One of our most popular entertainers bares his soul this Easter with a candid collection of prayers. He tells of conversations with God have become central to his life

Expelled from secondary school, the comedian Frank Skinner went to a college of adult education near his family home in West Bromwich to redo his exams. One day, as part of a classroom discussion, a lecturer asked anyone who prayed to put up their hand. “Nobody did,” he recalls. “And I didn’t either.”

He can summon up so clearly something apparently minor that happened all the way back in the mid-1970s because it has nagged away at him ever after. He felt ashamed. Brought up Catholic, he has never stopped being a believer or praying. “Since I’ve gone into public life”, he tells me, with that winning gift of his for wearing things lightly, “I don’t want to hear the cockerel crow.”

And so, unlike St Peter, he has made a point of never again denying God or prayer when the question has been asked, however uncomfortable the circumstances. “In a way”, he muses, “I think I have been trying to raise my hand ever since.”

It was, though, largely a case of trying in vain during his glory days of the 1990s, when he won the coveted Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival and went on to become reputedly the best-paid person on British television with his own eponymous ITV chat show and a hugely popular laddish on-screen pairing with David Baddiel in Fantasy Football League. “In interviews that I did at that time, I would talk about how I read poetry and had two English degrees, and that I was a Roman Catholic, but it never made it into print.”