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Cover
Title Page
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
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
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
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.
1.
THATTO HEATH RHAPSODY
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!’
‘Michael, what have I told you? Swallow your butty first, nobody wants to be drinking your leftovers’
Begging my dad relentlessly to be allowed to camp out on the big field with Ian Cropper –
‘But everyone else is going’
‘Well, good for them’
‘We’ll be dead safe, honest. Ian’s got a knife and matches and a proper paraffin lamp’
‘Has he really?’
‘Yeah!’
‘Well, that’s three good reasons why you’re definitely not going’
Tying fishing-line to a purse and lying in wait in the bushes to yank it away when someone tried to grab it, knowing that the victims who got narky had intended on keeping it –
‘Whoever you are, I know your dads – just you wait till I see ’em!’
Making breakfast in bed for my dad on Father’s Day but accidentally putting salt on the cornflakes instead of sugar –
‘And as soon as you’ve finished, you can open your card’
‘There’s no rush, you know I like to take my time with my food’
Going round Danny Rawlinson’s house believing that the future had truly arrived as I sat and watched with awe and envy, waiting for my turn on Atari’s Space Invaders –
‘Are you rich?’
‘No, why?’
‘Dun’t matter’
Saying my prayers in the firm belief that if technology such as Space Invaders was within our reach, then surely Star Wars was a realistic possibility –
‘Please, please get me to outer space. I know it might mean killing people, Lord, but you saw what they did to Alderaan, I mean, that was a whole planet ...’
Making movies on Danny’s Super 8 film camera and feeling magical the first time our film came back from the processors’ and we watched it projected onto a sheet tacked to his front room wall –
‘Look, look, there’s me!’
Playing snooker on Danny’s five-foot snooker table and dreaming of the day when Hurricane Higgins acknowledged the arrival of Michael ‘The Storm’ Pennington as the sport’s new name to watch out for –
‘... and as he lines himself up for a difficult angle on the blue into the right side pocket ...’
‘Do you always talk to yourself when you play?’
‘It makes it more like the telly’
‘Weirdo!’
Fishing with Danny’s spare tackle for four years –
‘Can Danny come fishing, Mrs Rawlinson?’
‘He’s out with his dad, Michael’
‘Oh ...’
‘The tackle’s in the garage – help yourself’
‘Thanks!’
My mum finally accepting it wasn’t a phase and buying me my own rod and reel from Makro for my birthday: a Shakespeare carbon-fibre ledger pro that you could bend right back on itself, although I never dared try –
‘Bend it ...’
‘No!’
‘They’re designed so you can bend ’em, to take the weight of a fish’
‘So?’
‘So bend it!’
‘No!’
Trying to breed my own maggots for bait by hiding pork trimmings on top of the cistern in the outside toilet. My dad doing a bloody good impression of Michael Caine in that movie The Swarm after taking the racing page in there for his Saturday ‘my time’ constitutional –
‘What the hell’s wrong with just using a bit of bread?’
Going hell for leather playing Murderball at Grange Park Youth Club until volunteer Phil blew his whistle –
‘Find a ball and you can carry on, otherwise the scrapping stops now!’
The first time we tried to play American football after watching The Longest Yard with Burt Reynolds, and my brother Mark kicked our Rob so hard that Mum and Dad had to take him and his baking apple-sized swollen balls to A&E, where the doctor suggested pressing charges before being made fully aware of the circumstances –
‘His own brother did this?’
(Taking Mum and Dad to one side.) ‘Is he adopted?’
Rob’s glee at the stitches Mark had to have in his bum when Gaz Leyland stopped mid aeroplane-swing and dropped him on a broken bottle –
‘Your arse looks like a Sky At Night chart’
‘Shut up!’
‘Give us a pen and I could draw the Plough on it’
‘MUM!’
That huge terrifying swing off the flat shed roof and over the sharp, iron-tipped boundary fence of Hankey’s Well that everyone had to pog onto – a forty-foot arc of white-knuckle terror for the nine or ten kids clinging on for dear life –
‘Whoever’s holding on there, don’t – aim for the rope!’
The games of Skillie, or Manhunt, that covered the whole of Thatto Heath, Taylor Park, Portico, Red Rocks, Broadway and Eccleston Mere, despite always getting caught early and never, ever launching a successful escape bid for my team –
‘Same bush, same spot, every bloody time! Look, I can see you from here, Mike, and if you make me go over there and tag you, you’re getting a dead arm ... a proper one’
‘I surrender!’
‘And you wonder why you’re always picked last?’
