Frank Skinner Autobiography Read Online Free Page A

school?’
    Now, as heckles go, this one was quite tricky. Firstly, it didn’t follow the normal heckle-structure of insult from audience, followed by better insult from comic. It was more of a polite enquiry, but still potentially destructive and probably still motivated by bad intent. It sounded friendly but it was designed to throw me. Secondly, you’ll be surprised to hear, it was not a heckle I’d had before, so I couldn’t even fall back, if stuck, on my own personal heckle-response back-catalogue. If someone says they remember you from medical school, there isn’t much logic in suggesting that, as a result of this, they’ll never stand in dog shit again. Thirdly, I never went to medical school. Anyway, the exchange went like this,
    Heckler: Don’t I remember you from medical school?
    Me: Oh, yeah. You were the one in the jar.
    Dave tells me he joined in with the applause. We didn’t actually speak that night, though. Dave was already established on the London circuit and I was just breaking through. There was a fairly rigid pecking-order on the circuit, the general rule being that established comics sat at one end of the dressing room, sharing in-jokes and ignoring the new boys, and people like me sat on their own, giggling nervously at overheard gags they didn’t quite get but which the established boys thought were hilarious. I made a vow that if I ever got established on the circuit, I’d always make an effort to make the new boys feel at home. You know, go over and ask their name and so on, maybe even introduce them to the closely knit in-crowd I was now part of. Of course, when the day came that I did get established and accepted, I thought, ‘Oh, fuck it. Let someone else sit in “Twats’ Corner”.’ Human nature, eh?
    Dave and me (yes, I know it should be ‘Dave and I’ but I’m trying to find my real voice. I just read what I’ve written so far and I thought some bits sounded a bit grand) had our first proper conversation in a dressing room at a club called Jongleurs in Battersea. It was during the 1990 World Cup and there was a telly in the dressing room so we could watch that night’s Republic of Ireland game. Being of Irish Catholic stock, I was supporting the Republic. I’d said hello to Dave on a couple of occasions but we hadn’t had anything like a proper conversation. He was doing pretty well at the time. He was getting a lot of radio work and doing gigs at all the best clubs. I was sort of world famous in Birmingham and getting on OK in London, but the differences didn’t stop there. Dave, or David as everyone called him. Hold it. I found a difference already. In my whole life up till then, I had never met anyone called David who people called David. In Oldbury, he would have been Dave, no messing. And he was Jewish.
    I don’t think I’d met a Jewish person before. If I had they’d certainly kept it under their hat. Which seems unlikely when you consider how small those hats are. (I’m not totally happy with this gag because although Jews do wear those little hats clipped to their heads, they also wear those big trilby-cum-stetsons which, I imagine, have loads of storage-room for secrets.) I may have sort of known a Jew back in Oldbury. There was a bearded, East-European-sounding local nutter who everyone called Jacob the Jew. I have no idea if Jacob was a Jew (I mean Jacob the nutter, of course, not Jacob, the brother of Esau and the son of Isaac. He was definitely a Jew). The rumour that Oldbury’s Jacob was Jewish was definitely beefed up a bit when my mate Ogga saw him on. Crosswells Road shouting, ‘The Suez Canal: what for?’ over and over. None of us really understood the significance of the Suez Canal at the time, but it certainly sounded Jewish to me. I’m not even sure if he was a nutter. This is not always easy to judge. I find, as a general rule of thumb, if you see