Yes, it surprises me too that it’s taken me this long to watch Being Frank, Steve Sullivan’s 2018 documentary about Chris Sievey’s life and his career behind the papier-mâché mask. It’s even more surprising when I tell you I’ve owned the BluRay for about five years and only took the cellophane off this week. Sometimes we just accrue things we’ve every intention of getting around to but time just sips away. Time to correct this particular oversight.

What a brilliant documentary film this is! I’ll admit, all I knew of Frank was from OiNK and his appearances on children’s TV in the 80s and 90s. As such, it swelled my heart to see him walking about with OiNK and No.73 badges as well as clips from the latter and Motor Mouth’s Andy Crane, with Frank sneaking about in the background. So I was feeling like a big child and extra comfy with the film as it got started.

There are plenty of sweet home videos of Chris and the story of how he met his wife Paula is a particular highlight of the early segments. You’ll be amazed at the combined Sgt. Pepper and Dalek bedroom mural he painted for his baby too! You see, this isn’t just the story of the megastar-to-end-all-megastars, this is a very human tale of the man behind the mask and it was all brand new to me.

I knew nothing about The Freshies, his band from his early days with “27 consecutive flops”. Chris’ passion never relented despite that achievement. Their music is great but just came at the wrong time, when being “cool” was the big thing in the charts. The Freshies were bright, bubbly and fun, and definitely not “cool”. Their song, I’m in Love with the Girl on the Manchester Virgin Megastore Check-out Desk is dead catchy and was due to be a hit, but events conspired against them. For example, a strike by the BBC’s technical staff cancelled their big Top of the Pops performance to promote it.

There are multiple stories of Chris’ brilliantly planned publicity stunts, such as stealing headed paper from a record company and sending out mass invitations for a secret event. The event was the debut of a new song and music video, but after all that effort Chris brought the wrong type of video cassette. His sense of humour in the face of adversity is truly inspirational.

His visionary genius is often on display, like creating a vinyl record with a song on one side and computer programs on the other that could be loaded into a Sinclair Spectrum for an animated lyric video. This was in the early 80s! The selection of talking heads also in awe of him include the likes of poet John Cooper Clarke (who calls him a pop music writing genius), radio DJ Mark Radcliffe, friend and band member Jon Ronson, OiNK co-editor Patrick Gallagher, his brother and musician Mike Gallagher, and comedians Ross Noble, Johnny Vegas and John Thomson.

Frank himself was created as a fancy dress costume for a party and afterwards was intended to be used as a Freshies super fan character, but of course he ended up taking on a life of his own. When the version of Frank we all know and love is properly introduced we visit his hometown of Timperley via the board game featured in OiNK. He could be up all night finishing his OiNK pages, often advised to trim bits off to give himself less work but he never considered doing such a thing.

Patrick reminisces about how often Chris would miss deadlines but the end result was always worth it. And that phone number he often printed in OiNK? That was his real home number, and Paula and his grown up kids remember just how many hundreds of calls they received as a result! Don’t be expecting a long OiNK section but that’s because there’s so much story to tell here. We do see TV clips featuring the comic though and throughout the film there are loads of things he referenced in his pages that you’ll spot and enjoy. For example, seeing his friends dressed just how he drew them in OiNK.

”Badly played, barely rehearsed bad versions of other people’s songs and people loved it,” says Chris’ brother Martin at one stage. How very true of the Oh Blimey Big Band. It’s at this point we get to one of the main themes of the film. His friends explain how Chris was living in an altered reality; when he was Frank he really was Frank. They say he was a genius but they were convinced there were two distinct personalities involved. This would eventually form the basis for Jon’s script for the Frank movie.

At one stage we actually see him take the mask off, but not before he’s ensured he’s out of sight of his fans and any children. Seeing his nose strapped up to maintain the voice and the amount of sweat pouring off his face, you begin to get the idea of just how hard it was to be Frank. His star was rising, opening for Bros with hilariously disastrous results, then playing the Reading ’92 festival where we hear 10,000 people cheering him on and singing his awful songs back at him!

It’s when we see clips of his Fantastic Shed Show that the story begins to turn, its success leading Chris off the rails with drugs, alcohol and affairs, the break up of his marriage and slipping into depression. After being so happy chasing his dreams for so many years of, for this to happen when he gets there is heartbreaking. This part of the documentary is particularly hard to watch, simply because we’ve grown to love the man so much by this stage and genuinely worry for him.

Eventually a job on the set of Bob the Builder helped get him back on his feet (there’s a funny story about how he got that job too) and he even reconciled with Paula. When he then resurrects Frank it’s all part of a very specific five-year plan, the culmination of which would see him get the credit he deserved for the character, and the film takes us through this phase of his life one year at a time.

The Frank Sidebottom renaissance was fantastic (it really was), with Timperley tours, a new TV show and even an incredible Frank stop-motion animated short! I dare you not to shed tears of joy with Chris’ Christmas present to his son at this point, which I won’t spoil for you. The increasing joy I felt as each year panned out inevitably led to 2010, his final gig on 11th June and his passing on the 21st. The fifth year of his plan was never to be. This was gut-wrenching.

If it sounds like the majority of this documentary with its roller coaster ride of emotions was all new to me that’s because it was. To be honest, I didn’t know how much I’d enjoy it before I put it on. I remember my mum couldn’t stand Frank when he appeared on TV. He was an acquired taste that’s for sure, so would my now-adult brain react as well as young me did to his contributions in OiNK?

The biggest surprise was discovering just how much I would’ve loved him outside of the world of OiNK and children’s telly if I’d known about it; he was an alternative comedian before I discovered the genre in my teens. All the clues were there in OiNK of course, but when it ended I never followed Frank any further. I really missed out. I loved this kind of humour in my teens (mainly thanks to Friday nights on Channel 4 in the 90s) and this realisation, the sheer fun of Chris’ comedy and his joy and passion for life was a delight to discover here, making the sudden end all the more heartbreaking, even though I knew it was coming.

This is a long review but believe me I’ve edited it down as much as possible without losing any of the things I just had to tell you about, and this is just the tip of the iceberg of what’s included in this 100-minute film. Originally a Kickstarter project (the list of supporters at the end is incredible) it’s widely available today. For example, at the time of writing you can buy the DVD for £6.99 or the BluRay for £5.99 from HMV’s online store (please support real shops like HMV, not that other online monopoly).

Just one word of warning before you do settle down to watch Being Frank, though. His Tax Song is awful, truly awful and deliberately so… but it’ll be stuck in your head for days. Trust me!

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