How I Escaped My Certain Fate (46 page)

It seems to me there are two broadly different approaches to stand-up, and by association to all art, each with their own strengths. At commercial British comedy chains like Jongleurs or The Comedy Store, performers tell you about your life, and things that always happen to you, and you may feel comforted by this. Go beyond the usual venues and you may see acts advance ideas that would not normally have occurred to you. In his book,
Improvisation
, Derek Bailey assumes a position in opposition to the very act of musical composition itself. But there’s a kind of social need both for songs we can all sing, and for jokes about buses always being late, and men being different to women, and dogs being different to cats. Only the most extreme
Wire
subscriber would deny the potential of all-embracing,
utilitarian
art. It’s just that all-embracing, utilitarian art tends to be a bit shit. When millions wept for their own mortality after the death of Princess Diana, all they were offered was an Elton John song with the words changed a bit.

Great art, whether it’s laboriously crafted or
spontaneously
generated, tends towards the surprise factor that Carlin describes, and Bailey embodies. Derek Bailey is bold enough to refuse to gloss his work with emotional
signifiers
, just as George Carlin doesn’t tell jokes as if they’re supposed to be funny. Both make us do the work, and we get the reward of appearing to surprise ourselves. But the breakthrough moment, for me, of seeing Bailey bash his guitar into the back wall of the RFH, was realising that I could be made to laugh, against my will, in an atmosphere of high seriousness, in the temple of culture, by the simple childlike joy of surprise. Derek Bailey, it seemed, was giving me permission to laugh.

‘Epiphanies’,
Wire
magazine

comedy issue, June 2005

Michael Pennington was born in St Helens, Lancashire, in 1971. He gave birth to Johnny Vegas sometime in the early 90’s, after a difficult pregnancy involving pottery, the priesthood and at least one severe beating.
Pennington
is one of our most misunderstood and maligned
talents
, and Johnny is one of the greatest comedy characters ever created. Johnny’s live performances, whether they succeed or fail, always do so spectacularly. Despite this, Johnny is best known to the public for his association with a woollen monkey in a series of TV commercials promoting a now bankrupt cable TV supplier. Almost hourly, people in the street shout at him, ‘Where’s your monkey?’ Only once have I seen him crack and reply, ‘It fucking died!’

I never knew Michael Pennington as Michael
Pennington
, only as Johnny Vegas, and he’ll be the first to admit that the line between the two burly northern men is blurred. ‘When I tell people about terrible things that have happened to me, they just seem sad,’ he explains. ‘But if I pretend they’ve happened to Johnny they become
hilarious
. But sometimes it’s complicated. On
Shooting Stars
I had to sit there and join in. But Johnny Vegas would have just lost interest, wandered off, come back with a dead
rabbit
and said, “Look what I’ve found.”’ For the purposes
of this piece, the Pennington–Vegas phenomenon will be referred to throughout as Johnny.

On location in the Peak District village of Castleton, where he is filming
Dead Man Weds
, a sit-com written by and staring
Phoenix Nights
’ Dave Spikey, it is Johnny, not Michael Pennington, whom every passer-by feels en titled to engage in conversation. Moving through any
public
space with Johnny is a problematic exercise. Everyone wants to shake hands, buy him a drink, or get scraps signed. I have never spent time with a celebrity so genuinely loved, and yet also so unselfconsciously accessible. Nobody leaves Johnny’s orbit without an anecdote or an authenticated fragment. Finally we wrangle him away, and Vegas drinks rum and coke in a Castleton pub, turning butts of
smoking
paraphernalia over in his hands, which are surprisingly small and gentle, like those of a spider monkey, or a young Victorian servant girl.

