Tears of a clown

THE luxury Audi saloon scythes its way through traffic on Edgware Road and screeches to a halt outside Threshers. "Can you get me 60 Marlboro Lights," says Johnny Vegas, extracting a £20 note from his tracksuit bottoms and handing it to his press officer. "No one's ever got any fags at the BBC." We're being whisked across London to TV Centre where Vegas is due to appear on Parkinson (to be screened on Saturday night), and we're late. Parky's "people" are getting shriller by the minute on the other end of the phone.

Vegas seems unperturbed. His earlier promise to "just pop upstairs to get my suit" resulted in our sitting outside his West End hotel for 20 minutes, after he invited me to accompany him on his hectic afternoon. With time-keeping, as with most areas of his life, Vegas admits to being laid-back: "Even my agent said to me, 'How can I put this, Johnny? You're not exactly ... driven.'''

He may appear calm on the surface, but you get the feeling that all is not entirely hunky-dory for the affable 32-year-old comedian from Lancashire. "Life's okay at the moment, I suppose," he says haltingly. "It carries on like a steamroller. No, that's a bit over-dramatic. Life's good. Not everything ... but ... but ... the stuff that isn't good I'm really not interested in talking about."

It's hardly surprising. His career may be flying but Vegas's private life is very publicly and poignantly in tatters. It was only a few months ago that his whirlwind marriage to interior decorator Kitty Donnelly hit the rocks after barely a year, when their infant son, Michael, was only a few months old. He had got chatting to the attractive 27-year-old in a London pub and they were married only three months later. "We thought of postponing because everyone was saying it was too soon," Vegas said. "But we said to ourselves, 'Why wait?'''

Now he's understandably reluctant to discuss his domestic situation: "To be honest," he says, "I'm not going to use my personal life to promote myself. And I don't want my son reading about it in years to come, hearing things second-hand. I'm not being truculent but hopefully you can understand that it's not easy to talk about."

Reports suggest that despite an attempted reconciliation, the couple are well and truly separated, though he still has regular access to Michael, now eight months old. Kitty and the baby are said to be living in a north-London flat while Vegas has moved back to his six-bedroom Victorian house in St Helen's, Lancashire, staying in hotels or with friends whenever work brings him to London.

GIVEN his reputation for Oliver Reed-style drinking sessions, I ask whether going through a period of emotional upheaval, coupled with the pressures of fame and fatherhood, could have left him tempted to hit the bottle? "No," he says without hesitation, "because being a dad means you can't afford to do that. It's not about you going off the rails - you've got a sense of responsibility about someone else. My personal opinion is that you go off the rails because you want people to notice that you're hurting. The biggest thing I've learned from my dad is that there were times when his heart must have been breaking but he held it together. That's what being a responsible adult and a parent is about."

It can't help that Vegas's new film, the ultra-laddish gross-out "comedy" (and I use the word very loosely) Sex Lives Of The Potato Men, has him playing a feckless delivery man whose boozy habits lead to his attractive wife throwing him out.

Thankfully, Kitty has pooh-poohed suggestions that her estranged husband's alcohol consumption contributed to their break-up, announcing last September: "I don't have a problem with the amount he drinks, which really isn't that much."

All the same, it's safe to say you never know quite what to expect from an encounter with Johnny Vegas. Previous interviews have involved journalists "going missing" for

48 hours or, in the case of one unfortunate hack, having your hair set alight by a northern comedy club owner while you're paralytically drunk.

My encounter with Vegas - tame by comparison - begins in a chintzy suite at the Dorchester where, sporting a St Helen's Rugby League baseball cap, T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms, and a week's worth of stubble, he looks as inconspicuous as a hyena at Crufts. Rather disappointingly, however, he seems to be stone-cold sober.

Vegas insists the reports of his bibulous habits are exaggerated, that he's just as likely to be downing industrial quantities of tea as Guinness, and that journalists routinely turn up to interview him having taken two days off in the expectation of going on a massive bender, when, more often than not, he's off home to do a bit of writing. Nonetheless, the Johnny "Leaving Las" Vegas image persists of someone attempting to drink themselves to death before our very eyes.

