‘I think I’m a better Johnny Cash than Joaquin Phoenix’
Last weekend he played the ukulele for HRH. Now he’s about to play Johnny Cash. Frank Skinner talks to Judith Woods
It’s hard, when talking to Frank Skinner, to get past that smile. You know the one; where he wrinkles his nose and shows all of his teeth at once. It’s a bit implausible for a 61-year-old, isn’t it? “I had no idea I smiled like that,” says Skinner, smiling exactly like that. “My partner, Cath, says I suffer from an unnatural excess of serotonin because I’m always happy,” he continues in deadpan West Bromwich tones. “She once came into the kitchen and found me watching my sausages cook through the glass door of the oven while jumping up and down with excitement. I am the best audience member in the world: I laugh at everything. Especially myself, because I am the funniest man on the planet. The only person who’s allowed to be funnier than me is [my fiveyear-old son] Buzz; I really hope he becomes a comedian.”
Skinner has made a massive success out of being funny: bar a few years in the late Noughties, when he left our screens to do some stand-up, he has barely been off TV, from his laddish period in the Nineties with David Baddiel on Fantasy Football League to the game show Room 101, which he continues to present on BBC One. But viewers are about to see a very different side to him when he appears in a self-penned homage to Johnny Cash, in the Sky Arts Urban Myths series entitled Johnny Cash and the Ostrich. The drama is loosely based on a surreal but true episode in the singer’s life, when he was badly injured by one of a pair of ostriches he kept at his home in Tennessee.
It’s Skinner’s first foray into proper acting and he does a fine job of portraying the singer at a low ebb, battling with painkiller addiction and alcoholism, perhaps partly because Skinner’s own relationship with alcohol (he is now teetotal) started with Johnny Cash.
His first visit to the pub was to see a gig by a Cash impersonator; later, Cash became his drinking soundtrack of choice. “Cash was such a character and I’d been singing his songs in his voice ever since I was a kid, so it was a no-brainer [for me to play him],” says Skinner. “Sky suggested that I not only write it and star in it but I could direct it if I wanted. But I thought, ‘No, that’s too much of a power-grab’.”
Presumably he’s seen Joaquin Phoenix’s much-lauded 2005 film version Walk the Line? He has. “I think I’m better. I like my Johnny Cash more than his.”
I can’t help wondering whether he will pass his towering self-belief on to his son, born when Skinner was 56.
“When Buzz was born, my major worry was leaving him in the lurch by keeling over,” says Skinner. “As long as I can get him through university age, I’ll feel I’ve done my job. I think 18 is the point where you’ve drained your parents dry; you’ve sucked most of the juice out of them so you really don’t need their husks.”
Judging from Skinner’s energy, he has no intention of dying any time soon either off on or stage. Performing, with all its risk and jeopardy, remains his life’s blood. When we meet he is fresh from his performance at the Queen’s 92nd birthday party concert at the Royal Albert Hall, when he, Ed Balls and Harry Hill joined the massed ukuleles of the George Formby Society.
“I play a little but I’m certainly not in the same league as the George Formby Society,” Skinner says. “But when you’re all playing together it sounds brilliant.” In fairness, the Queen is a Formby fan, so it was probably the highlight of her evening. “The wonderful thing was, after the genuine global superstars who appeared on stage, we brought things a little more lo-fi; it was very British, very traditional and very eccentric.”
“Afterwards, I met the Queen and Prince Charles under what can only be described as surreal circumstances. We were waiting in the wings to go on for the finale and the Queen and Charles just appeared beside us.” At that point, Ed Balls started to head for the stage and called out for Skinner to get a move on.
“The Queen called, ‘Frank! Frank! Hurry up’,” says Skinner. “That was literally a royal decree – I can tell you I’ve never moved that fast in my life.”
Skinner’s unquashable ebullience may have something to do with the fact his career has been on an unshakeable upwards course ever since he left university. Having turned down a much-coveted place at his local grammar school in the West Midlands (he grew up in a council house and thought it would be full of snobs), he was expelled from Oldbury Technical Secondary School at 16 for selling forged dinner tickets. But after getting a job in an aircraft parts factory, he put himself through college, achieved his A-levels and went on to get a degree in English followed by a Masters at the University of Warwick.
He did his first gig in 1987, aged 20. Four years later, he beat Jack Dee and Eddie Izzard to take the prestigious Perrier Comedy Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Then came Fantasy Football League and a joint chat show, as well as the hit song Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home). Today, as well as his Room 101 berth, he hosts The Frank Skinner Show on Absolute Radio every Saturday.
Does that make him famous-famous or merely famous? Let’s just say on his last stand-up tour he asked the audience to rate his fame on a scale from Madonna to the woman who dumped a cat in a wheelie bin. The result wasn’t always a given, although he was estimated to be nearer the singer than cat-bin-lady.
But by his own admission, kicking the fags and especially the booze back in 1986 was the deciding factor in his life. “I liked being sober and I liked being hammered, I just had a real problem with the states in between so I just stopped. I’d love to be able to drink in moderation, but I can’t. So I don’t.”
Sobriety coincided with the start of Skinner’s comedy career, initially as part of the late Eighties alternative comedy scene that radically changed comedy, which up until then had been routinely sexist, racist and homophobic. Does he think stand-up has changed radically again since then?
“Back then, we were self-policing,” says Skinner. “These days it’s become a bit like vigilantes trying to catch out each other for saying the wrong thing. We’re living in the age of new Puritanism. To paraphrase Descartes: I’m offended, therefore I am.”
Happily he is still able to find plenty of comic mileage in the new political climate. “At a show the other day, I decided to talk to an audience member in the front row who was in a wheelchair,” he recounts. “I asked her, ‘So what sort of speed can you get?’ and some other woman shouted out, ‘You’re identifying her by her disability!’
“I said, ‘I’ll be honest, that’s the reason why most comedians don’t talk to people in wheelchairs; in case someone like you yells at them’. Then I turned to the woman in the wheelchair and said, ‘I won’t be speaking to you again, you’re trouble’,” he chuckles. “When I addressed the audience saying, ‘I don’t know who to talk to next’, this other lovely middleaged woman pipes up, ‘I’m a lesbian, if that helps?’ Brought the house down.”
‘Johnny Cash was such a character, and I’d been singing his songs in his voice ever since I was a kid’