Johnny’s ongoing presence in newspaper gossip
columns
, quiz shows and commercials means that although he himself is instantly recognisable, the talent that informs his incendiary live shows remains largely un recognised. ‘It’s not my world but that doesn’t stop me passing through,’ he protests. ‘I think anyone who is remotely normal would find it interesting to observe those kind of parties without considering yourself one of the people that ought to be there. The thing is though, you go along and you imagine you’re just people-watching, but before you realise it,
people
are watching you.’ But to see Johnny live at the
Edinburgh
fringe in the late 90’s was an unforgettable
experience
. In some dark, dank room, this gargantuan figure would rage at the audience, often half naked, soaked with spilt pints, demanding their pity, or their respect,
forcing
them, often out of sheer terror, to enjoy themselves by joining in massed singalongs, whilst he displayed his genuine prowess on the potter’s wheel, creating, as best he could, beautiful clay objects, moulded from muck and beer, within the midst of this maelstrom. Where did this character come from?

‘When I was young I did get badly beaten up once and hospitalised. I went through a year of being really timid and I think doing Johnny allowed me to be as
confrontational
on stage as I’d like to be in real life. I might have been scared in reality, but I’d stand my ground on stage. And a lot of him is like local lads in St Helens where I grew up. You go in their club and they’re dead happy to see you but you only want to have two pints with them, not six. You don’t want to get drawn into it, otherwise it’s, “Come on, sit with me, be my friend, and then watch me reach the point of exploding.”’ When Johnny embarks upon
free-associating
tirades, that often last literally hours, he
conjures
the same feeling of excitement, fear and hilarity
experienced
during the desperate revels of just such despairing drinkers. ‘That’s another drunk-style thing about Johnny,’ he explains, ‘nothing ever gets to a finished point. Drunks think there’s always got to be somewhere else open.
Otherwise
it’s the horror of going home and living with
themselves
. Johnny wouldn’t care how much he bored other people. He’d satisfy his own need to be distracted first.’

Was using the potter’s wheel onstage in the early days of the act an attempt to find something delicate in amongst all the violence, despair and anger? ‘No,’ says Johnny, ‘the
pottery
was a kind of accident. When I was starting out doing stand-up I accepted a residency somewhere in Manchester and in my blissful ignorance I hadn’t realised people spent years putting their first hour show together. I didn’t have enough material so I just thought of anything I could do to fill the time. I remembered I’d done an arts foundation course and I’d really loved ceramics because I’d had a
brilliant
teacher. So I brought the Potter’s Wheel on stage. The first time I did it I realised it had a mesmerising, magnetic effect on people. They were amazed I could do it. And the fact that I could actually make pots like I said I could, made them wonder how much else of the act was true. “God! He weren’t lying? Maybe he was a Butlin’s redcoat in the 60’s like he says?” The problem with people that come and see me now is they’re not a live comedy crowd. They’re
people
who want to see someone off the telly. I do what I do and they say, “That’s not what I paid to see. I was expecting stand-up. Not a frightening monster.” I don’t think you can defeat it. You just have to not water down what you do, and not start gearing it towards that kind of audience.’

The Johnny Vegas character has been thoughtfully and carefully drawn to embody blackly hilarious notions of desperation, loneliness and bewilderment. But it’s so
convincingly
portrayed that, when it encounters an
increasingly
superficial media, Johnny’s behaviour is portrayed as synonymous with Michael Pennington’s. ‘What you say on stage becomes a perception of your real life,’ Vegas explains, ‘they won’t draw that line.’ Last year some lads shouted out at Johnny on stage, ‘Why did your wife leave you?’ Confronted with such a personal question any stand-up who chose to answer it seriously, or else get angry, would have thrown the gig. Johnny replied, ‘She didn’t share my belief in sea monsters. I’d be swimming around in the sea looking for them, and she’d get bored,’ brilliantly
defusing
the whole situation. The next day in the
Daily Mirror,
this comment was reported as evidence of Michael Pennington’s deteriorating mental state, as had been a
previous
gig where he had invited men in the audience to lick
his nipples, an old Johnny Vegas trick for breaking the ice that fans will have seen him use on stage many times. In the
Incredible Hulk
film, Eric Bana rampages through the Mojave desert destroying thousands of US army tanks, but he has so far escaped personal censure for this in the pages of the
Daily Mirror
. That said, I once criticised some friends for saying they had seen Johnny do a shit onstage. I said this was ridiculous and that whilst he may have
pretended
to do a shit onstage, he wouldn’t actually do a shit on stage. He was a character comedian, an actor playing a role, not a psychopath. I subsequently related this story to Johnny as an example of people’s failure to view Johnny Vegas as a character, but he made a kind of doubtful face, and I decided not to pursue the issue.