Our Dimon blowing his birthday money on sweets for everyone and ten packs of Star Wars cards for me down at the corner shop near Thatto Heath Park, and the bollocking we all got from Aunty Kath for filling up on Blackjacks, Sherbert Dips, Cola Cubes, Fruit Salads and Drumstick lollies before his birthday tea –
‘I’m cooking nothing this week till all that’s gone, do you hear me?’
‘Yes’
‘Pat, get the clingfilm back on’
‘What about my cake?’
‘Don’t push it!’
Me getting Astro Wars for Christmas after pleading with Steve Butler for a full term of playtimes for a go of his, then praying with all my might that his batteries would have an acid leak and he’d have to make do with a game of Bulldog like everyone else –
‘I only ask Lord because you’ve seen him – he’s a proper tight git’
All the patients from Rainhill Hospital wandering around Thatto Heath Lane, some shouting random swearwords, but most just dazed and confused from the institutionalisation –
‘Bloody buggers ... bloody’
‘Mum, that man just—’
‘Shush and finish your pie’
The pig that used to escape from Piggy Fletcher’s and run riot down the lane, stopping traffic and drawing out all the drunken wannabe rodeo cowboys from The Vine pub
My nan, Mary, taking us to Blackpool and telling us we could stay in the Funhouse for as long as we wanted, even if it meant missing our coach and catching a train home
My dad building us a sledge and dragging it – with me sitting on it – all the way to Taylor Park’s big hill, just so we could crash it into a tree –
‘You’re not concussed, you’d be vomiting if ... here, use my hankie, and not a word to your mum, all right?’
Sitting in the garden with my mum if I went home from school for lunch, watching The Sullivans courtesy of a long extension lead and eating my Blackburn’s steak pie with cream cake to follow –
‘Well, will you marry me?’
‘Yes, yes, I will!’
‘I think Kitty’s gonna be all right, Mum. Mum, are you crying?
‘Shush and finish your cake’
Not sleeping for weeks after watching Salem’s Lot but being grateful that Dad had a crucifix hanging in every single room in the house. And wishing our Mark wouldn’t keep whispering –
‘Michael, open the window, Michael’
Actually worrying that Mum might be part vampire as she applied her prescription sun-block after being diagnosed with a rare allergy to sunlight. Wondering if I could bring myself to stake her if the blood-lust ever overwhelmed her mothering instincts –
‘That’s not your mother, she belongs to the Master now’
‘Forgive me, Mum!’
Realising that vampires don’t tend to wear crosses around their neck as Mum did, and therefore deciding all was probably well
Dad taking the day off and taking me out of school to visit the Liverpool Maritime Museum –
‘Shut? Ah, well, do you want to see the huge police station I built?’
‘All by yourself, Dad?’
‘I did the stairs. I remember telling the foreman that those drawings the architect sent were wrong ...’
All of Dad’s stories and how adversity never seemed to get him down. Never even hearing him shout like some of the other dads on our street
All the front doors left open on our street and all the verbal snippets of family life –
‘Mum, Muuuuum, come and wipe me bum!’
That camping holiday in Wales when Dad’s old army tent ripped in half following a force twelve gale, and the sleepless night that followed as the rain blew in –
‘Dad, I’m cold’
‘Go to sleep’
‘Dad, my sleeping bag’s wet’
‘Go to sleep’
‘Dad, can I go and get a shower?’
‘No, go to sleep’
‘Dad, when can I get a shower?’
‘When you wake up, now go to sleep’
‘Dad, can I mind the torch?’
‘No, go to sleep’
Mum having her drink spiked with Pernod at The Catholic Men’s Society New Year’s Eve party and her coming home singing ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ before getting poorly –
‘No, the bucket! Under the stairs, next to the bleach!’
Butlin’s! Us and the Holkers paying for two families of three in the self-catering chalets but smuggling the rest in. Simon getting the short straw and having to go in the boot of the car –
‘Well, just take little breaths and for God’s sake don’t make a sound till we’re well past reception!’
Rumbles with the Protestant school, St Matthew’s, but making up by home-time as half the kids in our street went there –
‘You don’t get Communion because Jesus dun’t even believe in you!’
Almost wetting myself laughing at watching a truck drive backwards at high speed thanks to rewind on Martin Hurley’s brand new video recorder –
‘Can I do it?’
‘No, you might break it. You should tell your mum and dad to get one’
‘Maybe ...’
‘That’s what you always say’
Wimpy’s opening in St Helens and my dad acting genuinely bemused as to why I’d want to opt for that over a pig’s trotter from Kwik Save’s in-store butcher’s department –