‘I can be quite well behaved’: Frank Skinner on standup, rude jokes and what the kids got right

Frank Skinner has been up since 7.23am. “I don’t like dictatorial twelfths,” he says, showing me the list of alarms on his phone: 6.57am, 7.09am, 7.11am, 7.17am. We’re meeting at a photo studio in an industrial estate in north London. He’s already done the school run – Skinner had his first and only child with long-term partner Cath Mason in 2012, and Buzz is now 11 years old. They walked the dog across Hampstead Heath. “We’ve got a white cavapoo called Poppy,” Skinner goes on. “So it all works out quite neatly. The dog gets a walk, the kid gets to school, we don’t damage the planet. The maximum exercise I can do now is walking anyway.”

Is Skinner feeling his age? He is 66 now and looks well, like a slightly older version of the Frank Skinner picture from telly: thin but healthy, grey hair not yet receding. But recently… “One thing I’ve noticed is that when I bite into an apple, I have to press down on the top of my head to get through,” he says. “I don’t have enough jaw strength.” He laughs the trademark Skinner chuckle, half discerning professor, half giggling school boy. “No one said to me, ‘You’ll reach a point where you’ll be using your skull like a hole punch.’” Time has been catching up with him in odd and surprising ways. “I was watching a football match and the commentator said, ‘They haven’t won on this ground since 1993.’ I thought: ‘What, yesterday?’ Then I realised that’s 30 years ago.”

Skinner has been part of the nation’s fabric since he won the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1991, beating Eddie Izzard and Jack Dee. For a decade between 1994 and 2004, he presented Fantasy Football League with then-housemate David Baddiel, which spawned one of the greatest football songs of all time: 1996’s Three Lions, which has been released with different lyrics four times. For a while in the 90s he had his own BBC1 show. He’s presented a documentary on Elvis (Skinner is a super-fan) and featured in an episode of Peter Capaldi’s Doctor Who. He was appointed an MBE in 2023’s New Year Honours.

In February, Skinner will be performing 14 nights of his latest standup show, 30 Years of Dirt, in London. Which leaves Christmas to get past. I ask him how he’ll be spending the break. “My partner is very pro-Christmas, which is odd considering how morose she is the rest of the time. We’ll be going the full works: decorations, a tree… The biggest one they’ve got, obviously, which means I’ll have to cut the top off to get it into the house.” Christmas Day will be spent with the in-laws. “It’s one of my favourite times,” he goes on. “I think I’m at my best while dicing vegetables. There should be a chatshow where people dice vegetables. You’d get the best out of the guests.”

Christmas is typically a time for getting merry, but Skinner has, famously, been sober for 30 years. He’s spoken of only clocking that he was an alcoholic when he swapped the first swig of the day from sherry to Pernod. I mention one of his standup jokes, where Skinner receives mild applause for announcing he hasn’t had a drink since 24 September 1986, age 29, before he’d even done a standup gig. “What a lovely response,” Skinner says on stage as the audience celebrate his abstinence. And then: “Can I just ask, what would your response have been if I said I haven’t had a wank since September 1986?”

“I think if you gave most blokes the ultimatum, they’d give up the drink,” he laughs. I ask if he misses it. “I’m not really an adventurer,” he says. “I’m actually quite well behaved. In my drinking years, I had adventures every day. People think this means exciting sexual adventures, but it was never that. I’d meet some blokes on the bus and they’d say, ‘We’re going to Shrewsbury to smoke weed,’ and I’d say, ‘I’ll come with you.’ I liked the romantic feeling of people walking past me while I was queueing at the grocer’s at 7.50am to get sherry. As [playwright] Peter Shaffer says in Equus: ‘People worship at the altar of the great god Normal.’ I thought, ‘That’s what these people are, and I’m this maverick rebel figure.’”

It’s easy to hear comedians joking from behind the tears of a clown. Skinner has spoken of the anxiety he experienced while starting out as a stone-cold-sober comic. But depression isn’t something Skinner’s really had to deal with. “A woman asked me if I’d ever suffered with depression. I said, ‘Oh yeah, I have.’ She said, ‘How long did it last?’ I said, ‘Probably an afternoon, when I just felt really miserable.’

“I often feel like a cork,” he continues. “Through alcoholism, the death of my parents, I’ve always remained buoyant, which has been a blessing. Having said that, I don’t think people who don’t drink will ever know how drink can utterly switch off anxiety, like the flick of a switch. I once went to join a library and thought, ‘I can’t just walk into a library sober, not knowing anyone.’ I went and had four pints and thought, ‘Now I feel confident.’ Alcohol didn’t haunt me. I just thought that was the way it was.”

Skinner was born Christopher Graham Collins into a working-class Catholic family in West Bromwich, a faith he still follows. “Catholicism is a central part of my life, but I don’t preach it. It’s just incidental in my stories and my conversation,” he says. He was the youngest of four; the family grew up on a council estate. Going to university was rare among his family, but he went on to get a degree and a master’s in English. He’s always been proud of his roots. He chose the stage name Frank Skinner after a man in his dad’s pub dominoes team.

I ask, “Was there pressure at home to get a proper job?”

“Almost none,” he says. “My dad once said to me, ‘If I was you, I’d get on the bandwagon and get into show business.’ I would dress as a cowboy with a plastic guitar and do Elvis numbers. My dad would tap the telly and go: ‘One day, he’s going to be on this…’”

After graduating, Skinner spent three years on the dole before going on to teach English at the Halesowen College of Further Education in the East Midlands. “Teaching is a lower strand of show business,” he says. “You’ve got your crowd and you want to entertain them.” It was the school’s head of drama who encouraged Skinner to make a break into show business, inviting him to take part in a play at Edinburgh. Which play exactly, Skinner forgets. What excited him was the standup that he saw for the first time, something he’d never seen back in Birmingham.

