Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio4. Cast away this week is Johnny Vegas. As a stand-up comic, he made his name as one of the most unpredictable and brilliant acts on the circuit. His... Age persona, a self-pitying drunk, belligerently heckling an audience who at times were up unclear if they were watching a well-honed comedy act or witnessing a genuine breakdown.

With his stand-up work behind him and after a good degree of success as an actor, he describes himself as an entertainer. He's also consigned his heavy drinking to the past and lost a third of his body weight, both part of a plan to ensure he reaches the ripe old age of 40 and can be a proper friend. Other to his young son. He once said, I always consider myself creatively at my best when at odds with the world. You once said that. I'm wondering now if you still feel that way, that it's always better to be the grit in the oyster. I think it was certainly right for Johnny as a character. I think he's a good character. It does but I'd run out of anger. And I think people can see when something-- Is genuine when something's manufactured. And although I always enjoyed mixing facts with a little bit of fiction.

There is a point where you've got... Life's actually turned around and been very good to me. You have lost a lot of weight. I'm not entirely sure because I didn't weigh myself before I started but it would have been possibly four stone five I Was just judging it by Charles a size I'm an exercise more generous with the sizes so getting down to a 38 was a big whooping hollow moment. Me from the changing room. When I was introducing you there I used the name Johnny Vegas of course it's a stage name of course you weren't born Johnny Vegas and interesting that you referred to to Johnny Vegas there in the third person. Do you feel comfortable as me introducing you with that name or do you feel it should be your real name? No I'm very comfortable with it because to a lot of people That's who I am. Yeah, but that represents a certain thing doesn't it? It represents that guy who sort of was on the

And as I say there was that is this for real? Is this guy absolutely losing the place here and am I witnessing it? Or is it a beautifully confected, honed stage act? Well I think with Janet what started off as something very well constructed with absolute parameters. Change point of other things in your life. So you can then work. Were blurred for the wrong reasons. So your life started to imitate your art as it were? Yeah, I found a popularity through self destruction. Suddenly the more you damage yourself, the more people are drawn to you. And that can be quite addictive. You're trapped by your own creation and that creation is very destructive for you as an individual. It is when you realise that it's not a lifestyle you could maintain. There could hardly be a more appropriate opening disc then. Tell me what it is you've chosen.

This guy I'm chosen first is Johnny Cash and Hurt. I chose this because... I think it's all about legacy. And again, having a son now. And I think it was Dean Martin, I think it was his family, but. You see a lot of these shows where the children have had very little to do with the parents and yet the children are expected to ward the parents to see great entertainers who gave everything away to the public but gave nothing back. To their own family and I didn't want that for me. And I didn't want that for my family and the people closest to me. They've got to know that they come first. a note. I don't want to leave my son with just a pile of reviews. From Edinburgh, I want to be his dad who can guide him the same way that my father guided me. ♪ Everyone ♪

That was Johnny Cash and Hurt. So Johnny Vegas. You mentioned there your father and the kind of father that he's been to you when you were a little boy. Your dad was a joiner. Yeah, and your mum was was she at home? Yeah my mum uh... We stayed at home or did Verdi's cleaning jobs as and when they came along. You famously used to do a bit in your stand-up about eating the pet rabbit. I heard it and I laughed and I obviously thought it was a joke. I learn.

From reading the cuttings that it wasn't a joke. What happened? It was one of those mornings that my dad got us up for school. As we were leaving. School he went right who's rabbits going in the pot today I genuinely thought he was joking because it was such a ridiculous concept From school and he was out in the back cleaning out the hutch and I sort of looked around the garden and asked me that word it wasn't he right it's there looked at behind me and it was it was skinned and angry No, I couldn't quite believe it. So there was no tears, I didn't react. My sister went absolutely berserk, and my mum. - Did they? - Yeah. And my dad had always claimed that rabbits were livestock, but we'd never eaten one before. My dad had been laid off. That might have been not in itself a breakdown or something, but I just wonder if it was a...

