JOHNNY VEGAS IS BEING FOLLOWED. Haunted, even. A revolving billboard near his current London rehearsal room advertises a popular brand of fizzy water on every third turn, every twenty seconds. Three years earlier, Edinburgh’s Perrier panel opted to ignore the heavily-tipped St Helen’s lad and give the prize to a sketch show act who dressed in dinner suits and were named after a 60s British caper movie.
Johnny may have thought he’d seen the back of The League Of Gentlemen, but were he to switch his telly on to BBC2 at some particular point over the last couple of years, he may have caught sight of that group edging themselves into the cultish end of the mainstream. Meanwhile, Vegas’ own efforts to get a telly series reached the pilot transmission stage, only for the Channel 4 decision—makers to virtually deny all knowledge of his existence. ‘It was too Northern and too localised for them,’ Vegas believes. Yet, were Johnny to have turned over to Channel 4 at \ some point during January 99, there he would
have found Peter Kay with his own six- part series. In which he was very Northern and very localised. This makes you start to wonder whether, prior to delivery, Johnny’s mum must have thrown a handful of sodium chloride to the far right straight into the eyes of a black cat who became so disorientated and upset that it must have pissed on a nearby four-leaf clover. Or rather, that incident may have been induced by Michael Pennington’s mum.
For Pennington is the man behind and inside Johnny Vegas, the finest, beeriest, scariest, most confrontational comic to have emerged on British soil since Jerry Sadowitz had the fine citizens of Dundee in a spitting rage. If you haven’t seen Johnny Vegas in action, he’s got Les Dawson’s libido, Tony Hancock’s pain and Andy Kaufman’s what- the-hell’s-he-going-to-do-nextness. Were you to be pushed, you could even throw Fran Healy into the mix for the acute ability to whip an audience into singalong mode.
Unlike Johnny, Michael has taken the setbacks more or less in his stride. ‘I allowed
JOHNNY VEGAS
myself to be drawn into thinking of them (The League) as bloody Oxbridge theatre snooty shite who shouldn’t be here, and that was wrong,’ he says between large gulpfuls of Guinness in an East End pub peopled with more crosses of St George than bar staff. ‘I wish I’d had a chance to talk to them, because you get thrown into your own camps and you look at who you’re up against; that’s the disgusting element of the Perrier.’
Of his experiences with Channel 4, he is less generous. ‘They basically buried it, almost as though they wanted to deny it ever happened. I mean, I didn’t go cap in hand to them, they wanted a show from me. I get on with Peter very well so there’s no problem there, but in defence of our show, we had the best ice-cream man.’
With Fringe 2000, Pennington is removing his mitts from the potter’s wheel, which brought him such admiring attention in the first place, onto a brand new lease of life with two separate shows. As Johnny Vegas, he hosts his own gameshow which he hopes will retain the heart of his stand-up. ‘There’s a gladiatorial element to it and contestants should end up threatening each other; this is getting right back to grassroots entertainment.’ And in Joe Orton’s The Erpingham Camp, he plays the murderous, lying, Irish neurotic and failure Redcoat Riley. Pennington makes claims to be playing him straight, but Johnny’s mucky prints are all over Riley.
30, how does such an evangelically individual creation get to knuckle down to working with a cast, a director and, ye gods, a script? ‘One of the hardest things is learning words in a way that you don’t speak,’ he insists. ‘And you don’t have the luxury of working your way back when things go wrong and the fun you can have of doing that. With this, everything is bang, bang, bang; you have to get it spot on, remembering how a character will move, learning to sing properly. I’ve been told that I’m hiding a fine tenor’s voice. But with Johnny, the worse you sing, the better it is.’
And were you to be looking for yet more connections, what about with Joe Orton
‘If you kill that nervous side with drinking, you end up doing fifteen minutes talking about someone's toenail.’
himself? The playwright’s biographer John Lahr described him as a ‘connoisseur of chaos’. Much more of the same could be said of Johnny Vegas. ‘Joe Orton revelled in it, but Johnny’s hapless in that. in his head, things go wrong but none of it is ever his fault; it’s everyone else’s,’ says Pennington. ‘He’s never thrown a mirror up to himself, whereas Joe Orton glorified in that mischief.’
Johnny’s sense of mischief may have been wilfully enhanced by his level of sobriety. His careers as a potter and Butlins redcoat have fallen by the wayside in a polluted sea of ale and animosity, leaving Vegas permanently pissed-up and laconically let-down. To achieve that numbing sense of failure, it can only help to down a few before taking to the stage. ‘I’ve done it but it hasn’t been disastrous,’ says Pennington about facing an audience sober. ‘There’s a real fine art to drinking and performing; having a drink does release a certain amount of creativity, but you need those nerves to keep you ticking and alert. If you kill that nervous side with drinking, it just becomes a bore. You can lose track of time and you end up doing fifteen minutes talking about someone’s toenail. Ross (Noble) can do that; I can’t.’
And as for his fellow stand-ups, he feigns concern of their vengeful wrath. ‘The knives are going to be out: “Ooh, an actor now, are you?”,’ he says before continuing in mock-luvvie tones. ‘I’ll be shunned by the comics; I’ve thrown away my foolish ad-lib ways and I’ve learned the construction of verse.’ And the trashing of anyone’s expectations.
The Erpingham Camp (Fringe) Scotsman Assembly (Venue 3) 226 2428, 3-28 Aug (not Wed) 4.15pm, £10l£11 (£9I£10).
The Johnny Vegas Gameshow (Fringe) Edinburgh's Garden Party (Venue 50) 226 21511226 2428, 22—26 Aug. 8pm. £10 (£9).
Comedy Art (Fringe) The Mounted Gallery (Venue S) 229 8844. 4-28 Aug. noon-6pm, free.
3—10 Aug 2000 THE lIST FESTIVAL GUIDE 13