Reviews
New comedy reviews - and our reviews archive.

Features Archive
Return to the Features Archive.

News & Gossip
News and gossip from the world of comedy.

Joe's Comedy Madhouse
Listings and booking for Britain's maddest comedy club

ALAS VEGAS

BY OLLIE WILSON

JOHNNY VEGAS is something of a legend in the comedy world.

Two years ago, he made the giant leap from obscurity to stardom in three-and-a-half dreamy weeks at the Edinburgh Fringe with a show that ripped up the comedy rule book.

Vegas swapped punch lines for pottery, routines for stream-of-consciousness and strait-laced stand-up for all-round entertainment.

He performed while drunk, sang horribly out of tune, and knocked up little clay teapots on a potter's wheel - to pick up a Perrier Award nomination and land a Channel 4 contract.

All the while, Vegas kept boozing.

Anecdotes about his drinking are legion.

One of friend tells how a pickled Vegas put on a heckler's designer shirt and ruined it by ripping off the buttons per sheer force of his proud beer gut.

Vegas himself admits that on another occasion he came within a hair's breadth of being punched for making sexual overtures to an attractive girl in the front row, only to discover she was a precocious 14-year-old out with her unamused father

Without alcohol, these things would not have happened.

So it seemed apt that we should meet mid-afternoon in a London pub, the Coach and Horses in Soho, the old watering hole of another legendary drunk, the late Jeffrey Bernard.

Vegas rushed to get there, after getting delayed flying down from Scotland, where he had been gigging, and then being delivered to the wrong street by a London cabbie.

When he walks in, his mop of curly brown hair is wet with sweat.

He is panting from the exertion of running through Soho. Vegas is in desperate need of a drink. I order a couple of pints of Guinness, little imagining that 10 hours later we would still be drinking.

Johnny Vegas is the stage name of Michael Pennington, the 29-year-old son of a carpenter from St. Helens, Lancashire.

But Vegas is not really a character in the way Alan Partridge is for Steve Coogan.

For the life stories of Vegas and Pennington are closely entwined and their vices more or less the same.

Much of the spleen that Vegas vents on stage has come straight out of Pennington's childhood.

"Me and my brothers did not get on at all," he rasps in his trademark throaty voice.

"I'm the youngest and Robert is four years older and Mark three years older than me. I was too young to do what they did.

"A big gap emerged when they discovered drink. They were coming home after the bevy and I didn't understand why they were talking crap."

His childhood was complicated by his calling to the cloth.

From a devout Roman Catholic family, he thrilled his parents in 1981 by declaring that he wanted to train for the priesthood at Upholland School, Skelmersdale, Lancashire.

"At the age of 11, I had planted the idea in my head and told enough people to convince myself."

Suddenly, he found himself boarding at the private Catholic seminary, taught by priests and with his fees paid by his parish.

The regime was harsh.

" The way of life was Victorian. You were up at seven for a communal wash - freezing in the winter. Then there was mass, breakfast, lessons, lunch, more lessons, evening prayer, tea, and prep, which did my head in.

"You sat in a room in silence for three hours getting on with your studies, even if you didn't have any. I got really bored."

He also became "incredibly home sick" and hit puberty, enjoying a "lot of lustful thoughts".

Within 18 months, he had dropped out to return, in 1982, to state education at West Park School, St. Helens.

"Grades-wise, I really slipped. Even in religious Studies, I only got a 'C' grade at 'O' Level.

"I passed three other 'O' Levels but told mum I had failed all of them, so when I eventually admitted I'd got four, she thanked God."

In 1986, he started work at the local Argos shore.

"It was great," he says without a hint of sarcasm. "It was good money and meant I could progress from drinking cider behind the youth club to going to a pub."

But after making a series of gaffes at the sales desk, Vegas was told just to help customers carry their shopping.

"Argos didn't have a uniform that fitted me, so when I'd say, 'Can I help you with your stuff?' people thought I was a weirdo."