"Even in just talking about booze you always end up sounding defensive when there's nowt to defend," he says wearily. "I like a drink. I also like my sobriety. I know I don't have a problem and I don't mind the waters being muddy for other people. By which I mean I don't mind people debating whether I'm this or whether I'm that. That's what makes Johnny Vegas a good character - it keeps people guessing."

THIS might explain why, during our Threshers pitstop, he shouts after the departing PR in a raspy stage whisper: "Sixty fags ... and a half bottle of gin!" The drink, no doubt, for a post-Parky tipple. "I don't want to get to the point where I'm questioning something I enjoy," he says. "Something that's part of my social structure, that's part of my life, part of where I come from. If drinking interfered with my job, then I'd have to sit down and ask myself questions. If drinking interfered with my ability to be in a relationship, I'd have to sit down and question that. Same thing if it interfered with me being a dad. But it doesn't."

Vegas first burst onto the comedy scene in 1997 with an award-winning stand-up routine involving a potter's wheel (he has a degree in ceramics from Middlesex University). He has since built up a loyal following with TV appearances on Shooting Stars, as alcoholic Charlie in Paul Whitehouse's Happiness and, of course, those ITV Digital ads where he teamed up with a supercilious knitted monkey. In addition to the ill-conceived Potato Men he has two further films coming up - David Thewlis's Cheeky and The Libertine with Johnny Depp.

And yet the most important thing to remember about Vegas is that he isn't really Johnny Vegas. Strictly speaking he's Michael Pennington, a quick-witted, likeable and sublimely talented 32-year-old who plays a character called Johnny Vegas - a pubbish bloke who is very much like Michael Pennington except drunker and darker.

It's easy to get the two confused, especially given that, firstly, the only people who still call him Michael are his parents and siblings, and that he's willfully ambiguous about where Johnny ends and Michael begins.

When you play a comic creation who's a maudlin drunk ostensibly falling apart at the seams, it's hard for the public to take you seriously come the day you really are going through an emotional crisis.

"It's bizarre how people react. There was a situation going on with my family up North. I was sitting in a pub on the Isle of Man and this bloke comes over and goes: 'Are you Johnny Vegas?'I'm like, 'Yeah, I am, but I've just had some bad news. Do you mind if I just sit here alone?'

"So, he comes back a few minutes later and goes, 'Is it okay if my girlfriend sits with you?' And I'm like, 'Look, I'm sorry but I've really got nothing to say at the moment, mate.' And he goes, 'She doesn't want to talk to you, she just wants to sit with you.' This carries on and I end up with 20 people all sat round me. An hour later I'm playing pool with the landlord, tears streaming down my cheeks and nobody cares. They're like: 'Hey! We're playing pool with Johnny Vegas!'''

He's obviously very close to his family back in St Helen's, and speaks with unmitigated admiration for his carpenter dad Lawrence. He refers to his father as "a silent hero", recalling how he came back from university thinking he knew all about politics only to discover that his father had previously been one of the youngest Labour councillors in their town, unbeknown to him. The Penningtons are practising Catholics and Vegas joined a seminary when he was 11, but left after 18 months because he realised he fancied the dinner ladies. In his early twenties he had part-time jobs at Argos and behind a bar in Glasgow, before finding his comedy vocation.

You get the distinct impression that, for Vegas, the past few months have been a case of returning to the bosom of his family to lick his wounds. As our limo glides into the forecourt of BBC Television Centre he says: "I have a great relationship with my family. I don't know what I'd do without that support structure."

Just before being hustled away to face Parky's gimlet-eyed stare, Vegas leaves me with a parting shot: "On the other hand," he winks, "the big problem with having good parents is, you haven't really got an excuse for fucking up."

Sex Lives Of The Potato Men opens tomorrow.