And at the end of each other. How aware were you then, throughout your childhood, that money was a very-- or a lack of money was a big shadow? I was very aware-- there was a definite incident one day when I was-- me dad over an ice cream and nagging and nagging. He took me outside to the end of the street. He just said to me, I got laid off today. There'd been other children at school whose dads had been laid off and... That little bit of dread of, you know, kids coming back in the same school uniform pants, getting shorter and nicknames, you know, poven things. And then he went and saw it. Look, here's some money, get an ice cream, but do me a favor, don't ask me for the while. The last thing I wanted, then I felt like...

That's what you'll get for, you know what I mean? You know what I mean? I just felt awful. I felt like this spoiled rat then who'd been nagging and nagging and nagging and I should've understood and I didn't. How old would you have been then? I'd have been about nine. Within a year I'd have been heading off to seminary school. There was a lot of equipment and uniform and things that you needed to have. There was a realisation that, although they were trying to keep it from me, that that was bankrupting them. I want to talk to you much more about seminary school and all that entailed in just a second. Johnny, tell me... What's your next record then? My next record is Deacon Blue and Dignity. Both Muppets held themselves to a very difficult time and throughout the 80s.

Being unemployed, I think every day must have been that heartbreaking thought of where's the next bit of money coming from. They just got on but they got on with an amazing amount of dignity and we came through it remarkably well than it could have been, you know what I mean? It could have been. It must have destroyed a lot of the family. That was Deacon Blue and Dignity. So there you are Johnny Vegas, you're the youngest of four children. You're living in St. Helens.

Lancashire and you decide, do you decide or do your parents decide that life in a seminary is the life for you? How does that come about? It came about for me. My saying that I wanted to be a priest from a young age. But I think saying it because I enjoyed the reaction then it got what reaction did it get all it was fantastic the ambition of every parish is to produce its own priest. But that's another thing. No, for certain my mum really didn't want me to go. How do you know that she's told you that now? That's come out in conversations now and I think with a lot of the negative press of it's something that my mum suspected. Right so she was thinking I'm sending my little boy away to I know not what. Yeah. Right. Boy were you then? Did you like football? Did you play around with your brothers and sisters? Yeah, I was pretty much the...

Go lucky nine year old kid really. Academically quite promising. I had a lovely life. And so at eleven you go to the seminary and what's that like? What are your memories? It really hadn't sunk in, what was happening until the first night. Big imposing school in its own grounds, you know what I mean? It was, it was, I suppose everybody else was just horrendously homesick. It was shell shock. And, how quickly did you realise that...

Maybe I don't want to be a priest after all. I think it was the Sages events that made me realise I didn't want to be a priest. I didn't like the regime. It just seemed to be a place that wanted to strip you of any individuality. And so how quickly did you come home? I left. In the fourth term, I stuck up my first year and for me the place had very little to do with it. With religion and a lot more to do with regime. I'd come home for Christmas and we'd come to Benedictine and we were due to drive back that evening and I turned to my dad and told him that I didn't want to go back. And my mum was in flood of tears and the worst thing is at the time I thought I'd...

I broke her heart by leaving. It was quite the opposite as it turns out. It was such a relief for her. And was there any sort of local small-scale disgrace in the boy coming home from the seminary? I felt on myself that I'd let a lot of people down. Everything in my life has been about you laugh things off you make a joke It's very hard because things Do things that went on at that school? It was very difficult to come Back at weekends and people say what you're doing is a wonderful thing and you're quietly going it's not a wonderful thing and it's not a wonderful place. Were you abused there? I wasn't no. But it's a very difficult thing to talk on in public because for people who are or were, it's

It really looked to me to drag that into the spotlight and discuss that. I suppose what I am asking is there was a level of activity there that even as a young boy you were aware of that other people were going through. I think like so when I left there was for a long time I I felt very guilty, as I say when I left, I almost wanted to attack everybody else with me. We're going to take a break. Let's have some music then. Tell me about what you're... We're on disc number three now, Johnny. What are you going to choose? The track I've chosen now is love rain oh me the who is one of the bands I could have chose any song but this one in particular I was at a point where I was somebody who was the most unsuccessful teenager with women.

