Frank Skinner has been up since 7.23am. “I don’t like dictatorial twelfths,” he says, showing me the list of alarms on his phone: 6.57am, 7.09am, 7.11am, 7.17am. We’re meeting at a photo studio in an industrial estate in north London. He’s already done the school run – Skinner had his first and only child with long-term partner Cath Mason in 2012, and Buzz is now 11 years old. They walked the dog across Hampstead Heath. “We’ve got a white cavapoo called Poppy,” Skinner goes on. “So it all works out quite neatly. The dog gets a walk, the kid gets to school, we don’t damage the planet. The maximum exercise I can do now is walking anyway.”
Is Skinner feeling his age? He is 66 now and looks well, like a slightly older version of the Frank Skinner picture from telly: thin but healthy, grey hair not yet receding. But recently… “One thing I’ve noticed is that when I bite into an apple, I have to press down on the top of my head to get through,” he says. “I don’t have enough jaw strength.” He laughs the trademark Skinner chuckle, half discerning professor, half giggling school boy. “No one said to me, ‘You’ll reach a point where you’ll be using your skull like a hole punch.’” Time has been catching up with him in odd and surprising ways. “I was watching a football match and the commentator said, ‘They haven’t won on this ground since 1993.’ I thought: ‘What, yesterday?’ Then I realised that’s 30 years ago.”
