Johnny Vegas is adjusting himself in his seat to tell the story. “What I really love cooking at weekends is a Sunday brunch,” he says, waving his Marlboro Light about in the air for emphasis. “But I’m not one of those people who can just throw stuff together. What should take 15 minutes takes about three hours with me, so it’s a question of getting up early to make a start. The thing is, though” — he adopts his trademark tone of jolly despair and his cigarette hand comes sadly to rest on the table — “the food’s just never all that magnificent in the end. You know that feeling, ‘This should taste better’? Because of all that work that I’ve done, it really should” — mock-sobbing now — “just somehow taste ... better! Do you know what I mean?”
I think we do, don’t we? Although, as often with Johnny Vegas’s observations, we may not have actually known we felt that way about our cooking until he articulated it for us.The peculiar gift that enables Vegas to look at, say, a disappointing eggs Florentine (actually his best dish; he poaches “a really good egg”) and see the eternal thwarting of human dreams has become his most endearing quality. If they know his work at all, fans stopping him in the street are most likely to mention the monkey ads (for ITV Digital and then PG Tips) or the current hit ITV sitcom Benidorm. Most, however, simply remember him describing his struggles with life’s mundane details and “just seem to see me as a lad from down the road who’s been among people he shouldn’t have been among. They don’t know what I do at all. Maybe they think I’m someone who is continually winning competitions.”
The 38-year-old Lancastrian (real name: Michael Pennington) rents a flat in North London and spends a lot of time in Dublin, where his girlfriend, Maia Dunphy, lives. But because his production company, Woolyback, is based in his native St Helens, and because so much TV production has shifted to the North West, most of his work is now done there.
In London today to promote his new DVD, Live at the Benidorm Palace, he sits in the bar of an expensive, media-type West End members’ club, in black baseball cap, black T-shirt, jeans and black Converse; they are good-quality casual clothes that could have been carefully chosen to look effortless but decent. He is more intellectual, and far smaller (5ft 6in) and somehow prettier than you expect; his arms and hands are as slender and pale as those of a Jane Austen heroine, although those of a Jane Austen heroine would not be getting through the fags at such a prodigious rate (he is discreetly positioned behind some plants; the staff who see him smoking pretend not to notice).
Having been famously, fabulously fat — his 2005 chat show was called 18 Stone of Idiot — he has lost 6st in the past 12 months, “just by eating better in general”. His chief motivation was health: a newspaper feature cited him as a “fatty smoker” who would be refused treatment on the NHS, his doctor gave him a talking to, then, as if to underline the warnings, he got gout — yes, gout — which apparently causes a terrible pain in the joints.
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He has also drastically reduced his formerly high alcohol intake. A couple of years ago he was seen standing on a Benidorm hotel balcony at 8am repeatedly shouting “I’m Johnny f***ing Vegas” and throwing furniture to the ground. ITV bosses claimed this was a rehearsal; this may or may not be true, but Vegas says now that his excessive drinking led to a point where he was “burning bridges and taking things for granted” and jeopardising his career.
To be fair, he did face a particular problem. “Johnny Vegas” was originally a stand-up persona with which Pennington made his reputation in the mid-1990s. When he was offered other work, he kept the name because he thought that it seemed a bit pretentious to drop it when that was what everyone knew him as. The trouble was that Vegas the character is a maudlin self-pitying drunk and these qualities were partly based on similar tendencies in Pennington himself, although he strives to control them.
“It meant that people were quite happy to sit with me in a pub when I was maudlin and s***faced, and they didn’t want me to be any different, because I was fulfilling all the ideas of what they thought I was. I could be sat in the pub in clothes I had had on for five days and they’d still say, ‘Great, I’ve just had a pint with Johnny Vegas!’ No one is sitting around saying, ‘Isn’t this a shame?’ But I almost wanted to let people know I was hurting.”
The chief motivation to sort himself out was seeing his son, Michael, growing up. There was the chilling moment when he realised that blurring the line between being a real-life drunken idiot and a fictional one may be artistically daring, but as something your dad did, it was potentially off-the-scale embarrassing. “I don’t want to be a dad who is a role model for being a drunk,” he sighs. “Projecting that image is part of my bread and butter, but there’s also a responsibility to do with what his mates might think.”
