Becoming Johnny Vegas. Johnny Vegas
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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,