Put your money on Mr Vegas

He's a f?ted man - he was voted the sexiest at the Edinburgh Festival. He is sexy, of course, because he's so one-off and raw, but he's not supposed to know that.

I had planned that we'd talk about this. How he couldn't exist if he was successful - he wouldn't have anything pathetic or sad to draw on. But it didn't happen like that. By the time we met in the lobby of the Lowry Hotel in Manchester, I was sobbing uncontrollably because my dog had just died. He came into the room, looked puzzled but not perturbed, and then told me his father had just had a brain haemorrhage, so we had a good half hour of being really tragic before he concluded: 'I'm pretty happy-go-lucky, but I can easily find the downside. I can look every gift-horse in the mouth.'

I asked him if he was more motivated by fear of failure or fear of rejection.

'Mmm. I'm totally accepting of rejection. It's almost like the Eskimos, I've got 90 different words for rejection. Rejection doesn't have the same sting for me. Rejection's like sunshine, it's just there.'

We chunter away. It's no good telling him he's funny, he doesn't know how to take a compliment without squirming in his seat.

'Failure?' he says. 'I don't fear failure because I don't ever feel like a failure. I have never died on stage.'

Stage Johnny can take any heckle. 'You can't shit on me, mate. Life beat you to it' sort of thing. Stage Johnny is arrogant, crude and full of false bravado about women. Real Johnny is a perfect gentleman.

I know real Johnny is called Michael, but this man is not a Michael. 'Father Michael' I could manage for his more earnest moments when he looks at you with teddy-bear eyes. Michael is probably what his mother calls him when she's cross with him. Anyhow, real Johnny didn't have a girlfriend until he was 26.

When he first started going out with his mates to clubs, they'd send him over to chat up the girls for them. 'I did the fishing, they enjoyed the spoils. A club is one place where you don't really have the opportunity to put your personality across. I couldn't get designer gear to fit me, but I did develop this natural ability to chat that was so over the top that if a good-looking guy had done it, he would have got grief. But with me it was inoffensive and it wasn't threatening because there was always an element of "you're nice but I'd never consider getting off with you", and then I'd introduce them to my good-looking friends.'

It was going on a crash diet to go on holiday with the good-looking friends that made him first tap into his inner woman. He was thin and women fancied him more, and he kind of despised them for it. He went to art college, put all the weight back on, not really knowing or wanting to know whether it was the fact that he was unattractive or did pottery that made women dismiss him.

Then he got into Naomi Wolf and made these things that looked like distorted candlesticks that were meant to be female abstract forms.

I can't believe that, until he was 26, there was nothing but drunken fumblings. He narrows his eyes and tells me that he did do this awful thing of aiming too low; chasing women that he knew he could get. And then, of course, when he got them he didn't really fancy them.

'And besides, for one period, I had an age thing, they had to be older. Then I felt I'd really been left behind, because in your twenties everything is based on looks, isn't it? I had a panic about it. I'd walk round town and see all these couples. Everyone was in love except for me. And then when I did meet someone I could just be myself with, I realised I'd been worrying about nothing for years. We were engaged and then we realised it wasn't right, and you do think you might never meet anyone again, but that's not a reason to stay in a relationship.

'I'm not an easy person to be with. Being a comic, or having any job of this nature, isn't easy, but I think if it's going to work it will work, and if it's not you just learn to like your own company.'

Since the fianc?e, there was another year-long relationship with someone in London and now he says he's just dating, with no specific girlfriend. We joke about how suddenly he's sexy. And this time it's a compliment he can bear to take, probably because he's spent all his life coming to terms with who he is. So confident, in fact, that recent reports suggest he asked out Kym Marsh, despite her much-publicised relationship with Jack Ryder.

'I think when you're younger everything is based round aesthetics, and then it's who you can be bothered to spend time with, and you do become more economical with who you want to be with. Personalities become much more important than looks.'

So he's not as scarred and charred as stage Johnny. 'I haven't come out of a relationship scarred. I'm yet to be embittered,' he says, with a raised eyebrow that hints he's looking forward to trying that.

