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Becoming Johnny Vegas
Johnny Vegas
‘My name is Michael Pennington, and I am not a comic character. I’m often mistaken for one though. You might know him by another name. Johnny Vegas.’From BBC Dickens adaptations to Benidorm and Ideal to the PG Tips ads, Johnny Vegas has become one of Britain's best-loved comic actors.But before he'd ever drunk tea with a knitted monkey or made himself the exception that proves the rule in terms of the predictability of TV panel game regulars, Johnny Vegas was perhaps the most fearlessly confessional stand-up comedian this country has ever produced.How did an eleven-year-old Catholic trainee priest from St Helens grow up to become the North West of England’s answer to Lenny Bruce? That’s just one of the many questions answered by this eye-poppingly frank memoir.Becoming Johnny Vegas establishes its author as the poet laureate of the Pimblett's pie.Once you've finished this darkly hilarious tale of family, faith and the creative application of alcohol dependency, you'll never look at a copy of the Catholic men's society newsletter the same way again.
CONTENTS
Cover (#u666a4889-8b63-52a0-aa34-a48c66fece5a)
Title Page (#ue29209c1-ef94-5893-bc59-ea7b99db100b)
Introduction
PART I: THAT THERE MIKE PENNINGTON
1. Thatto Heath Rhapsody
PART II: SEEDS OF JOHNNY
2. The White Father
3. Upholland First Year: ‘Underlow’
4. Orwell’s Words Were My Silent Lullaby
5. The Vatican Didn’t Stand a Chance From That Moment On
6. A Decanter of Sherry
7. Upholland Second Year: ‘Low Figs’
8. Fuck Catholic Guilt! or The Dynamics of the Communal Shower
9. Madame Had Real Class
10. A Slow-acting Poison Whose Symptoms Won’t Dilute
11. Benediction Had Long Finished
PART III: JOHNNY GERMINATES (#u0b97d486-8713-562e-b567-81caf9a03df5)
12. The Blue Blazer
13. Cat’s Arse-kisser and Desmond Tutu
14. Rowena Vs Ian
15. The Catholic Men’s Society Newsletter
16. Nutgrove’s Here
17. A New Voice
18. Saved by the Wheel
19. My True Vocation
20. Argos Fuck Yourself
21. Project Guttenburg
PART IV: JOHNNY TAKES ROOT
22. Let’s Get a Perm
23. Live Bait
24. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Middlesex Poly (But Were Afraid To Ask)
25. ‘Mad Dog’ Mike Pennington’s Third and Final Gig
26. Graduation
27. The Brown Edge
28. Storming The Citadel
29. ‘So You Think You’re Funny?’
30. The Old Frog
PART V: JOHNNY TAKES OVER (#u815b70b7-87f8-5458-b4c7-3c7c84e02b16)
31. Let Go, Let Johnny
32. ‘Lust for Life’
33. Amos 3:3 – ‘Do Two Walk Together, Unless They Have Agreed to Meet?’
Picture Section
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Copyright
About the Publisher
An art school exercise in releasing the ego.
See, I did warn you!
INTRODUCTION (#uc06a74ee-4e8c-53ee-9553-7a1d0afc53d7)
My name is Michael Pennington and I am not a comic character. I’m often mistaken for one, though – as much by myself as anyone else.
See me in the street and you might shout ‘Hey, Johnny!’ or chant, ‘Vegas!’ Langtree-Stadium style (home to St Helens’ finest, the mighty SAINTS!), then most likely invite me out on the lash with you. But don’t be offended if I wave awkwardly before walking away (and please know that he is dying to take you up on the offer).
That title – Johnny Vegas – belongs to my best friend and my worst enemy, my nemesis and my deliverer, the one person who stuck up for me when everyone else had quietly written me off, but then tried to out-and-out assassinate me; a walking encyclopaedia of human frailty who started out as a fearlessly confessional stand-up comedy persona (and who now thinks I sold him out in favour of flogging teagbags alongside a far more media-friendly knitted sidekick, when I’m not busy on panel shows, cosying up to the very same comedy establishment he’d set out to obliterate).
Like a special schizophrenic edition of Who Do You Think You Are? I want to trace the conception of Johnny Vegas: his awkward gestation, violent birth, messy adolescence and distraught assault on the UK comedy stand-up circuit. I’d like to know how I could be so blind to a fact so obvious to everyone else. I didn’t make him up as my ego would have us all believe: he always was me! The part of me I mistakenly thought I could put back in the bottle once he’d served his purpose. How did I miss the real joke that everyone was in on, except us?