Vegas’s 2002 marriage to Michael’s mother, Kitty Donnelly, broke up in 2004 amid mutual accusations of drinking and bullying; they were divorced last year. He spends every other weekend with Michael, usually in St Helens; there will be a sleepover at Vegas’s sister’s house (she has a son of similar age), “something middle-class and remotely educational” or vegging in front of the TV on Saturdays. (“You don’t want to plonk him down in front of the telly because your time together is precious, but as a kid what would you rather do? The best I can do is to hide the PlayStation.”) On Sundays, besides brunch (“I pride myself on cooking for Michael”), there is church. Raised a Roman Catholic, Vegas began training to be a priest when he was 11. The “double standards” of the priests put him off his career, although he still has faith and finds church worship “a very relaxing experience, a comfort. Like sitting down to a meal that reminds you of something your mum used to cook”.
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This linking of family and spirituality is telling; the Penningtons are close, and ensuring that Michael junior gets to know his extended family is very important. Vegas grew up the youngest of four children and took his father, a joiner “with very strong moral values”, as his personal hero — although, he says, he has belatedly come to appreciate the endurance and hard work of his mother, who worked part-time as a cleaner and for a catering company.
Vegas studied art and ceramic design at Middlesex University but drifted into bar work (and drinking) until he got into stand-up comedy. He won the Edinburgh Festival Critics’ Award in 1997 and his work since includes TV ads, Dickensian and Shakespearean drama for the BBC, various films, Benidorm and the cult comedy Ideal on BBC Three. He is developing a puppet-based show for BBC children’s television with the Dublin-based puppeteers who were behind The Big Breakfast’s Zig and Zag.
The only big setback came last year, as a result of a review of a stand-up gig. On stage, in character, Vegas will often make lewd suggestions to people in the audience and sometimes touch them, and himself, in sexually suggestive ways. He argues that it is part of the process of discomforting people, and that those who come to his show know what to expect. Last year a Guardian reviewer accused him of sexually assaulting a woman audience member.
Accusations and rumours flew. “It snowballed and suddenly people were e-mailing me saying I should be in prison,” he says. “It became quite vitriolic and grew into a sort of campaign. For a couple of days it was a little bit frightening, and it shows how one incident can throw a career into a tailspin. I thought it could become very public and very bitter, but I was going: ‘Well, it should be; I should clear my name.’ But you learn over time that most things in the press are there for a week and then gone.”
He consulted lawyers, but his divorce settlement negotiations meant that he couldn’t afford to pursue the case. As it happened, the woman concerned offered to make a statement denying that the incident constituted assault and, perhaps because the tabloids ignored the story, sensing a potential libel, it died away. Vegas did stop performing as a stand-up comedian for a time, though, and now feels a self-consciousness about the act that he didn’t have before.
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There are no such issues with Live at the Benidorm Palace, in which he makes his act work for an audience more mainstream than his usual one. As he discovered, Spain’s tourist coast has a thriving subculture of 1970s clubland-type audiences and performers. “I thought they were going to hate me,” he says. “It ended up feeling like a very odd social experiment.”
In fact, he seems to win through easily, thanks to those powers of observation and empathy — which brings us back to his brunches. Can he share his eggs Florentine secret, I wonder? The cigarette bobs about enthusiastically again. “Yes. The thing is to not have the water boiling, to add a drop of vinegar but not too much, and not to stir too fast. If you stir too fast, it throws all the whites off and by the time it comes back together it’s a mess.”
Johnny Vegas Live at the Benidorm Palace is out on DVD
My perfect weekend
City or country?
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Country
London or Lancashire?
Lancashire
Sunday roast or sushi?
Sunday roast
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Strictly or X Factor?
Neither. BBC Four
Benidorm or Bognor?
Bognor. The English seaside is my ultimate day out
Family night in or pub?
It depends on which family members. Please don’t make me choose
Dickens or Shakespeare?
Shakespeare
Gin or Guinness?
Guinness
Fry-up or fruit salad?
Neither. What I love is brunch. I can’t do fry-ups. I can’t bring all the elements together to be ready at the same time
I can’t get through the weekends without . . .
Scrubs on TV. It would be The Waltons, but no one’s screening it now