, thus making it a much more difficult target. The end result is a wet carpet, not ideal in a room where you spend a lot of time walking around in bare feet (a phenomenon that could be described as ‘beyond the pail'), and, more problematically, a wet bucket-handle, which, it has to be said, is not a pleasant start to the day.

On one occasion when I was about ten, I picked up the bucket to have a nocturnal piss. One of my brothers had been on the beer and the bucket was heavy with about four or five pints of urine. I picked it up, essential in the circumstances unless you have a night-sight fitted, but the handle was soaked. A five-pint-wet-handle combo is deadly, and no sooner had I raised the bucket to waist height when it slipped out of my grasp. Obviously, the spillage potential was enormous but, by what seemed at first a stroke of good fortune, the bucket landed firmly on its base and remained upright. Then came the second tremor. The impact of the bucket landing with such a thud caused the liquid to surge up into a sort of tidal wave and fire a ball of piss full into my unsuspecting, ten-year-old face. Meanwhile, almost certainly at that same moment, some unknown chappie who was born in the right place to the right class of family was using exactly the same principle to create a tequila slammer in a Soho bar.

When I was about five, Terry got very drunk one night and was violently sick into the bucket. The smell of this caused Keith to vomit into the bucket, and the combined smell caused me to vomit into my pillow. I believe scientists call this the domino effect. Sadly, none of us were familiar with the phrase or we could have had quite a lively seminar about the evening's events.

Today is Good Friday. The day we remember that Jesus Christ died a slow, painful death, nailed to a wooden cross so that people like me can gain forgiveness for my endless catalogue of weaknesses, ingratitude and malicious misdemeanours. As a Roman Catholic, I am encouraged by the church to treat this day as one of abstinence and meditative prayer. I must also fast, or at least refrain from eating meat until tomorrow.

This morning, a man from the Bentley car company delivered a midnight blue giant of a car that does seventeen miles to the gallon and retails at £149,000 brand new. I'm not buying the car, or even hiring it. Bentley just wrote to me and asked if I'd like to borrow a Bentley for a few days. It goes back on Tuesday. The idea is that I won't be able to bear parting with it and so they'll make a sale. Essentially, it's what some people call ‘a freebie'. In the last few weeks I've had a free video recorder, a free pair of shoes, about a dozen pairs of tickets to music gigs, four free CDs, three free books, and an all-expenses-paid free trip to the UEFA Champions League Final in Milan. A national newspaper even offered me a free holiday to Barbados with my girlfriend on the understanding that their photographer would be allowed to take photos of us in beach-wear and then claim that they had snapped us unawares. That was a bit of an eye-opener. Call me stupid, but I said no. Anyway, such is the life of a celebrity. I lived my first thirty-odd years on the poverty line and no one ever gave me a free anything. Now that, according to the
Sunday Times
, I'm number thirty-six on the list of the country's highest showbiz earners, people are falling over themselves to give me stuff.

I picked up my twenty-three-year-old girlfriend from her job at the BBC and we drove down to Brighton for the weekend. The Bentley handled like a dream and pretty soon we were checking in to our £700-a-night suite at The Grand Hotel. (I had to pay for that.) The room had a very nice bathroom. It was en suite. It's the rich person's version of the bucket-in-the-bedroom.

Maybe I should feel guilty that this is the kind of lifestyle I have now. I don't. I just feel lucky.

Anyway, I didn't eat any meat today.

When Keith was eleven he went to ‘big school', as they called it: Bishop Milner's Roman Catholic School in Dudley. I would have been pushing five when he walked up to the end of the garden to show me his new school uniform. My mom and dad had coaxed him into the full outfit to see how it would look on his first day. It being the summer holidays, I was messing about in the garden. There was a big metal bowl-like thing that my dad used to catch rain-water. He always said that rain-water was much better for the garden than tap-water. However, as we lived close to several factories that pumped out all manner of poison, I'm not sure, on reflection, if he was right. Anyway, at the bottom of the big metal bowl-like thing was a thick, black, unpleasant-smelling silt. The ingredients of the story are starting to come together, aren't they? And guess what. When Keith arrived to show off his new gear, I had just scooped out some of the smelliest, blackest stuff with my little rubber multicoloured bucket. Before me, in pristine blazer, white shirt, cap, tie, grey trousers, the lot, was my brother. In my hand, a bucket of smelly, black nasty stuff. All these years later, I still have a sense of that moment when I became aware I had a decision to make. I didn't realise till quite recently how big a decision it actually was. The choice was only superficially about whether to tip the bucket over Keith or not. It seems to me now that I stood at the end of that garden at 181 Bristnall Hall Road and, for the first time in my life, I made the choice between comedy and the rest. I could have said I liked the uniform and carried on playing. Or I could have said I didn't like it, or virtually ignored Keith and grunted something non-committal. Compassion, unpleasantness, indifference were all on offer, but somewhere in my head a little light had come on. I looked at this chubby schoolboy in his smart uniform. I saw how proud he was. And I thought, wouldn't it be funny to tip the bucket of nasty stuff over his head.

The trouble with the comedy light is that it blocks out other things, like the consequences light, for example. It's the same light that came on when Sylvia Kristel told me she was a film actress. It's the same light that came on when I had a deep discussion with a close friend about the fact that he was twenty stone and smoking and drinking vast amounts. The conversation became heated and he snapped at me, ‘So what if I died of a heart attack? Would anyone really care?' ‘Maybe,' I said. ‘Especially if you fell on them.' It was the same light that came on when a radical feminist woman that I actually quite liked came up to me at a party and launched an attack on my stand-up act. Parts of it, she said, were ‘verging on the offensive'. I should have tried to calm her. Instead I said, ‘There's only one virgin on the offensive in this room . . .' She never forgave me. Anyway, I stood there, and I made my choice.