So, do you drink when you perform? 'You can't go on smashed.' He pauses, 'Well, you can, you may get away with it. I do have a drink. There are some people who were born to be on stage and I don't think I'm one of them. I get awful nerves. It frees up that little bit in your mind and helps you come up with things that you wouldn't normally do sober. It helps not to push things in an awkward way.'

There was a terrible period in his time in Glasgow in a shared flat, when he was too poor to buy milk for coffee, but even then there was always the possibility of getting drunk with horrible things mixed with cider. It was what he calls his Charles Bukowski period.

'Someone gave me that book and it was dangerous. I had a stupid kind of hero worship, a glorification of what he was doing.'

Poet Charles Bukowski worshipped at the altar of bourbon and bad women and behaving badly with both of them.

Johnny lived in a flat with someone who made S&M furniture, who is now doing rather well. But at the time, 'I was dropping out from society. I was brought up to believe that you have to pay your bills.' (Even though his dad was a carpenter who suffered from all those Thatcher-years' cuts, and was sometimes without work, his parents were always good, hard-working, try-and-put-your-kids-through-college stock.)

'In Scotland, I left quite a few debts because I thought, "One day I'll pay them off, now I must have that bottle of Merlot." I must stress it was only institutions that I was in debt to, I'd never let anyone down on a personal debt. And I have paid them all off now.'

Now everything looks swanky, well almost. He's bought a huge Victorian house in St Helens. He's had it a year, but it still has no furniture. 'It looks like a squat. It's got velvet wallpaper put on in the Seventies, but upside-down.'

Sounds quite kitschy cool to me. 'No, it's very much like something from The Shining. I had a girlfriend stay there once and she wouldn't go to the bathroom at night, we had to have a bucket.'

There's still something bizarre about Johnny. I ask him what he likes to do. He says: 'I like to cook, but I've got no cooker. I've got a plug-in hob. I've been fantasising about Smeg cookers, free-standing with six rings and two ovens. I do a lovely lasagne. I can take the day off and spend the whole day doing it.'

Isn't it a bit of self-torture that you love to cook, but don't have a kitchen?

'Yes, that is ridiculous. I'd also love to have a large bath, one of those French double-ended baths, free-standing.' But at the moment he doesn't even have a proper bathroom. Well, he has been working very hard.

He makes a half-hearted attempt at explaining that he wants everything to be perfect in his first proper home and it'll be very time-consuming, so that's why he hasn't started it yet. He thinks he's come to a point where, yes, he could have taken on a lot of work just because it's there, but at the same time he doesn't want to miss his moment. He says he's not a workaholic, though.

'I love stand-up, but I don't need it to give me any sense of self-worth. I saw this programme on Tommy Cooper where he had to be on stage even though it was killing him. For him it was only when he was up there that he felt loved. And I don't, I feel loved in a lot of areas of my life,' he says, putting on this rather calm, pragmatic Johnny face.

We decide to have lunch. He has pasta with pine nuts and I have eggs Benedict. And although he chain-smokes, occasionally referring to the stress of his dad's illness, he doesn't drink at lunchtime. He has to work on the new show.

'And besides,' he says, 'if I have a drink at lunchtime, I might not stop for three days. I like vodka and I don't sleep much, so it's best not to start because I don't want to be throwing opportunities away.'

And then he talks about how he still loves to make pots. He's going to have his double garage converted so he can set to with his potter's wheel again. This time he will finish a teapot.

'I know people who find it addictive. I only want a little teapot, but I don't know where I'm going to put it.'

'You could be covered in blue this time next year,' I suggest. 'Hmm,' he says, 'Royal Doulton blue. Maybe I can have a Royal Doulton tummy, a big stripe going round it.'

We talk for ages and ages. He's a different kind of raw in real life than on stage, but unfaltering in his vulnerability. He says he doesn't want a PR to help him with damage-limitation stories. He feels he should be able to take his own damage. And when he hugs me goodbye, he's very soft and cosy, but it's a proper generous hug and I really do feel all the better for it.