For Frank Skinner, stand-up’s coming home. After half a life on television and a decade on the radio, the British comedian is returning to his natural habitat. Next month, Skinner embarks on Showbiz, a 100-date, one-man tour, his first bona fide solo shows in five years. And, to his mind, the only real competition out there is… Madonna.
Of course, he’s joking.
‘We’ll be battling for the bridal suite in the Nottingham Holiday Inn,’ sniggers Skinner, on learning that his epic UK jaunt will coincide with Madonna’s hotly anticipated Madame X project.
After half a life on television and a decade on the radio, next month, Frank Skinner (above) embarks on Showbiz, a 100-date, one-man tour – his first bona fide solo shows in five years
‘I actually met Madonna once in a cinema in Belsize Park,’ he says in his breezy West Bromwich brogue. ‘Unfortunately, I thought she was the TV presenter Dani Behr, so was giving her the over-familiar thumbs-up. Madonna didn’t look pleased. In my defence, it was dark.’
Skinner recalls that he also witnessed Madonna’s theatrical debut in David Mamet’s 1988 play Speed-The-Plow.
‘I’d been to see her in concert and she was this amazing, all-conquering super-woman,’ he recollects. ‘But seeing her in the theatre, she was so frail, she didn’t have an actor’s voice and was really out of her depth. There were moments during her performance, one in particular when she answered a phone before it had rung, when I nearly dislocated my shoulders such was the squirm.’
Skinner is playing it for laughs. Like Madonna, his own foray into theatre, albeit as a writer, wasn’t a resounding success. His 2018 play Nina’s Got News received terrible reviews. ‘Wearisome,’ the critics cried, ‘the end couldn’t come soon enough.’
Skinner has been with his partner, talent agent Cath Mason (above with Skinner in 2008), 50, for 17 years and reports that she’s turned down his marriage proposals four times
‘It was absolutely panned,’ winces Skinner, 62, in the garden of a Hampstead pub, around the corner from his home. ‘Truly crushing reviews. I felt as if people were looking at me in the street and laughing inwardly – it was genuinely horrible, but amid all that pain, lessons were learned.’
So Skinner is back to what he does best – telling gags and thinking on his feet. But the formerly filthy funny man has cleaned up his act. ‘People used to say, “He only ever talks about sex,” ’ Skinner acknowledges. ‘But it was such a driving force at that point in my life, it was pretty much all I thought about.’
His sex drive, he likes to say now, ‘is more of an overgrown footpath’.
Skinner has been with his partner, talent agent Cath Mason, 50, for 17 years and reports that she’s turned down his marriage proposals four times as she is ‘convinced it would put a hoodoo on us’.
He regularly suggests that the relationship is volatile, and they have sought couples counselling on occasion, but there is a solidity at its core.
In 2008, the entertainer, who is now estimated to be worth £11 million, took a devastating financial hit due to bad investment advice and ‘lost all my savings, millions’.
‘I was lied to and I was very angry about it,’ he says evenly. ‘I managed to get most of the money back five years later but it was a particularly harrowing time.
‘But the one lovely thing that came out of it was when I told Cath,’ he marvels. ‘She just said, “We can always move to a smaller house. You can still do the clubs if you have to.”
‘I still think about that. I was gobsmacked by how not-bothered she was, because it was a lot of money.
‘Generally, she doesn’t like me to be the one with a problem,’ he grins. ‘There’s no shelf space for my issues, but I was really knocked out by that.’
Their son Buzz Cody, named after the astronaut Buzz Aldrin (whom Skinner once had the honour of introducing on stage with the words, ‘Careful, there’s just one small step’), is already shaping up to follow in his father’s footsteps.
‘He’s seven next month and he’s the one person in the world who I’m happy to say is funnier than me,’ Skinner says, glowing with paternal pride. ‘Buzz is a born comedian, with great timing and delivery. He does word-play, visual gags, the lot. If he became a professional comedian and was more successful than me, I would be delighted. Now that is love.’