I need to make sense of this as much for myself as for you, the reader. But I don’t want you feeling like you’re intruding on some personal journey. As with any self-respecting clown, there will be laughs along the way, but this is an attempt at telling my story warts and all, with the aim of delivering something a little more substantial than a Christmas-stocking filler. Dare to scratch beneath the surface with me and together we’ll find the good stuff, the home truths, the black gold stuck to the bottom of that circus bucket full of confetti. And I genuinely hope the blood, sweat, tears and other less socially acceptable bodily fluids will be worth whatever they end up charging you for this in Tesco’s.
But what I’m praying for deep down is answers.
This book is about the real me, Michael Pennington, looking back and trying to find the source of what you think you know and (hopefully) love about Johnny. I’ll no doubt moan about the loss of innocence and blah de blah de blah, but I want to know how a genuine alter ego is born, and then manages to take over completely.
No doubt Johnny will want to turn his back on this book – publishers are pimps! He might be willing to prostitute his past for a cramped wee slot on the bookshelf of showbiz banality but, just like Julia Roberts, you won’t catch me kissing on the corporate lips of ‘Hey, hey, look at me’ celebrity literature. Or even try to destroy it if it gets too close to the difficult truths he was meant to protect me from – truth is a trombone, capable of sweet yet sombre serenades, but in the wrong hands it’s nothing more than a long, wet, amplified fart that sends its audience scurrying for the earplugs of inebriation. But sod Vegas …
I was here first.
PART I (#uc06a74ee-4e8c-53ee-9553-7a1d0afc53d7)
1. (#uc06a74ee-4e8c-53ee-9553-7a1d0afc53d7)
THATTO HEATH RHAPSODY (#uc06a74ee-4e8c-53ee-9553-7a1d0afc53d7)
When I go back to the very beginning, I can’t help but smile. Like a Ken Loach film, there was a joy to be mined from everything life threw my way. It was who we were and how we lived. It was the perfect comic breeding ground, where self-deprecation shielded us from the indulgent evils of self-analysis, and we loved it that way. If I start my search hoping to find out where I got the feeling that I alone was not enough, then I know I’ll draw a blank from my early years in St Helens.
I was loved as a kid; I was raised with more love and emotional support than most folks could wish for. Now, if you have siblings, you’ll already know that there’s no guarantee how each individual brother or sister might turn out. But nothing about my family background suggested I’d end up aspiring to anything other than what I already had.
Did I say aspiring? You see? I didn’t even aspire. That better world was meant for folk who needed more, as far as I could see. I daydreamed, as all kids do, but never feared those innocent flights of fancy not coming true. My emotional cup overfloweth-ed with positivity, and financial hardship was hidden behind a wisecrack or a definite no to any unrealistic pleas for whatever was the latest rage.
Instead we counted days, weeks, months even, for birthdays and Christmas to come around. That’s the difference between the working and middle classes: our gifts weren’t token gestures. A birthday or Christmas wasn’t a time for sitting back and feeling grateful for what we had. We had fuck all, in the material sense, so it was a time for getting things your selfish little heart had convinced itself you really, really needed. To this day you’d be strung up in our house for trying to pass a Boots three-for-one ‘gift’ option off as a main present: ‘I can shower with bloody Fairy Liquid ... I need a BlackBerry!’
The Fords, the Barnets, the Fenneys, the Croppers, the Rodens, the Leylands, the McGanns, the Dennings, the Carrs and the Kings – these were the whole street of supporting characters who made up the Truman Show-esque microcosm of my world. I was happy with my lot. I wasn’t fat at that point, I was fairly bright at school, and I had some great mates. Bryan Davies, my best friend to this day, was built like a brick shit-house from the age of five. From the first day at school, I decided I would befriend the grumpy-looking git.
He had this intently furrowed brow when he was pissed off that would earn him the nickname Dan Aykroyd. My cousin, Dimon, was the same age, but appointed himself as my bodyguard. He was ‘nowty’ – no nonsense – and had a brilliant, mischievous look to him just before he’d belt a lad. All the Holker brothers have it, and it always helped lend a comic-book violence to any schoolyard scrap.
