After doing a show together a few years ago, Eddie Izzard told Frank Skinner that he was a transvestite and was anticipating problems from people who didn't really understand what the term meant. Skinner said he knew exactly what Izzard was feeling, adding that he encountered similar problems when he explained to people he was a practising Catholic. "Looking at it now," says Skinner, "I think Eddie Izzard has it easier being a transvestite than I do being a Catholic".
It's not just his religious leanings that people find hard to reconcile with Skinner's persona of Superbloke - his expletive-ridden gags about football and sex (his only two onstage interests) more or less defined nouvelle blokeishness in the early years of this decade when he was the original man behaving badly - it's his academic background, too. Skinner is the proud possessor of not one, but two university degrees in English literature. "People only see the bloke in the pub image of me, the bloke at the match image, but as I'm sure many people reading this have just discovered, there's more to me than being Funny Frank."
One of the most popular and successful comics of his generation (Perrier winner back in 1991, he's currently on a 100-date tour of Britain and Ireland), his two forays into television have pulled in an average of six million viewers per episode for Fantasy Football League (which he co-hosts with ex-flatmate David Baddiel) and seven million viewers for his own chat show, The Frank Skinner Show.
The latter, as he proudly points out, "has attracted a record number of complaints. I think the most the BBC has ever had."
His no-nonsense, back-to-basics routines on football and sex have successfully merged the mainstream and alternative wings of comedy and while Bob Monkhouse and Jimmy Tarbuck are major fans, so are many of the newer style gagsters who see his straightforward "Route 1" approach to comedy (the footballing equivalent, which he would appreciate, is the long ball game) as a refreshing change from any number of surreal and overly wordy acts.
"Like most aspects of my life though, people still have the wrong perception of me," he says. "The old school comics wonder why I hang around with the `alternatives' and the newer comics see me as being a type of Northern Men's Working Club act. For example, when I won the Perrier, Sean Hughes came up to me and wondered aloud why they were giving the award to an end-of-the-pier comic. I can't win."
Chronologically, he's 40 years of age but he still possesses all the wide-eyed enthusiasm (never mind the smutty jokes) of a 18-year-old. His real name is Chris Collins, he's from the West Midlands (the West Bromwich Football team are something of a passion to him, to put it mildly) but had to change his name because somebody else in Equity had already taken Collins, Chris. He sincerely thought of changing his name to "Wes Bromwich" but settled on Frank Skinner simply because it was the name of somebody on his father's dominoes team. After university, he drank full-time for a few years before giving it up and becoming a comic. He's been off the drink 10 years now but talks about a recent holiday in France when, wanting a drink, he settled on smelling the top of a bottle of beer. "I wanted to drink it but I just thought `I'm not going to do that again'. I'm an alcoholic in the sense that there was a time when I couldn't get through the day without a drink. I used to get up in the morning and drink cheap sherry. One day, when I was unemployed, I decided to join a library to improve myself. I imagined going down and filling in a membership card, only I couldn't quite picture doing it without a drink. How could I talk to anyone stone-cold sober. It was at that point that I started to worry."
He's adamant that there's no connection with his new found Catholicism and his alcoholism. "I was brought up Catholic but like most people I left the church when I was 18 because I thought it was all a load of rubbish. But I returned when I was 30. It's hard to talk about religion without sounding like a complete w--ker and when even when someone mentions the word `Christianity' I think of people with bad fashion sense and bad skin, but that's just the Protestant end of the market, I think - that's just a joke by the way.
"I just found myself reading all these books about religion and then thinking `f--- it, I'm going to return'. I can't really rationalise what I get out of it [he chooses not to mention how both his parents died and how his first and only marriage broke up after 10 months immediately before he returned to the church] but wherever I am in the world, I go to Mass every Sunday. I find it very comforting. Obviously anybody who has seen my set will know that I'm not a good Catholic and I know I swear too much . . . but then hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue. I know about all the child abuse stuff in the church and all of that, but you have to remember there are a lot of alternative histories of the church, and in other times all the negative stuff was focused on the lives of the popes, but there are good influences also."
He feels no need to reflect his experiences (whether religious or drink-related) in his material - "I'm not a bloody playwright" - and says that despite the criticisms of him as a one-dimensional performer, there are "clever little bits below the surface" of his gags. "I know I probably should stretch myself a bit more and maybe tap into some more of my experiences but I'm just not cut out for that sort of material. I do what I do and people know what to expect from me," he says. "After all, I'm more Jimmy Cricket than James Joyce."
Frank Skinner plays the Olympia Theatre, Dublin, next Tuesday night. A compilation video of his chat show, The Frank Skinner Show, has just been released by PNE Video