This was a love song that also contained all my frustrations having been every girl's best friend but not the bloke they actually wanted to kiss. ♪ Only love can bring the rain ♪ ♪ That makes you young to the sky ♪ ♪ Only love can bring the rain ♪ ♪ That falls like tears from a high ♪ ♪ Love ♪ That was The Who and Love Rain Omey. Johnny Vegas, comedian, actor, ceramicist. Seems unlikely, doesn't it? How did ceramics come into your life? Ceramics came into my life because I'd struggled to fit in.

I just wanted to be the normal kid once I got back home. I wanted to drink cider, stand by bus stops, do everything anybody else did. I had this thing hanging over me. That's the police boy. I just wanted to blend in. Were you funny? Did you make people laugh? I don't think I was. was and... There was little bits of entertainment. I'd, you know, play my nose in class and play some... You'd play what in class, did you say? I used to play my nose. That was my little... Entertainment piece. As a musical instrument? Yeah. What did you play? I played an Hawaiian tune and I had a quiet ambition to get on That's Life. Sounds like you should have made it. I finished school with a few all levels but I think in a way it's very disappointing in terms of what I academically should have been able to achieve.

Chief. My sister in the meantime pushed ahead with art, went away and did studied fashion. She can't pave the way to go to college. None of us had been to college before and when I went to from, it was the first classroom, the first environment where a teacher basically said you come in and work when you want. You couldn't get me out of that. You said earlier that just like a lot of teenage boys, you know, you wanted to hang around the bus shelter and drink cider. I mean, were you drinking at that point in your life, sort of in a committed way? I was when I could get the money, yeah. Right. And how did you manage for money at university then? Did you have enough cash? I did, I got a full grant. My dad had warned me before I'd left to try and save some money, because what they'd experienced with Catherine was there was a lot of people there from far better off backgrounds than us. And I was quite... Bye.

I was air-built that until I got there and I ran up a lot of debt in my first year. But then in the second year, the party was over, there was no money, and my family couldn't afford to send me that money, and suddenly a friend in need is a pest. God forgive me, it was a very bad time when I started to resent my parents. I resented, when I first went there, I resented my parents for not being able to support me. But yeah, I... I graduated and then realised it wasn't the most commercially successful move I've ever made. A degree in ceramics. Have I ever gone into the door and they've had a car outside teapot mender? Huge mistake. Which you have to...

Years and putting them to all that financial pressure is not really what you want to hear from your graduate son is it? let's have some music Then Johnny Fink is what we're gonna hear. Yes please! What are we going to hear? We're gonna hear pulp and common people. I was at college. There was a lot of resentments building up that I was only really aware of when I started doing Johnny Verghese and performing. One of them was inverted snobbery and it was a resentment of these people who just had everything. If you called your daddy could stop it all and... That he couldn't. And this song came along and just said it perfectly. Thank you, Pope. Thank you, Jarvis.

That was pulp and common people. You said thank you to Jarvis Cocker there. Jarvis, of course, in that song, gets the girls. You were saying at school you didn't get the girls. Did it help at university that you were one of the common people that would attract the ladies? - It didn't. I'd got to an edge in my life of being, what, 22, 20, without ever having had a girlfriend. I'd actually reached a point in my life where I thought I was just gonna be single, and that that just wasn't meant for me, that I wasn't a relationship's sort of...

Of person that perhaps was better off on me own. I said I'll just re-sign myself to the fact that women didn't see me in the same way that I'm imagining when you became, even when you started to become well-known in the comedy circuit that all changed, I mean you know people like somebody who's well-known and up on stage. It did. Did that make you cynical about what was Though because you knew that there you had been this this friend of so many women but lover of none who suddenly was able to attract women? It did but I think the relief quite literally. Far out way. The pessimism. The pessimism. Again, I think what came together was I met somebody at the time that was very nice.

