“a supernatural sureness of touch…just plain funny in a way that few other comics can touch… supremely fast-witted in his interactions with the crowd…exquisitely vivid in some of his turns of phrase: you can sense Skinner the poetry lover in lines”
Dominic Maxwell, The Times
“he’s still got it… a comedy master… a masterclass in crowd work, with Skinner getting spontaneous laughs off every interaction…exquisite one-liners”
Steve Bennett, Chortle
“Skinner is never less than beadily alert…you come away happy that after 30 years Frank’s still dishing his dirt, and happier still that he can dish plenty more besides.”
Brian Logan, The Guardian
“immaculately constructed…Skinner’s crowdwork is as sharp as ever…he can spool out a yarn every bit as entertainingly as prime-era Billy Connolly.”
Bruce Dessau, Evening Standard
It was announced today (Monday 18th December) that following 14 performances of his latest critically acclaimed stand-up show 30 Years of Dirt in London’s west end at The Gielgud Theatre in February 2024, comic legend Frank Skinner is set to take his show on the road from 12th March, opening in Belfast at Ulster Hall, including two homecoming performances at Birmingham’s Alexandra Theatre on 18th and 19th May and completing the UK tour at the Marlowe Canterbury on 9th June. Frank recently sold out seven shows at London’s Lyric Theatre as well as at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which included four extra dates added during the run due to overwhelming demand. 30 Years of Dirt follows his critically acclaimed, sell out national tour, Showbiz, and subsequent sell out residency at the West End’s Garrick Theatre in 2019-20.
Tickets go on pre-sale to Frank Skinner’s mailing list on Tuesday 19th December at 11am, and on general sale from Wednesday 20th December at 10am from www.frankskinnerlive.com. Sign up to Frank’s mailing list at https://www.frankskinnerlive.com/mailing-list
Notes to editors:
Frank Skinner’s live career began in 1987 when he spent £400 of his last £435 booking a room at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Four years later in 1991 he returned to the city and beat fellow nominees Jack Dee and Eddie Izzard to take home comedy’s most prestigious prize, The Perrier Award. He was appointed an MBE by the Princess Royal, Anne, for his services to entertainment in April 2023.
During a non-stop 10-hour radio show, which marked the 10-year anniversary of his hugely successful career at Absolute Radio, Frank announced his last stand-up show, Showbiz, which was a sold-out national tour and subsequent sold-out residency at the West End’s Garrick Theatre. Frank’s award-winning show, The Frank Skinner Show, attracts over one million listeners per week, has achieved over 100 million podcast downloads since launch, making it one of the most successful radio podcasts in the UK, and saw him inducted into the Radio Academy’s Hall of Fame in 2016.
Away from the stage, the last few years have seen Frank host the Big Hay Weekend on Sky Arts in 2022, and present three mini-series for the channel with author Denise Mina, Boswell and Johnson’s Scottish Road Trip in 2020, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Romantic Road Trip in 2021 and most recently Skinner and Mina’s Literary Road Trip: Pope and Swift.
In April 2020, Frank Skinner’s Poetry Podcast was launched to critical acclaim with a sixth series released earlier this year. Off the back of this, the highly acclaimed book How to Enjoy Poetry was published in September 2020. His latest non-fiction, A Comedian’s Prayer Book, was published in April of 2021 and released in paperback in April 2023. In July 2022, the South Bank Show aired an episode in honour of his career.
Frank has written two autobiographies, the first of which, Frank Skinner, was the top selling autobiography of 2002, spending 46 weeks in The Sunday Times Bestseller List. The second Frank Skinner On The Road, chronicled his 2007, sell-out return to stand-up. He also published Dispatches from the Sofa; a collection of columns he wrote for The Times.
Frank’s television career includes writing and hosting The Frank Skinner Show (BBC & ITV), which is widely credited as setting the tone for the modern comedic chat show and ran for nine years, attracting 11 million viewers at its peak. He also hosted seven series of BBC1’s Room 101 and seven series of Portrait/Landscape Artist of the Year for Sky Arts. He hosted three series of Frank Skinner’s Opinionated for BBC Two and presented documentaries covering passions including Muhammad Ali (BBC1), Elvis (BBC4) and investigating the life of George Formby (BBC4). In 2018 he wrote and starred as Johnny Cash in Johnny Cash & the Ostrich – a one-off special forming part of the successful Urban Myths series airing on Sky Arts.
As England made their Euro 2020 final showdown with Italy at Wembley, the iconic football anthem Three Lions, written by Frank alongside David Baddiel and Lightning Seeds, clinched the Number 1 spot in the Official Big Top 40. In the years since its debut, the track has seen multiple releases and is the only song in existence to have become the UK number one on four separate occasions by the same artists: two one-week stints in 1996, three straight weeks in 1998 for the remake, and again in 2018 during the World Cup. A reworked, festive version of the anthem was also released ahead of the 2022 men’s World Cup in Qatar.
Alongside his regular show on Absolute Radio, Frank has carried out exclusive feature interviews for the station with a number of esteemed guests including Nobel Peace Prize-winning former Vice President Al Gore and Russell T Davies, executive producer of Doctor Who and writer of It’s a Sin. Frank has also written and starred in three series of the critically-acclaimed comedy drama series Don’t Start for BBC Radio 4 and has created and hosted two series of his comedy panel show The Rest is History for BBC Radio 4.
30 Years of Dirt runs from 12th March to 9th June 2024
