...in favour of Samuel Johnson

Frank Skinner has turned down the chance to follow the Pope on stage.

The comic, who is a practicing Catholic, was approached by the Vatican to compere a concert following Pope Benedict’s Hyde Park mass in September.

However, after some deliberation, Skinner shunned the pontiff – as he had already agreed to attend a dinner that same night at which he would become president of the Samuel Johnson Society.

He told The Observer that the concert was planned as a way to let crowds disperse from the London event slowly, rather than all at once following the service.

He said: ‘The way I saw it, the Pope would essentially be my warm-up act. He’d get them going and then it would be, “That's enough from me – here’s Frank Skinner!”

‘It’s not that often you get to blow out the Pope. I’d like to think it’s a pivotal moment in my life.’

Skinner has been a fan of Johnson’s since reading Boswell’s biography of him when an undergraduate at Birmingham Polytechnic.

He said: ‘I got into Johnson the way one gets into a band. I quoted chunks of it all the time. I converted a mate and we had a phase of prefacing everything we said with an 18th-century “Sir…” It was almost a form of Johnsonian Tourette’s that we had.’

Published: 12 Apr 2010