And very understanding. And so I didn't fall into the Groobie lifestyle. - It was 1997 then, that was sort of your breakthrough year. That was when you were nominated for a... Perrier and you were named most promising newcomer. I mean I described it as your breakthrough moment. Were you conscious of that at the time it was happening? I think so and I think it Established me outside of the Northwest. As a festival it was brilliant. Within three days we'd sold, we pretty much sold out the road. I loved it. It was just one long very hard party with the gigs thrown in for me. Good measure you know what I mean everything came together and people got it everybody was getting it critics were getting it audiences were loving it perfect. Let's have another piece of music then track number five. Track number five.

Five is calling here and it's waiting for my real life to begin. This has become a song in the past few years that in darker moments, this is a song that you've got to believe that you're going to come through. If it's not enough for the circuit yourself, then for other people. Bit of a push to just get off my backside and get on with it. and you said... ♪ Still my love ♪ ♪ Open up your heart ♪ ♪ Let the light shine in ♪ ♪ Don't you understand ♪ ♪ I already have a plan ♪ I'm waiting for my real life to begin

Colin Hay and waiting for my real life to begin. So Johnny Vegas, you became this to pick out a cutting, you know the hell raising heavyweight comic rarely... Seen without a pint of Guinness in his hand. That was your identity. That was the identity people paid tickets to see. That was why you got on TV. That's what people wanted from you. They did. Once I was trying to craft Vegas, my usual approach was to just get as drunk And I mean I can count one hundred times that I've gone on stage without a drink. At its worst how badly did the drinking affect your life? I mean what were the points at which things were out of control? I think there was a period in my life after college when I became So resentful even towards friends for there was nothing happening in my life but I wasn't making anything up I'd always jumped to social

Lies had always, you know, pubs with a culture, everything centred around the pub. But this wasn't, this was drinking in a room on your arm. And blaming the world for you not being where you thought it should be. But then oddly enough the career took you back towards that path of, you know... Thought I could, maybe it was arrogant that I thought I could go out and play the Hell Dancer, but then put Johnny back in his box. I think within my personal life I went through a separation and a divorce and I think I was I was burning bridges with people because I wanted people to know I was desperately upset. What sort of a husband were you? I don't honestly think it lasted long enough to find out. How long you married for? Less than two years.

I think from a relationship I think it's not being guarded about it I think it's one of those things that when it's very It'd be a long time before you can sit down and actually look at your own mistakes within a relationship, like within a marriage. Are you not drinking now? I do drink now. For me, drink has served me wonderfully. It helped me create journey. I see it as something that's done a lot for me, but something that can turn on you at any moment and take it all back. I enjoy drinking and I always wanted to be able to enjoy a drink and I never wanted the drink to get to a point where you go, It's either the drink or nothing else.

Do you know what I mean? If you can't strike that happy balance between going out and that being a part of your socialising but not a part of your everyday existence. And can you strike the balance? I think I can. But I'm also again very afraid when I was talking about my parents before. I know they came through difficult situations. I can strike that balance when things are going good. Are you a strong enough personality to be able to strike that balance? under... Motion was your ass. And are you? In the past, couldn't really say I've come through with flying colours. Let's have some music then. I have fun as well sometimes. I should point that out. I come in here and I'm incredibly earnest, you know, then you go, I like balloons!

