Stand-up Frank turns the clock back
Comedian remembers the debut gig that put him on track to the top
Grounding a fleet of paper aeroplanes during a five-minute Edinburgh Fringe set decades ago proved to be a pivotal moment for Frank Skinner.
And this year, he’s returning to the festival that inspired and then kickstarted his stand-up career.
It was a taster night, where new acts got a short slot to show off their material, that the 62-year-old pinpoints as his first big achievement in comedy.
“It was a big room with a balcony above it and the first thing I saw was people tipping beer down on to the acts,” Frank said. “People had made paper aeroplanes out of the many leaflets you get in Edinburgh and while the bloke was on stage for five minutes there were probably about a hundred thrown at him.
“My act at that stage was quite a gentle thing and I watched it and got more and more scared. I asked someone for a cigarette – I hadn’t smoked in about 10 years.” Cigarette in hand, Frank stepped on to the stage, changing tack and going for the crowd from the off.
“Luckily, they loved it. Having been truly terrified, that was the night I really found my voice on stage,” he says. “That could’ve
easily gone the other way and finished me off. In a way that was a bigger moment than that first hour show.”
Seeing a comedy show at the Fringe a few years earlier had ignited his love of stand-up.
At the first festival Frank went to as a performer, he was starring as a hard-bitten Cockney copper in a play.
In his downtime, he went to his first comedy show, a cabaret featuring among the acts his future partner in crime David Baddiel.
“The only comics I’d seen were Bernard Manning live and the likes of Little and Large on TV,” he says.
“I’d never seen anything quite like this before. Straight off I realised this was what I wanted to do.”
Frank went home and booked an hour slot for the next year’s Fringe.
“I’d been doing it about eight months when I got to Edinburgh. You shouldn’t be doing your first hour after that amount of time. I got through it. I got two reviews and neither were singing my praises, but they both thought I had something so that kept me going.”
Three decades later and having performed at festivals all over the world, Frank still says there’s nothing like the Fringe.
While he has diversified, with TV presenting and hosting radio shows and podcasts now on his CV, Frank still sees stand-up as “the centre of the wheel” for him.
“I haven’t been given many talents, I’ve basically been given one and I feel a certain obligation to make the most of it,” he says. “I think of myself as a stand-up first of all.
“One of my first thoughts when the show started to come together was that I wanted to go back to Edinburgh again.
“At the end of August I might be wondering why on earth I did that!”