the times | Saturday December 4 2021 saturday review 11soul... and a practising
Roman Catholic who winc-
es when he hears people
saying “Jesus Christ”. Skin-
ner recently published A
Comedian’s Prayer Book.
The people he knows
who believe in God could fit
into the back of a Vauxhall
Corsa, he once said, adding
today that “my friends see
my religious belief as one of
my peccadillos”.
Their responses have been
warm, though. “David Baddi-
el read it and to my surprise
— as he is my sternest critic
and doesn’t say he likes stuff when he
doesn’t — he was very nice about it. He
liked the ‘Thomas Aquinas-level of picki-
ness’. I don’t know how well he knows
Thomas Aquinas.”
Skinner’s parish priest even asked him
for a few dozen copies of the book to sell at
the back of the church. “I said, ‘Please don’t
ask me that because I don’t want to be leav-
ing Mass every week and that pile is gath-
ering dust.’ ” Yet they all went on the firstI
t gets you, seeing Frank Skinner
cry. It happens in Wordsworth
and Coleridge: Road Trip with
Frank Skinner and Denise Mina,
the gorgeous new series that he
presents with the Scottish crime
writer. The normally ebullient
comedian has found the remote sheepfold
in the Lake District that is thought to have
inspired William Wordsworth to write
Michael, the poem about a destitute shep-
herd who reluctantly sends his son, Luke,
away to find work in the city.
Broken-hearted, Michael visits the dry-
stone sheepfold where they once worked
together, with a view to repairing it. “That
many and many a day he thither went,/
And never lifted up a single stone,” go the
lines that bring Skinner to tears when he
recites them on the hillside.
“Every time I read the end bit of Michael,
I feel myself going,” he says by phone from
his home in Hampstead, north London.
“There’s something about that terrible
giving up. Since I’ve had a kid, it’s multi-
plied that hugely.”
Luke is Michael’s only child and Skinner,
64, is also the father of one. He and his
partner, Cath Mason, have a nine-year-old
son, Buzz, who was born when Skinner
was in his mid-fifties and a hugely popular,
Perrier award-winning stand-up comedi-
an. “To think that it’s never going to
happen and then it does happen is spectac-
ular,” he says in the programme. “I defi-
nitely cry more since I’ve become a father,”
he says today. “Also, I never used to think
about death at all. Now if I get a bit of tur-
bulence on a plane I think, ‘No, no, no! I’ve
got an unfinished job.’ ”
He wasn’t sure about welling up on
camera. “Tears are pretty cheap now on
television,” he says. “When I was growing
up they were a pretty rare occurrence.
Now, on Strictly Come Dancing, if they
don’t get tears a couple of times a show,
they’ve failed.” Yet he felt it was justified
here. “Wordsworth can put that level of
emotion in a sealed capsule that you can
open 200 years later, and it still works.”
Skinner discovered Wordsworth in the
late Seventies when he studied English
at Birmingham Polytechnic, now Bir-
mingham City University. For a lad who
grew up on a council estate in the West
Midlands, the degree was “an absolute
life-changer”, he says. “It was more life-
changing, I would say, than becoming
famous.” He went on to do a master’s in
English literature at Warwick University,
but it’s a side of him that is still often
overlooked.
He talks about doing interviews to pub-
licise his weekly Poetry Podcast. “Everyone
always started by saying, ‘It’s a bit of a
shock, you doing this.’ I don’t know what to
make of that, really, whether it’s a sort of
social mobility debate.” He always used to
mention his love of literature when he wasinterviewed in the Fantasy Foot-
ball League days. “But it never
made the final edit, and I think
that’s fair enough. If the story is
me being king of the new lads,
the fact that I’m interested in
poetry muddies the water.”