I had a huge crush on my first teacher, Mrs Powell. At break time the girls would link arms with her and stroll around the playground whilst a gang of us followed on behind, egging each other on to touch the back of her long, black leather coat. She was my first inkling of sexy, before I knew what sexy was. She didn’t dress like any other grown-up I knew at that age. She was my Cagney (Sharon Gless) to all the mums and fellow teaching Laceys (Tyne Daly). When she handed out my class photo and told me that I looked like ‘a little film star’, I accidentally squeezed out a little bit of wee.
But I digress. I do that a lot. I think it’s my attempt to camouflage the short-term memory blips and attention deficits resulting from Johnny’s diet of Guinness, vodka, gravy and Gaviscon. Still, back in the day, Mrs Powell, along with St Austin’s Infant and Junior School, my family, my friends, that death-trap called Hankey’s Well at the end of our street (where we used to build dens, light fires and basically go full-on Lord of the Flies, minus the conch) – all these people and places were, in retrospect, a beautifully coherent, well-integrated influence on my happy-go-lucky young life.
But when I try to sift through and conjure up the atmosphere of my early childhood, it hits me like a giddy ton of bricks: I don’t know where to start. My memories aged nought to ten don’t sort themselves out individually – they’re all bound up together in a mesh of innocence and fun. And for someone with definite OCD tendencies, I’m strangely content to have them misfiled in no particular alphabetical order or coherent timeline. That’s not to say every picture that flashes into my mind is a happy one, but, like any strong relationship, or reality-snuffing episode of The Darling Buds of May, there was always enough good stuff stored up to cope with the bad.
While there’s nothing there to satisfy his appetite for torture, I already feel browbeaten by the paranoid suspicion that you don’t feel me capable of sharing the good things I associate with Michael Pennington, or that perhaps these are the personal insights you crave since you think you know all you need to know about Johnny Vegas? So I will purge myself of all the good things that held my hand from hitting The Priory speed-dial button after one of his ‘incidents’ – and the only way I can do so is to take a whole load of those images and throw them all out there together.
I realise that the English teachers among you might hanker after a few more full stops over the coming few pages, but please don’t worry: the joining words will be back in full effect in the next chapter. I won’t be giving it the full James Joyce any more, once I’ve done justice to the breathless childhood rush of:
Taking my birthday money into town under my cousin Gillian’s supervision and buying ‘Action Man: Helicopter Pilot’ –
‘Are you sure that’s the one you want?’
‘Yeah, deffo’
‘Have you got the helicopter?’
‘No, but it’s all right, you see he’s not just a helicopter pilot, he’s been trained to kill just like the others’
Taking all my Action Men including ‘Talking Commander’ – as well as my motorbike and side-car, jeep with trailer, lorry with opening hatch and mounted machine-gun, and free Asian-looking enemy characters – into school on ‘What did you get for Christmas?’ play-day –
‘This one’s got no undies on!’
‘That’s how you know he’s a baddie – that, and the eyes’
Watching Star Wars for the first time with the Holkers on one of Uncle Mike’s access nights and leaving the cinema with a million questions whilst believing that there really was a galaxy somewhere far, far away ... And not knowing how to ask why their dad didn’t live at home
Climbing on the roof at Martin Hurley’s and trying to summon Spiderman with a torch pointed at the moon through the plastic web rotor of his die-cast Corgi helicopter
Writing a short, farewell note on the back of an empty Cook’s Matches box as we planned to run away to Star Wars’ Mos Eisley and join the rebellion –
‘We will have laser blasters or light-sabres so we will be safe’
My daft childhood crush on both Martin’s sisters, especially Jane after she gave me an Ian Dury single with ‘There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards’ on the B-side –
‘Does he actually say the ‘B’ word?’
‘He does, ’cos he’s a rebel’
‘I wanna be a rebel when I’m older’
‘Then this is perfect’
Exotic day-trips in the Hurleys’ working car to Blackpool, Southport and the pre-bombed-out Arndale shopping centre, Manchester
Taking Martin to Morrison’s on our weekly shop in a bid to return the day-trip gestures and shaming Mum into blowing her budget by buying us Yo-Yos at the checkout, then suffering a week of extra veg piled high at dinner as part of her quiet revenge
Martin’s parents taking us into country pubs with them instead of leaving us in the car and then buying us our own drinks, in our own glasses –
‘Look at this straw ... it bends!’
‘Michael, will you be having a starter?’
‘A what?’
Mum filling up a pop bottle with cordial and taking it with us to share when we walked to Taylor Park, or went wild and caught a bus to Victoria Park –
‘Mum, floater!’
