Johnny turns to chat

Johnny Vaughan doesn't want to be presumptuous - which makes a change - but he thinks it must be interesting my seeing him both before and after "the 'Orrible stuff". By "the 'Orrible stuff" he means the appalling reception that greeted his BBC2 sitcom - or comedy drama as he preferred - in September. "Insipid, cheap, wide of the mark and unfunny," was the verdict of one critic, who resisted, as so many of his colleagues could not, calling 'Orrible horrible. And they said Vaughan's script was witless.

"The only guy who got a worse press that week was Osama bin Laden," he says, raising the matter himself in a coffee bar near his company's production offices in Fulham. Our original interview, I admit, became another victim of the reviews. September 2001 seemed the wrong time to be nattering about a failing TV comedy.

As before-and-after stories go, however, we are not talking Jeffrey Archer here. There should be no disgrace in a comedy failing critically or reaching "only" two million viewers, and here is Vaughan already back on television, this time with a new chat show, Johnny Vaughan Tonight. He does not look like a broken man, although at 35, with his precariously thatched scalp and V-neck jumper, his cheeky chappy persona seems to have aged a little. Over Christmas his skin broke out into a rash that, to his anorakish delight, has been diagnosed as the rather rare psoriasis rosacea. TV's latest chat show host currently has more scales round his neck than the Man from Atlantis.

He does not complain about 'Orrible having tanked. Oh, all right, he does. He thinks critics whacked him because they resent people who do one thing well, in his case presenting The Big Breakfast, and dare to move on. Additionally, the comedy became enmeshed in the mini-outrage surrounding the £5 million he was allegedly getting paid, but actually wasn't, to host the BBC1 chat show three times a week. He nurses the clichè of the Marmite commercial that loads of people hated 'Orrible but those who got it really got it. Nevertheless, he concedes it should have looked better and that his acting probably shines best at sketch length.

"What I have really learned is that although there were 77 actors, five producers, two writers, a director and an editor involved in 'Orrible it is my fault. Only me gets the blame."

We are talking on the Friday before this Monday's launch of JV Tonight. It's a busy time but Vaughan's publicist says he can spare 30 or 40 minutes. Since I want to cover only two topics, the chat show and 'Orrible, this should be plenty. In the event, however, Vaughan talks for two hours and covers everything - tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, the lot - much of it in the comedy voice of a post-match soccer player who "at the end of the day" gave 'Orrible his best shot.

Uninteresting television, 'Orrible was interesting autobiography, delving into a milieu Vaughan once knew, that of the petty or aspiring gangster. The public-school-educated son of a businessman, the teenage Johnny dreamed, admittedly in a haze of dope, of being a writer but ended in a most unliterary set. He became, he says, the same sort of "bullshitter" as 'Orrible's anti-hero, Paul Clark, "another little criminal liar, kidding himself".

In 1989, at 23, he was sentenced to four years' jail for conspiracy to supply cocaine and thus became Uppingham School's second most famous convict, after Stephen Fry.

"I realised I'd really let myself down. What the f*** was I playing at, pretending to be some kind of plastic gangster? When you meet the real thing, you realise you're not of that ilk. You're not hard like that, ruthless like that. You don't value money above human life, which is the big difference with villains."

The 25 months he served changed him: he read copiously, became devoted to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and decided that he would try journalism when he got out. He also became close to his divorced father, Randal, whose engineering firm had gone bust when Johnny was a teenager. The work Vaughan senior put into his business and its subsequent failure seem to have sparked in his son a kind of bolshie cynicism about capitalism which led him both into crime and also into voting Socialist Worker, which he still does (although, natch, his daughter Tabitha will go to public school).

A major moment of revelation for him was discovering amid the belongings of his paternal grandfather - a factory owner who "shafted" his own son in a way Vaughan does not want to go into - a scrapbook simply entitled Really! This contained endless photographs of the Duke of Kent talking to lathe operators as he stood over them during factory visits. In every case the Duke wore an expression of painfully executed sincerity that read "Really!" His taciturn grandfather, a failed tap-dancer, had concealed a streak of subversion, a streak that would surface in his chattermouth grandson who marvels at the "private delight" the old man must have taken in this collection.

Vaughan began his post-prison career as a reporter on the Peterborough Herald, progressing through market research and corporate videos to television. He enjoyed his first success while presenting Moviewatch on Channel 4. Neither his version of Candid Camera, The Fall Guy, nor his late-night chat show, Here's Johnny, was well received, but when he took over The Big Breakfast the week after Diana died he was instantly recognised as its saviour. His ad-libbed paper reviews became a daily tour de force, while his scratchy on-screen flirtation with Denise Van Outen (whom he didn't actually fancy) became a minor national obsession. He scored marks, too, for being gentlemanly to her hopelessly inarticulate successor, Kelly Brook (whom, I fear, he did fancy).

