Comedian Frank Skinner's meteoric rise from Tipton Pie Factory - from £20 a night to a £20 million chat show

Gaunt was running a nightclub in Coventry, and he had heard about this young Halesowen College lecturer called Chris Collins who was trying to get a comedy club going. 

"We went over to see him one night, and I reckon the Tipton Taliban would have raised more laughs," Gaunt recalls.

"He was a geeky, part-time teacher with an act that was as funny as haemorrhoids." 

Problem was, the following week Gaunt was short of a compere, so he found himself offering 'funny as haemorrhoids' Chris Collins £20 to warm up the crowd.

"I've always joked that the fee was £19.99 too much, but the truth is he didn't go down too bad," Gaunt later admitted.

"I liked the bloke, and I actually took my theatre company over to his college to perform my play Hooligans, and I was also booked to carry out some drama workshops with his students. More gigs followed, we became friends, and I gave him the chance to perform in one of my venues at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival."

It is fair to say that from this point on, the career of Chris Collins, or Frank Skinner as he became known, somewhat eclipsed that of Jon Gaunt from that point. 

Christopher Graham Collins was born in West Bromwich in January, 1957, the son of John Collins, who before the Second World War played football for Spennymoor United in County Durham. When Spennymoor played West Bromwich Albion in an FA Cup tie, he called into a local pub where he met future wife Doris.. 

Chris grew up in a council house in Oldbury, where he attended Moat Farm Infant School from 1961 to 1964, St Hubert's Roman Catholic Junior School from 1964 to 1968, and then Oldbury Technical Secondary School from 1968 to 1973. Despite passing only two O-levels during the summer of 1973, he stayed on to sixth form where he took A-levels in English and Art, as well as resitting a number of his O-levels.

He subsequently took four A-levels at Warley College of Technology and graduated from Birmingham Polytechnic (now Birmingham City University) in 1981 with a degree in English. This was followed by a master's degree in English literature at the Warwick University Coventrythe following year.

After university, he spent three-and-a-half years on the dole before landing a job teaching English at Halesowen College. He  performed his first stand-up gig in 1987, and made his first television appearance a year later, encouraged by his father John.

"My dad didn’t have that attitude ‘you should get a trade’, which is what most dads said in those days," he recalled. "I think he’d worked in factories for a lot of his life and didn’t like it that much, and he was all for me taking a risk and trying something else, which was quite unusual."

By 1989 he had enough work to focus on his comedy full time, changing his name to Frank Skinner after a friend of his father because the showbiz union Equity already had a singer called Chris Collins on its books. 

The following year he co-wrote and starred in the Channel 4 comedy variety show Packet of Three alongside Jenny Eclair and Henry Normal. The show was a moderate success, and returned for a second series, but it was his barnstorming appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1991that set him on his way. By this time his act, which had come a long way from his time at the Pie Factory, beat both Jack Dee and Eddie Izzard to win the coveted Perrier Award.

His profile grew considerably when he began appearing alongside David Baddiel for the popular late night comedy, football and chat show Fantasy Football, which ran from 1994 to 2004. The pair became unlikely chart-toppers in 1996 when they joined forces with rock band Lightning Seeds to record the Euro 96 song Three Lions. The song reached No. 1 again two years later when it was re-released for the 1998 World Cup, and for a third time at the 2018 World Cup.  

He reprised his partnership with Baddiel in 2000 for the improvised comedy show Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned. By this time he was well-established for his sardonic style of observational humour

In 2001, he returned to his Black Country roots for the autobiographical TV series Frank Skinner on Frank Skinner, in which he revisited his childhood home in Oldbury and included interviews with his friends and family member

From 1995 to 1998, Skinner presented a chat show on BBC1, which moved to ITV the following year following reports that Skinner was demanding £20 million. 

The Observer listed him as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy in 2003, but a comedian's life can be a fleeting one, as he discovered in 2005 when the chat show came to an abrupt end.

“I definitely thought it was over, from about 2005 to 2007,” he said. “I could feel a bit less respect when I arrived to do a job, the phone calls slowed down and I felt sorry for myself. It was a dip, not an ending, but that’s hard to spot.” 

He decided to go back on the road, and his 2007 proved surprisingly successful, and he gradually started building up his live and broadcast appearances. HIs 2013 Man in a Suit tour was both a critical and commercial success. 

It wasn't all plain sailing though. His play  Nina’s Got News flopped at the 2018 Fringe, convincing him to focus on the stand-up. 

A practising Catholic, he removed swearing from his act in 2008 in response to comments from Sir Terry Wogan and Michael Grade about the amount of foul language on television, although he said swearing had its place when it was relevant to the act. He also stopped talking about football. A lifelong Albion fan, he was regularly seen attending matches with his close friend Adrian Chiles. But despite making his name on a football-related comedy show, he later said: "The reason I don’t talk about football on stage now is because I just thought that you lose half the audience when you start talking about something that’s specialist. Aside from that, any comedy tour is your current thoughts, interests and obsessions.”

Skinner, who had battled with alcohol in his younger days, became teetotal in 1986, saying he began to fear for his life when he started drinking Pernod for breakfast. He said that he filled the void by taking up new hobbies, such as playing the ukulele, and these activities provided him with much material for his act.

From 2012 to 2018, Skinner hosted the BBC show Room 101, where celebrities were invited to discuss their pet hates. A longtime fan of Doctor Who, he appeared in a 2014 episode alongside Peter Capaldi. 

Skinner first married in 1990, but the marriage was annulled shortly afterwards. He became a father in 2012, at the age of 55, and married his long-term partner Cath Mason in May this year.

In a 38-year career, Skinner has been one of the most familiar and highest-paid stars on television, and has packed out some of the country's top stadia. 

He has come a long way from the lad who bombed at Mad O'Rourke's Pie Factory and scraped a living earning £20 a night.