Frank Skinner has said he is “deeply ashamed” of his treatment of former footballer Jason Lee, describing his jokes about the sportsman as “bullying”.
In the Nineties, comedians Skinner and David Baddiel had a BBC show called Fantasy Football League, in which they ridiculed footballers.
Much of their mockery was directed at Jason Lee, the Black Nottingham Forest player. Baddiel would portray Lee as dim-witted, with a pineapple on top of his head to imitate Lee’s hairstyle. Skinner would put on a strong Northern accent to portray Lee’s then-manager, Frank Clark.
At one point, Baddiel wore blackface when depicting Lee.
“It was bad, yeah,” Skinner told The Guardian in a new interview. “I spoke to Dave about it recently, from a how-the-f***-did-that-ever-happen point of view. I still don’t know how it happened. I know why we took the piss out of him, because I’d watched him on Match of the Day missing several goals, so a sketch about him being unable to put a piece of paper into a bin worked.
“But when Dave walked out from makeup [in blackface] that night, I still don’t know why one or both of us… or someone there didn’t say what the f*** is happening?”
Skinner added: “I can’t look back on it now without seeing it as bullying. There was a big response to it. People started to send in loads of pictures of pineapples, and so it ran and ran and ran. Looking back, it was a bullying campaign. And it’s awful. And yeah, I’m ashamed of it.
“And we’ve said that to each other without any Guardian journalist to impress. It wouldn’t be too much to say we’re both deeply ashamed.”
Skinner said he’s “never done the big public apology” because it “doesn’t sit well” with him. He said: “They look a bit like union card apologies: ‘I just need to keep working; I’ll apologise for anything, just let me keep working.’ I didn’t want to be part of that.”
Baddiel has issued a number of apologies on social media, but in 2020 Lee called out the pair for never apologising to him personally.
“I never received an apology from Baddiel and Skinner,” he said, adding: “It’s never too late. I think that would be good for maybe my children to hear that, and it would show them that in today’s day and age people maybe are more remorseful, and people are having to look at how they act.”