He also studied part-time for 'A' Levels and a teacher got him interested in what became the greatest passion of his life - pottery. Hooked, he took an art foundation course and, in 1989, went to Middlesex Polytechnic, in north London, to study ceramics.
Herein lies the biggest disappointment of his life and his greatest source of comedy material. "The best pottery I ever did was my graduation work. I made abstract female forms. I'd worked my arse off, done something I really believed in and got the worst grade in the group." Graduating with third-class honours, he felt utterly let down by his tutors whom he resents to this day.

He was £1,000 in debt and his parents, Laurence and Patricia Pennington, could not afford to bail him out.

After working in a St. Helens pub for six months, he returned to his student digs in north London and fell into a pit of despair.

He signed on the dole and got "smashed on cheap wine during the day in the flat." By night, he released his anger by heckling at free comedy clubs.

Bored with that, he made the move from top heckler to wannabe comic, soon adopting an old nick name, Johnny Vegas as his comedy persona.

"At first, I was just a drunk bloke on stage," he admits.

All the same, he entered Channel 4's So You Think You're Funny contest in 1995, dying "the worst death in the final, forgetting my name, everything".

Dejected, he went back up north. "I thought, 'Sod everything - I'm not a comedian, I'm an entertainer.' That's when Johnny Vegas came together. I started saying on stage that what I talked about was not meant to be funny. People started laughing."

He brilliantly portrayed Vegas - clad in a tatty leather jacket, darts players' smock, beer-stained brown flared trousers - as the quintessential loser.

Ironically, for the first time in his life, he became a success.

But instead of chancing the London circuit again, he stayed up in the northern clubs, honing his act for two years, before taking Edinburgh by storm in 1997.

He feels very angry about the packaging of comedy and comedians, especially by the Jongleurs club chain.

"They are set up to sell food," he says. "The comedy is a side show.

"When Jongleurs phoned up my manager, he told them, 'I'm sorry. Johnny Vegas doesn't do small clubs!' We were saying we can work without them."

Fame has come at a price. His parents have never been to see him perform.

On stage, Vegas is harsh about his father. Off, he insists their relationship is sound.

"But my dad did cook my pet rabbit, Blackie. We had our rabbits as live stock. I thought he was joking one day when he said, 'Which one is going in the pot?' But I came back Blackie was skinned. We weren't that hard up. He just fancied a bit of rabbit!"

And he finds it hard to sustain a steady relationship. He says he is single at the moment, although hopeful of patching things up with the most recent love of his life.

He was also devastated by how Channel 4 executives treated him.

Although his Johnny Vegas pilot show was broadcast by the channel and acclaimed by critics, he felt his employers did not understand it.

"It went terribly wrong," he says. "They didn't like the show. I think they only signed me to get one over on the BBC. I was really angry and walked away from it."

Now he says the BBC is interested in doing a Johnny Vegas show, and he has had considerable interest from American television, not all of it level-headed.

Shortly after the Louise Woodward trial, says Vegas, Fox TV suggested a sitcom idea in which he would play an irresponsible nanny.

"I would have been the most hated man in America," he bellows.

It is well past midnight. Words still flow from Johnny's mouth like an endless piece of string.

He has been enthralling company. Our crawl has ended at a small Irish bar/comedy club in north London, where, handed the microphone by a truly appalling act, Vegas delivers a hilarious, off-the-cuff diatribe on comedy and the soul, to the delight of the tiny audience.

I have lost count of how many pints and double-vodka chasers he has consumed.

He surely must be drinking himself into an early grave.

But alcohol is central, probably vital, to his comedy.

He never goes on stage without drinking "half to three-quarters a bottle of red wine and some vodka".

Without its help, it is doubtful whether he could summon the self-loathing that makes him a great entertainer.

The key to Vegas's comedy is that he bastes himself in pathos - inviting his audience to laugh at his expense and feel better for it.

"People understand that even if I am on the attack, it's because of my own shortcomings. At the end of the day, what makes it all work is that I am a much sadder person than you."


© 2000 J C Wilson