He left "The Breakfast", as he calls it, a year ago this week and a few months later Channel 4 announced its contract would not be renewed. He quit because three-and-a-half years of turning in nightly at 8.30pm was paling, especially now he and his fashion designer wife Antonia Davies had Tabitha, who, like most babies, demanded attention in the night. Life had become "one rolling bad nap". Besides, the BBC had finally green-lighted 'Orrible and he knew the effort it would require to film.

When we talked last summer, Johnny marvelled at the disparity in effort and reward between wittering on breakfast television and writing and performing a sitcom. "The tragedy of it, you know - and I'm really not saying this in a boastful way - is that for one episode of 'Orrible, which takes two months to write, the pay is the same as two mornings of The Big Breakfast, perhaps one-and-a-half mornings of The Big Breakfast. One is a completely, absolutely disposable vehicle, really there just to fill in the gaps between advertising, and one, you hope, leaves some kind of legacy, repeats that are a joy to people - like when I used to watch Comic Strip as a kid: record it, learn it, watch it again and again."

How old quotes can mock. At least Vaughan still has friends in high places. Even now a Mr Big in a recess of the coffee shop is sending over a flunky to offer him a cappuccino. This self-designated playboy soon lumbers across, announcing himself the new owner of the K-Bar in Chelsea. "Come by," he says, ignoring me, "and we'll have a few drinks, tell a few stories."

"What larks we shall have, Pip," Vaughan paraphrases.

He is a true wit. As the receptionist at his production company tells me while I await his return from the rash doctor, the chat show will be better than 'Orrible because "it's what he's good at". Even after its assured debut, however, one can foresee problems. It is bound to be compared to Jonathan Ross's better-resourced show, particularly since it adopts a near identical format of monologue, house band and desk - a criticism Vaughan dismisses by saying this is simply how chat shows work best, as David Letterman proves every night in America (and that's another problem: ITV2 shows Letterman virtually opposite him and has just renewed its deal for another year).

I also wonder, amid so much competition from Parkinson, Ross, Skinner and Norton, if he will attract classy enough guests. So far he has tempted on Boy George, a millionaire who wants to go into space, Eddie Izzard and Charles Kennedy: not bad, but not first rank. I mention the draw of Posh and Becks on Parkinson.

"Yes, you'd tune in but you wouldn't necessarily stay with the show. It amazes me when you interview people whose profile and public greatness way exceed what they are intellectually capable of or what their faculties can actually deliver to an audience. So you get this huge audience - and I like Posh, I have interviewed her a couple of times myself - but you get the chat you would if you were cutting your hair."

Or she was cutting yours? "I wasn't going to say that because I thought it would come out a bit bad for me, but yes."

So he wouldn't have them on? "Of course I would, because I quite like talking to them. But would I have an entertaining conversation with them? Or would I do what I call 'shallow intimate'? Do you know shallow intimate? People do it and I do it as well. You are asked a heavy question and you don't give the answer you would give a mate. You give a public answer, that Rikki Lake confessional answer - bad childhood, eating disorders - and it is somehow good PR because it makes you seem a better person because a more 'human person'."

Journalistically, wouldn't he have liked to have conducted Martin Bashir's interview with Diana? "But that was shallow intimate, wasn't it? At its best. I think you get more out of people by ..."

By being matey? "Yeah, that's how you get the most out of people."

Like when Victoria Beckham told him on The Big Breakfast that David wore her thongs? "Yeah, by being a bit matey. If you ask me a deep question I will go straight into shallow intimacy. I'll go into what will make me sound like a good guy."

Whereas he'd reserve his real confessions for his priest? "Exactly right. That is where you do your real confessional. I think people reveal themselves much more through detail. Ask someone their favourite flavour of crisps. Only in shallowness do we really reveal ourselves. I am really sure of it."

The confessional, I threw in, because, although he never pitches his Catholicism at you, he was confirmed into the faith three years ago at Westminster Abbey. He is a serious man: serious about God, serious about his marriage vows, serious about self-improvement and serious (perhaps too serious) about his writing. The one thing he is not serious about is chat shows. Or, rather, he is very serious about not taking them seriously.

"If the Orwellian vision of the future is a jackboot stamping on a person's head then my picture of Britain for the next whatever would be a concerned face then asking a concerned member of the public, 'How did that feel?' That seems to be the best our culture can throw up at the moment. How did that feel?"

Has he ever done any therapy, I ask, pretty sure of the answer. "No - although my mother is a psychotherapist. That is very probably why not. No, I just find it all so peace-time. It is part of peace-time culture. There is no struggle any more so we internalise and look at our own lives. There is no life-and-death struggle left."

Except, I should have said, for ratings. It has been a bantering two hours but by the end of it I do feel I know him a little better than after our weightier talk in the summer. Maybe he's right about the revelatory power of the trivial. Last time, impressed by his seriousness, I privately concluded he was wasted on chat shows and should do something more grown-up. Present a TV equivalent of Nicky Campbell's Five Live programme, perhaps. I now realise he is far too serious to consider it. Profoundly aware of its limitations, if not his own, Vaughan deliberately and censoriously plumbs television's shallows.