Frank Skinner is talking money. About the fortune he lost when his bank advised him to put all his life savings in the US insurance giant AIG. About the £20m deal that his management company tried to negotiate with the BBC that led to his being named the greediest person in Britain in 1999. And about his two "golden handcuffs" deals with ITV that ended in 2005 when he disappeared from our screens after a decade of unbroken success.
Now Skinner is back, with a Saturday morning show on Absolute Radio and a new BBC2 entertainment series, Frank Skinner's Opinionated, his first regular presenting job for the corporation for more than a decade. But he is not afraid to talk about the difficulties of the past five years. "There is a sense that if you're not on the telly then you might have died. I'm aware that's how people largely judge you," says Skinner, over a steaming bowl of mussels in a restaurant in Covent Garden, central London.
He even bemoaned his absence from the TV schedules in the standup gigs that dominated his screen break, partly for comic effect, partly because he really felt it. "I'm very anti-bullshit. When people aren't on telly for a bit and they deny it I always find it wince-worthy. I might have slightly gone the other way – my manager used to get very upset about me saying I'm in decline and all that. I ended those ITV contracts and no one was snatching my hand off. If that's true, why not get some gags out of it?
"It's a bit odd the way it turned out," says Skinner of the BBC2 series rather than his career to date. The new show, in which he will discuss the week's events with two other comics and a studio audience, came about despite Skinner finding the first pilot "a bit constraining".
So keen was BBC2's controller, Janice Hadlow, that she commissioned not just a second pilot but a series as well, due to begin filming just nine days later. "So if the pilot's shit this time I'm really in trouble. But it's exciting, obviously."
Lad attitude
Skinner was one of the BBC's biggest stars in the second half of the 1990s, with a chatshow on BBC1 and BBC2's Fantasy Football League, which he co-hosted with David Baddiel. Along with the Lightning Seeds, the duo topped the charts with their football anthem Three Lions during Euro 96. Britpop was at its peak, Loaded was the magazine of the moment and Skinner was its quintessential "new lad".
Critics claimed his comedy was crude and misogynistic, with one complaining: "He doesn't seem to like women very much." Crude? Undeniably. Misogynistic? Not so, argues Skinner.
"If you look back at my standup DVDs it's about sex rather than [being] sexist," he says. "I'm the fall guy in every routine, I don't think there's anything which is derogatory about women." Something that seems more in tune with today was Skinner's acrimonious earlier divorce from the BBC. The relationship ended in 1999 amid claims that his management company, Avalon, had demanded £20m for a new two-year deal. The brief tabloid fury that followed was a foretaste of the storm that would later break over Jonathan Ross.
"I topped a chart of the world's greediest people in the Daily Mirror," remembers Skinner. "Imelda Marcos was fourth." Skinner says it "really got quite nasty" and he did not speak to his manager, Avalon joint managing director Jon Thoday, for three days. "I phoned him up and he was a bit wary. He's not the sort of man to be wary, he's quite a scary man. He said when you give someone the job of manager, you are basically giving them the right to play poker on your behalf. Sometimes when you play poker your bluff gets called and that's what I think happened." Of the £20m claim, he says: "I've never known whether it was true or not. The money I just leave to him. He might have asked for £20m. I don't know that he didn't."
He went on to sign consecutive three-year deals with ITV, presenting nine series of his chatshow and appearing in five runs of the improvisation series Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned. But towards the end he began to lose interest – "I stopped going to the edit, which is a bad sign" – and grew tired of interviewing Westlife no matter how much ITV paid him. "Those were the golden years – ITV don't pay that kind of money any more. When I left ITV I shook hands with [ITV's then director of television] Simon Shaps and said 'It's been great, you should see my flat.'"
Skinner also wrote and starred in ITV's sitcom Shane, the second series of which has never been aired. "I thought it was better than the first," he recalls. "It must have been terrible. As part of slightly losing my mojo I stopped watching comedy on TV, so I kind of wrote a sitcom that was from the 1970s and at the time people really liked The Office. I did a press launch and they said 'What do you think of The Office?' and I said I had never seen it. It didn't go down very well." After leaving ITV he appeared on various panel shows such as Have I Got News for You, and embarked on an acclaimed standup comeback tour.
Absolute freedom
Skinner says his Absolute Radio show gives him a freedom that he never completely had on television. He even gets to choose his own music – well, two songs an hour – playing Public Image Ltd, X-Ray Spex and the Fall. "The only time they have rejected them was because they said they were too dancey," explains Skinner of the station's music policy. "As long as there's one strum of a guitar somewhere, you're all right."
Absolute's audience has declined dramatically since it changed its name from Virgin Radio in 2008, but Skinner points to his audience figures, up 19% in the latest Rajar listening figures with an average weekly reach of 202,000 listeners. His Absolute Radio podcast has been downloaded 1.5m times in the past 12 months. But that is a fraction of the 2.94 million who listen to Jonathan Ross's Saturday morning show on BBC Radio 2. Dave Gorman, Skinner's Avalon stablemate, has a show on Absolute on Sunday, with both programmes produced by their management company.
Skinner will reunite with Baddiel to report for the station from this year's football World Cup in South Africa. Absolute Radio has also bought the rights to live Premier League football commentary on Saturday afternoons from next season, but this move is unlikely to lead to Skinner moving from his Saturday morning slot.
Skinner has a long-term partner, Cathy Mason, who recently left Channel 4 to become an agent. He is a teetotaller and devout Roman Catholic. He talks about his faith on his radio show and in print – he has a weekly column in the Times – but never uses it in his standup act.
"It's still one of the barriers, I think. I've written bits of standup about being a Catholic but I've never actually tried them out," he says. Because of his own sensibilities? "I don't think it would offend my sensibilities. I suppose I think my old fans are still there in football shirts wanting me to talk about anal sex. In a way I don't want to completely let them down."
Skinner suffered a blow last year with AIG's collapse. He says he was advised by his bank, Coutts, to invest his life savings – reportedly about £6m – in the US firm.
"I've got a lot less money than I used to," he says. "I'm not broke or anything. I've got half of it back."
The other half may – or may not – be returned in 2012. "That's the big question. When you ask them they say 'We are very confident.' I was angry with the bank but I wasn't crying into my pillow. It didn't upset me as much as I thought it would. It's not like I've had a call from my doctor and been told I'm not funny any more."
Upcoming projects include a documentary about George Formby for BBC4 – he is a ukulele devotee – but plans for a novel have been permanently put on ice. His book – about a 50-year-old Christian superhero called Thunderman who sold out and got bored – stalled at 60,000 words.
"I thought I'd have this mega-novel and people would say 'who'd have believed that laddish bloke could have written this work of art?' I didn't really read fiction – I recently started reading it again – the only fiction I ever read was comic books."
Skinner, who presented an edition of BBC1's Panorama about swearing on TV and radio in the wake of the Ross/Brand saga, turned down a spot on a younger viewers' version of Question Time on BBC3, which Dermot O'Leary will host. He had previously appeared on Question Time, but realised in the midst of an appearance on Andrew Neil's politics show This Week that he was out of his depth.
"I felt a bit like the guy who accidentally got interviewed on BBC News 24. I thought at the time I wasn't trying to prove anything, but maybe I was. 'Ooh, look at me, I can talk about politics.' That's a bit tragic. Whenever I see a comic on Question Time I think: 'Tell us a fucking joke'."