The irony is, such stories, whether true or not, add to the myth of Johnny Vegas. Johnny has never been
honoured
with his own TV vehicle. ‘TV producers and
commissioners
come and see the show and love it but when you give them any more in that vein they don’t seem to latch onto it and think you’ve gone too far,’ he concedes. Ben Thompson’s study of British TV comedy in the 90’s,
Sunshine on Putty
, singles out Channel 4’s failure to commission Johnny’s 1998 pilot as a major downward turning point in British comedy. But, denied of its own TV format, the Johnny Vegas character seems instead to be creating its own narrative in the real world, funnier and more
comically
tragic than anything a team of writers could contrive.

Earlier this year, Vegas appeared in
Sex Lives Of The Potato Men
, a film subsequently described as ‘the worst British film ever made’, though presumably not by people who had seen
Love Actually
,
Shooting
Fish
or that one with Lee Majors and Bradley Walsh riding around in golf carts. But though being in ‘the worst British film ever made’ might have been a blow for Michael Pennington, there’s something perfect about it for Johnny Vegas. When I went to see
Sex Lives Of The Potato Men
in Leicester Square, the Warner West End ticket machine was broken, and the
cashier
had given me a handwritten note allowing me access to the film. The very act of going to see Vegas’ film became inherently absurd and this is a typical by-product, somehow, of any of Johnny’s interactions with popular culture. I couldn’t resist ringing him from the largely empty
cinema
. ‘It’s the critics,’ he said, ‘they’ve taken to sabotaging the ticket machines now.’ But whilst the film’s other stars saw off the flack with various degrees of plausible denial, Vegas, honourably alone, embraced it. ‘Even when one critic described me as “the ugliest man in British cinema” I still stood by what I’ve done,’ he says. ‘Everyone that read that script wanted to be in it. I don’t moan about it. There are actors in it who’ve tried to distance themselves from it but it’s like stand-up. When they go badly they blame the crowd, and when they go well it’s because they themselves were amazing.’

Vegas may yet become a superstar by doing what he’s actually good at. If not then there remains the
consolation
that his career will look like some kind of strange art project. Standing alongside soap opera celebs in TV listings magazines Johnny, like the skeleton at the feast, renders them all ridiculous, whilst he remains idiotically removed, so low in status that he cannot be harmed, a genius fool. ‘You can’t touch Johnny because he’s never going to see the sense in taking the blame for anything anyway. That’s another idea drawn from alcoholism too. Everything’s always someone else’s fault. If that butterfly had flapped its wing in Tokyo I’d have got the part in
Lord Of The Rings
. It’s not my fault.’

The Johnny Vegas character seems entangled in notions of guilt and blame. It’s no surprise that the young Johnny considered training for the Catholic priesthood. ‘I thought of going into it until the age of ten,’ he remembers, ‘then at 11 I went to seminary, a private school funded and run by the church. The church work out what you can afford and your parents pay it out of shame. The idea was you’ll be a priest, get a taste for the monastic lifestyle of the priesthood – it’s indoctrination really. I don’t want faith through fear. I think it’s about the individual’s acceptance. I thought it was quite good that at the age of 11 I wanted to read George Orwell in bed but they wouldn’t even let me have a reading light because of rules and regulations and I found myself rallying against it. I was the great white hope of the parish and when I said I wasn’t up for it every one was very disappointed. I was made to feel very special when I wanted to be a priest and everyone was disappointed when I became ordinary again. But I craved the ordinary. I suppose Johnny Vegas is like that. He doesn’t give people what they want. He’s a revolutionary, like Martin Luther, but he doesn’t have anything worked out that he can nail to the church door. Johnny Vegas believes he has something to share but he is constantly humiliated. God is trying to teach Johnny Vegas a lesson, but even the violence doesn’t work on him. You could knock his head in and then he’d just put on baby’s clothes. God is doing it to him. God is saying to Johnny Vegas “you are one of the men who deserve to be beaten”. But he’d just tell God he was out of order.’