Keith started crying and ran back towards the house. My laughter died down fairly quickly when I remembered that my dad was inside that same house. I stood like a statue and stared at the door that led into the garden. Half of me was thinking that maybe my dad would take the whole thing in the spirit it was intended and not come racing out of the house in a wild temper. The other half of me was toying with the idea of weeing myself with sheer terror. Still no movement at the door. I needed Jesus to appear to me in a vision and say, ‘Don't worry. That comic impulse may get you into trouble this time but before you know where you are, you'll be driving to a posh Brighton hotel with a dishy blonde draped over the passenger seat of your Bentley because of it. Oh, and don't eat meat on Good Friday.' Still no movement at the door. Perhaps Jesus had spoken to my dad and told him not to rein in my blossoming comic spirit. Perhaps he had cleansed Keith's uniform, as he did the poor leper after the sermon on the mount. Then there was movement at the door. And my dad came racing out of the house in a wild temper. I stood still like a statue as he came closer. Come on, Jesus. What are you waiting for? My God, my God, why hast though forsa . . . ugh! My dad had surprised me by swooping low at the last moment and grabbing me by the ankle. When he returned to his full height, this turned me upside down and dad was able to return to the house, smacking my legs and arse as he went, without being slowed down by me stumbling and dragging my feet on the floor. It was like a hawk falling upon a sparrow. All down the garden, he smacked and I just hung there. Truly, my world had been turned upside down. From laughter to tears in an instant. I don't know if being upside down does something to your lungs or vocal cords but I was very disappointed with my crying. It sounded breathless and strangled, not at all plaintive, so there was no chance of awakening his fatherly compassion with it. As we reached the house, he flung me through the open door and I landed with a horrible cracking sound . . . on Keith's guitar. You remember, the one with the circular picture of Elvis in the little frame? It snapped like a carrot and Keith's crying went up another couple of octaves. There is a habit, not necessarily a nice habit, that some comedians have. If you make a joke, no matter how funny, they'll try and top it with a slightly better one. I even catch myself doing it sometimes.

I was too young to know it, but this was a sign that God and me had something in common. Despite the fact that there is virtually no laughter in the Bible, God must like a gag. I had done the bucket-over-Keith joke and He had topped it with the guitar.

Tonight, Dave and me opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in the West End of London. I say the West End of London because some readers may not know the Shaftesbury. Or there may be another Shaftesbury Theatre in another town. My point is that too many people in London think that everyone knows about London or, at least, wants to know about London. I live in London now and I really love it. I get a tingle when I drive over Westminster Bridge at night or stroll through Hampstead on a sunny day, but when I lived in the West Midlands I thought London was an over-priced cesspit full of mouthy tossers trying to sell you fruit or unsatisfactory beer. When I hosted a comedy club in Bearwood, just outside Birmingham, I saw a crowd turn very nasty when a comic began by saying, ‘Y'know when you're on the tube . . .'

‘No, we fuckin' don't,' some bloke shouted. The comic never really got over it.

Anyway, we opened at the Shaftesbury in the live version of
Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned.
(I think alphabetical order is the safest bet.) This show has a strange history. In 1998 Dave and me went to see the film
Boogie Nights
at the Odeon, Swiss Cottage (yes, in London). The movie was OK but me and Dave got far too many of the writer's in-jokes about pornography and had several moments when we were the only people laughing in the cinema. We soon became identified as not the sort of people you want to share your popcorn with. After the movie we went for a drink in a nearby bar. The most notable feature of this place is that it used to be a Barclays Bank and they've sort of crossed out the ‘clay's Bank' bit to make the transformation absolutely clear. So we were in this bar talking about the Edinburgh Festival. The room was crammed with the bright young things of North London nightlife. We were going on to each other about how we loved a lot of the things about appearing at the Festival – the performing, the socialising, the girls – but how we hated some of the other stuff, well, just writing the show, really.

So Dave said why don't we do a show that isn't written. Just turn up and do forty minutes, with us sitting on a sofa chatting to each other, and to the audience, about anything that crops up. We could do it at lunchtime, when not much else is happening and expectations are low, and also charge only two quid. Most Edinburgh shows are between eight and ten quid. That way, if it failed horribly, we'd still have ‘Well,
sorry
, but it was only two quid' to fall back on. We both got very excited about the idea.

When you're a stand-up, you inevitably end up doing the same gags over and over. On a bad night this can seem like a long, over-familiar road stretched out before you. Sometimes it's hard to let a routine go, especially one that's at the top end of the laughter-volume scale. A really strong bit will serve a comic for years but you have to fight this temptation to hold on. It's like children when they reach a certain stage – you have to let them go. If you hold on to a gag too long, you start to forget how to tell it; to forget why it's funny. It becomes stale. The words feel awkward in your mouth. This is the great skill of the stage actor: to say the same words night after night and make them feel fresh every time. There were people doing the Alternative circuit who did the same twenty-minute act, year after year. I'd hear them in the dressing room, complaining about how they'd got bored with stand-up. To the slightly over-excited new boy, it sounded like blasphemy.