Straddling high and low cul-
ture makes Skinner brilliant at
analogies. In the programme
he describes love poetry as
“stalking in metre” and Word-
sworth and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge’s pioneering Lyrical
Ballads is “the Sgt Pepper of
poetry”. Mina, with whom he
did a series about Boswell and Johnson last
year, is an excellent foil. The Glaswegian,
he says, “is really sharp and funny and she’s
got stories and opinions about every-
thing”. He has not read any of her crime
novels “because I’m not very good on vio-
lent crime. I don’t watch horror films. I
went to see Silence of the Lambs because it
was so big you had to, and afterwards I had
to walk about 300 yards in the dark and it
really freaked me out.”
So he’s a literature lover, a sensitivepoetry
‘I cry more since becoming a father’
week. “It’s got jokes in it, of course,” he says
of the book. How could it not?
Humour and seriousness can happily
coexist, of course. Skinner recalls visiting a
meditation centre based on the teachings
of Osho, “one of these sex-guru-type Indi-
an guys”, for a TV show. “He felt very
strongly that if you’ve got anything impor-
tant to say, it’s got to have a joke attached
or people won’t remember it. I’m the sort
of person who thinks in jokes, but it’s also
a case of a spoonful of sugar. Not that I like
to see religion or poetry as medicine, but I
think a lot of people do.”
Coleridge liked his faith with a side order
of laudanum (opium plus alcohol), but for
Skinner religion and intoxication didn’t
overlap. A recovering alcoholic, he gave up
drinking in the mid-Eighties, around the
time he returned to Catholicism. “That
was a way of keeping me on the right road,”
he says, even though “for Roman Cathol-
ics, the combination of heavy drinking and
religious belief is rarely problematic”.
That laudanum habit was one of the
things that drove a wedge between Cole-
ridge and his adored friend. Even so,
Wordsworth’s removal of Coleridge’s name
from the second edition of their LyricalBallads seems harsh. It’s like Baddiel re-
moving Skinner’s name from Three Lions.
“Well, he has tried!” Skinner says with a
laugh. “He did an interview where he said
it was his idea. We spoke about that.. .”
Three Lions, which he wrote with Baddi-
el and Ian Broudie, was ubiquitous again in
the summer, 25 years after its original
release, as England reached the final of
the Euros. Although it was intended to be
about “doubts and hope rather than confi-
dence”, he agrees that those nuances were
lost on many. And that crushing loss to
Italy? “What made Gareth Southgate miss
the penalty was probably what made him
tactically lose the final. He’s not a gobby,
confident man. He’s a thoughtful, sensitive
man. I thought it was there for the taking,
the final. He was just too cautious.”
Skinner is one of my favourite people to
interview, reliably smart, funny and en-
gaging. We talk about Jack Thorne, the
celebrated writer of the TV series His Dark
Materials, who is married to his partner’s
sister. “I was pretty confident that I would
remain the most famous person in the
family and suddenly he’s the hottest writer
on the planet,” he says. Thorne’s adapta-
tion of A Christmas Carol is playing at the
Old Vic and he dedicated the programme
notes to Skinner, who notes that it’s a play
about “a bloke who does well for himself,
rejects his friends and becomes a spiteful,
miserly, solitary figure”.
None of that surely applies to Skinner,
although he has a grumpy — if under-
standable — aversion to present politics. “I
can’t imagine voting for anyone,” he says.
“I am not a fan of this idea that you have to
vote regardless. It’s like getting to the last
week of Strictly and you haven’t watched
any of the dances and you vote because
you feel you should.” Whether or not Skin-
ner is the most famous person in his family,
he is still the don of analogies.He’s the epitome of
laddish comedians,
but Frank Skinner is
really a sensitive soul.
He talks fatherhood,
faith and Wordsworth
with Ed Potton
Gareth Southgate
was just too cautious.
The final was there
for the taking
well versed Frank
Skinner with Denise
Mina in Poets’ Corner at
Westminster Abbey and,
top, Skinner on the roads R e s n C w i C t m m w e —Wordsworth and
Coleridge: Road Trip is on
Sky Arts/Now, Tue, 8pm