“I was so excited that when I got back from Edinburgh, I phoned this place called the Tic Toe Theatre Company and said, ‘I want to book for next year.’ They said, ‘How long do you want to do?’ I said, ‘A couple of hours?’ ‘They said, ‘Nobody does that long – do an hour.’ I booked an hour at midday for however many days, which cost £420 and left me with £14 life savings in the post office.”

He goes on, “For a while, I thought, I can make people laugh in the pub. I don’t need any practice. I’ll just turn up in Edinburgh and do it. But the same head of drama said, ‘I really think you should try a few gigs beforehand.’ So I did some gigs, and I was terrible.”

“How terrible?” I ask.

“My first gig was at the Portland Club in Birmingham, also home of the Birmingham Anglers Association. I knew there was this thing called alternative comedy, but still I didn’t know where it was in Birmingham. The second was on New Year’s Eve. I thought: I need to buy into the mainstream, so I started telling gags, but it was still just awful. An old woman walked to the front of the stage, looked up at me, shook her head with tremendous sorrow and walked away. It’s still one of the most nuanced heckles I’ve ever received. The third was in a small pub called the Ivy Bush in Edgbaston on an alternative night and I absolutely stormed it. After the gig, a beautiful woman came up to me and said, ‘God, you were brilliant. I suppose people tell you that all the time?’ What I didn’t say was, ‘No, you are the first person who’s ever said it.’ Once you’ve had one good gig, you’re off. I was hooked.”

Skinner’s live stuff especially is famous for the sex stuff. In his latest show, he makes the bold move of leaving the knob gags at home. “Why?” I ask.

“I have thought in recent years that that kind of material doesn’t command respect in lots of quarters – like at the Observer for example,” he says. “Doing a clean show removes the tension of the audience thinking, ‘Oh, I didn’t think it was going to be like this.’”

But there’s always been more to Skinner than knob gags. My favourite joke, from Skinner’s standup in the 90s, is where he points out that if you stumble, you should style it out then look at your watch, to make it look deliberate. “I actually saw a bloke do that,” he says now. “Something I’ve realised is that I have little power of invention.” He brings up the second series of his 2004 sitcom, Shane, starring Skinner as a taxi driver, which was filmed but never broadcast. “My jokes all come from things that have happened to me, because I don’t seem to be able to make stuff up very well. If I could, I’d be on Netflix, and I wouldn’t have to try to prove myself as cool and intelligent…”

David Baddiel has only recently apologised for repeatedly calling former Nottingham Forest striker Jason Lee a “pineapple head” on Fantasy Football League, in what now is considered racist bullying. Is there any other material Skinner is worried could come back and haunt him?

“I don’t look back and think I’d be cancelled, so much as I wouldn’t do that now,” he says. “I still think what you feel is right is right. I don’t want to do anything on stage that I couldn’t defend. They’ve started showing some of my old standup on the telly and stuff arrives in the post – I mean emails – saying: ‘Can you watch this edit?’ and I just can’t watch it. Usually it’s because they need to edit it down, but I assume they’re also applying some sort of modern contemporary eye, which could make it a slim volume indeed.

I’ve always been very anti-deliberately shocking. If I read the blurb on the back of another comic’s DVD and it describes them as ‘politically incorrect’, it makes me nauseous.”

How political is he? “I don’t think very politically,” he says. “I vote Labour, because when I was a student, we went to No 10 back when you could get quite close, and James Callaghan waved to me. I thought: that’s my politics sorted. I voted to remain during Brexit because I like the idea of sitting outside a café in Paris smoking a Gauloises, not because I have any view on the economy. There’s only one thing worse than celebrities talking about politics and that’s politicians talking about anything other than politics. The question I get asked most, which you’ve resisted – well done – is how can you continue to do standup comedy with all this woke stuff? I don’t think woke is a negative thing at all. I watched the new Doctor Who and there’s a trans woman who is essential to the plot. Another character is in a wheelchair that fires missiles.”

He goes on, “We were watching Strictly recently – the biggest show on television. Two men were dancing together and everybody loved it. I said to my son: ‘We are living in wondrous times. When I was your age, gay men in Birmingham would get beaten up in the street.’ This might sound a bit – if you don’t mind me saying – Observer, but I actually believe I’m at my most woke when I’m talking to my 11-year-old. I love that accepting difference is a concept that comes naturally to him, whereas I grew up as a quite bigoted, narrow-minded person who had to change when I got to my 20s.”

I ask him how Skinner will be judged at the pearly gates. “I don’t think I could put my hand on my heart and say, ‘I’ve cracked it.’ But, as Henry Fielding describes Tom Jones in his big fat 18th-century novel… Tom Jones is shagging around, causing scandal, but he’s described as a good-natured man. And that’s what I’ve tried to be, good-natured, even if I’m not 100% sure of the criteria. I’d imagine it could be quite a nit-picking process of who makes it through the pearly gates and who doesn’t.”

I suggest that when he’s judged, it’ll be by the old lady heckler from before, looking him up and down and shaking her head with tremendous sorrow. “Maybe!” he laughs.

Frank Skinner’s 30 Years of Dirt is at the Gielgud Theatre, 5-17 February. For more details, go to frankskinnerlive.com

Stylist Vivian Nwonka; grooming by Krystle Gohel; photographer’s assistant Emma Pottinger; shot at Big Sky studio