Oh sorry, yeah sorry. Right, yeah the next song, The Beautiful Self and it's Domino Man. This is really a tribute to pubs and that pub culture. ♪ Through ugly pints and Sunday breaths ♪ ♪ Did men who stare as cold as death ♪ ♪ Do mild lapels and glued up eyes ♪ ♪ Through made up kids and made up wives ♪ *Outro Music* The beautiful South and Domino Man. You are now, Johnny Vegas, of course, a well-respected actor. The ragged trouser, philanthropist, bleak house, happiness. Benidorm was the big ITV hit, watched by nine million people. Did you decide to become an actor or did people

see I think he might be quite good at this. It was something I quietly wanted to do but without Having the formal training, I didn't really feel very confident about putting myself out there and saying I want to act because I thought you can't do it. Did you feel quite self-conscious to be in groups of serious proper actors? I always have and it's something I've never really got to grips with. You still do? Yeah. I always felt like I was never fully doing justice to... Something that somebody else had written. - Your parents didn't come to see you do your stand up, but I'm imagining they watch the stuff you do on TV. What do they think of it? Well they love it. I mean it's really nice to finally do something. Something like with Benidorm, something that my mum can discuss without bringing shame upon the family. Is she, you say she's supportive, is she proud? Yeah. Yeah, very.

Because you live in St Helens, are you based there? I'm based in between St Helens and Dublin at the moment. But yes, my home is St Helens. And Dublin is from a sense of love. Yeah, my fiance was in Dublin. So I travelled My son lives in London but comes up to the Northwest when we have time to get there. That sounds like quite a logistically complex life you're living there. Dublin and the Northwest and London. It is but it's a life that makes me very happy. I'm very contented with the way life is at the moment so I get by. Let's have some more music then. Disc number seven. Number seven is... The last and there she goes. Now for some reason I've probably come across as so melancholy while I've been talking to you. I love love songs. I live for love and it's such an influential

In my life from somebody who told himself, you know what I mean, that this probably wouldn't be for me and that relationships would, would, would, that, that just wouldn't happen. I think from being was alone and probably got off on the notion of being alone. I now have a lady in my life that just, that's my I makes today. Somebody that... Can come along and make you realise that my life isn't best lived on my own. Ummm... With Michael, I'll love me son until the day I die. Nothing can ever change that. Whether I've struggled through my faith, through drinking, through anything, just that one guarantee has made the world of difference to my life. And I'm not a misery guts so here we are with the Lars and there she goes

That was the last, a happy song, Johnny Vegas, and there she goes. And what about the life that you've hinted at, that life of the performer? You've talked a bit about your son Michael. And the feeling is what that you don't want to give up your life to performing only for him to think well that's my dad but I hardly know him. Yeah that's exactly and it's I it can be The performance side of your life, it... And be a very shallow existence. And I just couldn't forgive myself if he thought he came second, because I always did, with my parents. -You're 40 this year. And how's that? How does 40 feel? Umm... A lot better than I actually expected. I've actually made it.

At one point in my life I actually thought when I reached 40, I hope it's the start of a far less dramatic chapter. I would like my 40s to just be that period of focusing on the people close to me. Tell me what your final record is then. Final record is Don McLean, 'Finsons' and I chose this because growing up I tended to listen to music that was knocking about the house with me siblings. But I was very fortunate there was some quality music lying around.

And Don McLean, especially now, I sit down and I try to do a lot more writing now. And I both almost love and loathe him because if I could just write one of these lines at any point in my life, you know, create anything as beautiful as a song like this, I could professionally walk away a very happy man. Now I understand what you tried to say to me And how you suffered for your sanity And how you tried to set them free They would not listen, they did not know how Perhaps they'll listen

That was Don McLean and Vincent. So Johnny it comes to the point then where I'm going to give you a copy of the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare and what's your book going to be that you'll take to the island? I will take a rank of Charles the Philanthropist. I learn something from it every time. Okay well that's your book. Every time I read it. yours and a luxury too. A kiln. A kiln. A kill, a pottery kill. Although when I finished at college I was never financially going to

I look after anybody for what I made. I really miss it. It's an incredibly therapeutic thing to do. Let's hope it's clay-based soil then. Kiln is yours and if you had to choose just one of these eight discs today, which one disc would you save? Oh no, it'd be Johnny Cash and Hurt. It's yours. Johnny Vegas, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you for having me.