In Skinner’s new show, the comedian will ‘break a previously sacrosanct boundary’ by talking about his son. ‘But I won’t be saying anything cruel,’ he warns. ‘It is so rubbish when comics belittle their children in the misguided belief that it makes them look cool. You can be funny about your kids without being unkind.’
Skinner remains a thoughtful and responsible parent. He hasn’t touched alcohol since 1986, when he used willpower to quit a heavy drinking habit, and he leaves social functions before 9.30pm these days, having arrived ‘when the crisps are being put in bowls’.
‘I’m not on some moral crusade,’ he adds. ‘But there are some people, in telly especially, who really just want to be taking cocaine in a private members’ club. And all the other stuff is a maze they have to get through to achieve that. I never did any of that, all I had was the work.’
He admits that when mainstream acclaim finally arrived in the mid-Nineties, he became ‘a bit of a git’.
‘Fame changes you and I suppose I stopped biting my lip for a while,’ he divulges with a hint of regret. ‘I started to point out when people weren’t doing their job properly. I never reduced anyone to tears but people certainly thought I was a complete nutcase.
‘Now I’m weary of people who have become famous, done well, made money, then pretend it hasn’t happened and they haven’t changed, because it does change everything massively.’
The glitzy title of his tour might suggest that Skinner enjoys the celebrity high life, but he has only ‘two showbiz friends: Adrian Chiles and David Baddiel, and in terms of celebrity we’re all hanging on by our fingernails, let’s face it’.
Skinner went through a phase of trying to make famous friends, first with artist Tracey Emin and also the then-Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.
But after a few dinners ‘and an evening of bowling with the Archbishop’, the new-found friendships fizzled out. ‘I never text people back,’ Skinner shrugs. ‘I’m just not that pushy type of person, I guess.’
Neither is he a typically profligate celebrity. ‘My accountant says I’m frugal,’ he squints. Skinner’s greatest indulgence is lingering in second-hand bookshops, where he’ll ‘spend anything approaching eight pounds on a single item’.
‘I don’t want a Lamborghini,’ he scoffs. ‘Even if I was given one, I’d be like one of those people who won the speedboat on Bullseye and have it in Exchange & Mart within 48 hours.’ Yet the entertainment industry and its attendant rumour mill continues to amuse him.
‘This is my juiciest piece of showbiz gossip,’ Skinner decides. ‘I was at Elton John’s villa in Nice for a child’s birthday party. We, the grown-ups, started playing that game where you put yellow Post-it notes on each other’s foreheads with the name of a well-known person written on the sticky and they have to guess who they are.
‘Elton had Bobby Crush, the flamboyant Seventies pianist, on his head, which figured, and I found out I had Ian Krankie [male half of Scottish comedy duo The Krankies] on mine. Fair enough.
‘We got talking about games and Elton said he’d played charades with Robert De Niro and he’d taken exception to Elton and David Furnish calling him Roberta because they like to give everyone a feminine name. He was fuming.
‘But then he said that, without doubt, the worst person he’d ever played charades with was Bob Dylan! That, to me, is priceless information,’ Skinner chuckles. ‘I love Bob Dylan so much. I am going to cry when that man dies.’
This leads Skinner, a practising Catholic, to reflect on how his own death might be received. ‘Will it even make the news?’ he ponders. ‘Maybe they’d shoehorn it in as the light-hearted item before the weather.’
With this morbidly amusing thought in mind, he leaves us with a spectacularly highbrow piece of showbiz name-dropping.
‘I was on a flight with the playwright Tom Stoppard and there was a loud, inexplicable bang, so I asked him, “If this plane had gone down, Tom, which one of us would have got top billing, me or you?” He said, “I think it would depend on the newspaper.” ’
Skinner doubles over with mirth and slaps his thighs in delight. ‘Wonderful,’ he hoots. ‘And so true.’
Frank Skinner performs at the Leicester Square Theatre from June 3 to July 4, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe from July 31 to August 18 and around the UK from September 30 to December 11. See frankskinnerlive.com