Frank Skinner to tour to Theatre Royal Bath with new show in Spring 2024

Following a sell-out extended run at the Edinburgh Fringe and seven nights at the Lyric Theatre in London’s West End, comic legend Frank Skinner is set to visit Theatre Royal Bath with his critically acclaimed new stand-up show, 30 Years of Dirt, on Sunday 5 May. The 2024 nationwide tour takes place directly after a return West End run in February at the Gielgud Theatre.

Frank Skinner’s latest show comes hot on the heels of his last sell-out national tour, and subsequent sell out residency at the West End’s Garrick Theatre with Showbiz, which appeared at the Theatre Royal Bath in October 2021. 

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 for his services to entertainment in April 2023.

His award-winning Absolute Radio 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. To mark the 10-year anniversary of his hugely successful career at Absolute Radio, Frank completed a non-stop 10-hour radio show.

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 and 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 in 1996, 1998 and again in 2018. 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.