The sacking of Frank Skinner is a loss to British comedy

The recent news that comedian Frank Skinner had been sacked from his job at Absolute Radio after fifteen years as presenter feels like a misstep to say the least. It has not been without a whiff of scandal, coming amidst accusations of ‘ageism’. The man himself lamented: ‘I’m not going to pretend I took it well… I don’t want to go.’

Many of us will feel the same way: if, from May when his contract runs out, Frank Skinner is to be not only off our television networks but also national radio as well, it would seem to be comedy’s loss. His brand of humour – smutty, confessional, nudging and winking – is in a long tradition arguably dating back to Chaucer, through seaside postcards, Max Miller and the Carry On films. To abandon it is to jettison some aspect of being English.

For a time, you could scarcely avoid Skinner. After the ex-alcoholic Brummie English lecturer won the Perrier comedy award in 1991, he was everywhere. Beside his comedy, he had a hit chat show, co-hosted a series on Fantasy Football and was presenter of Room 101. Often dismissed as the archetypal 1990s ‘New Lad’, this description – while true – doesn’t quite nail him.

Skinner may seem a bloke’s bloke who grew up loving football, girls and masturbation, but he’s also a churchgoing Catholic (recently publishing A Comedian’s Prayer Book), an academic manqué and a long-term poetry enthusiast, currently presenting a weekly podcast on poets as various as A.E. Housman, T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath and Sappho. He himself is aware of the two Frank Skinners, saying of the swoops in his autobiography between high culture and filth that the book should be called ‘Blank Verse and Bell Ends – the life of Frank Skinner’.

Certainly he was the bluest – and often smartest – of comedians, but in the graphic shag-and-tells of his act there was a strong vein of self-deprecation and Skinner nearly always lost the battle: ‘No bimbos or brash male behaviour here. She is Madonna, I am Jack Duckworth’, he wrote of one romantic encounter. He complains about his women getting ‘bossy and actually quite aggressive’ in bed, and how they ‘bark out orders’ at him. Often, he’s unable either to satisfy them or rise to their metropolitan tastes, and he feels ‘abused’ (it’s as though Charles Hawtrey suddenly woke up in Debbie Does Dallas).

Part of Skinner’s appeal was that despite the laddishness there was always something else – streaks of Frankie Howerd and even Birmingham housewife, grimacing with disdain at the sticky mess of his sexual antics. He’s fastidious and ever so slightly camp, captured in his crisp delivery of words like ‘blemish’ and ‘adjacent’. ‘That’s what I love,’ Skinner explained, ‘when a routine becomes a sort of filth-poem.’

But what you notice most, watching his act, are the gales of laughter from the audience, with the filthier parts going down (no pun intended) even better with the women than the men. Skinner was once told by a former head of BBC One that people liked him because he was ‘ordinary. The public don’t want to admire, they want to recognise.’ And though he’s long been a multi-millionaire rolling about in money and fame with undisguised glee, he never quite stopped being one of them: ‘I just like those kinds of jokes so much and have always liked them. That was how we communicated when we were youths in the West Midlands.’

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Then there’s what Skinner calls his ‘pun disease’, which you will either love or hate but in his writing shows someone in his element. A beautiful woman who steps out from behind a bar to show an unexpectedly lumpy lower body is described as a ‘dame of two halves.’ A footballer’s wife stalking her husband’s lover becomes ‘the WAG’s tailing the dog.’ When Christine Pratt, founder of the National Bullying Helpline, was dismissed by Phil Woolas MP as ‘this prat of a woman,’ Skinner lamented her lack of a decent comeback: ‘I really wish she’d given a gutsy example to the bullied of this nation by putting the opportunistic Woolas in his place. Maybe she could have fought fire with fire and pointed out that “Phil Woolas” is what you do when sodomising a sheep. Instead, she let the bully go unchallenged.’

Skinner has clearly been worried about being passé for close on twenty years, raging away in 2007 about being called ‘one of the greatest storytellers of the Loaded generation’. Yet to say his comedy is dated is wide of the mark. Certainly, it’s of its time, and though one can imagine a bluestocking on the warpath crying ‘rape culture’ at many jokes, a lot of the sexual stuff – in a world of online hardcore – has lost its real power to shock.

Much of Skinner’s comedy is, however, still screamingly funny, a reminder of the no-holds-barred hilarity we were allowed the day before yesterday. Watching his stand-up shows on YouTube you’re reminded of an aspect of comedy that’s almost never discussed. Not its ability to prick the pomposity of the powerful, or to reframe reality or acquaint us with bitter truths. But simply that to watch a gig like this is to experience tangible, giddy happiness for an hour and a half – a happiness nowadays in short supply. And for every profanity of Skinner’s, there are passages like the following, from his recent book on talking to God:

I never hear your voice – no mighty wind – or, if I do, I don’t recognise it, but I have sensed you in the silence. And I rest there for just a short time. I sort of know it’s where the glory is, but it’s a place I feel too naked to stay too long. I also feel, and I don’t mean to reduce you, that silence might be the one place that you don’t know what’s coming next, either. 

Is this rather complex man, blank verse, bell ends and all, something of a ‘national treasure’? We tend to like our national treasures sexless in this country, the men at any rate – as Betjeman, Larkin, Alan Bennett and Stephen Fry have proved – and Skinner’s scarcely that. But he’s certainly an extreme national pleasure, and any mainstream channel that gives him the swerve is a bit of joke itself.

In his 2007 book Frank Skinner on the Road he describes every comedian’s nightmare – the one member of the audience, visibly impervious to your humour, you can’t tear your eyes away from. ‘It was a young woman in the front row with spectacles and hair pulled tightly back… She hated me. I tried directing a few lines straight at her, delivering them with a cheeky, ice-melting smile, but she just glowered back… Suddenly she became every finger-wagging, sour-expressioned, tut-tut disapproving person who’s ever told me what I should or shouldn’t say.’

You might argue, in many ways, Skinner’s world led directly to our current one. His jokes about underage girls and amputees were the extreme swing of the pendulum, for him and for us. We used up a lifetime’s lightness, laughed ourselves out, and were left with a mirthless hangover. But it’s a depressing thought that in 2024, that unsmiling spectator, ‘po-faced and disapproving’ as Skinner describes her, has had the last laugh at all of us.