Johnny Vaughan delves deep into his trials and tribulations

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10 April 2012

It's less than an hour after Johnny Vaughan has finished presenting the Capital FM breakfast show with Lisa Snowdon. The man whose garrulous charm welcomes more than one million Londoners to their working day is standing on the freezing banks of the Thames, in wellies, clutching a trowel and holding forth on the end of the world.

"It's a sign of the beginning of the end when a country becomes frightened of its own children. We have all these young people growing up who fear nothing. Not the law, not their parents, not even a lack of love. Isn't that end-of-days stuff? And behold! The people shall be frightened of the youth!" Vaughan cries out down the shore.
And now it's over to Johnny with the apocalypse, then.

We are here not to discuss the end of humanity, but his adrenalised new history programme, Mud Men - a sort of turbo-charged Time Team in which Vaughan and his co-presenter, Steve Brooker, dig up historical booty in the mud of the Thames.

The trouble is that Vaughan is forever breaking off to rant, declaim poems, hold forth on Tolstoy, his stint in jail, Elizabethan hat pins, Greenwich Mean Time, what the kids of today could learn from the impoverished 19th-century mudlarkers, who foraged in the same Thames mud for a living The end-of-days stuff is a variant on a thesis of his father-in-law's: if the 19th was the century of man, and the 20th the century of woman, then the 21st is the century of the child. "How we deal with them, how things are marketed to them, how adults also become more childish End of days."

See, Vaughan, 44, is a far more complex character than you'd guess from Breakfast with Johnny and Lisa. Aside from his conviction that the world is about to end, his insight into London history is astonishing. Freakish, even.

"Oh, that's part of a Bellarmine pot which will be about 300 years old," he says as we break off from the motley crowd of mudlarkers, photographers, publicists and some crazed fans to walk along the foreshore. "You can see the top of the cartouche there from Cardinal Bellarmine " He scrambles along, handing me semi-precious garnets, Elizabethan dress pins, a gun cartridge ("you should probably throw that away, it could go off at any time"), and some Roman tesserae with the eagerness of a child.

"I don't think I've stopped being a boy," he admits. "If you look at my default mood - apart from rage, which is the default mood of any man - it would be always slightly in wonder with the world, like I'm dawdling on the way to school." He was "instantly bitten" by mudlarking after he found a Bronze Age cloak pin, he says. Mud Men felt like the kind of programme he would watch himself - and he's on to something: the combination of historical insight and on-screen banter with Brooker makes for a weirdly compelling show.

But however enthusiastic he may be, there is a sense that greater things were expected of Vaughan than archaeology shows for a cable network. It wasn't so long ago that he was one of the most highly paid and talked-about TV stars - that was, before he went bald. As he says: "How many people on TV are bald except Paul McKenna?

It's not acceptable to be sexist, racist or ageist or even rude about people with ginger hair. But it's fine to marginalise bald people."

I wonder whether it is dissatisfaction that explains his odd behaviour when we initially meet. For the first 20 minutes, he barely speaks at all, ignoring most of my questions. I show him a passage by the great 19th-century journalist Henry Mayhew describing mudlarking and he simply turns away as if I am offering Class A drugs and this is a rerun of his entrapment in 1988 when, aged 21, he was jailed for 25 months for trying to sell cocaine to undercover police. At the time, he was an aspiring writer who, after leaving Uppingham boarding school, wandered aimlessly, unable to settle into a career.

In jail, he read everything he could get his hands on, whether books on Ancient Greece or Tolstoy (he has devoured all his fiction - his favourite is a fable about a landowner killed by his own greed called How Much Land Does a Man Need? "as it tells you everything you need to know about humanity").

Vaughan became something of an autodidact and turned his life around after he was released. He landed his own TV show, Moviewatch, and then shot to fame hosting The Big Breakfast. In 1999, he married costume designer Antonia Davies, the daughter of former Daily Mirror journalist Nick Davies, a close associate of Robert Maxwell who was accused of involvement in Israeli arms deals (yes, the same father-in-law who spoke of "the century of the child"). When Vaughan left The Big Breakfast in 2001, he was said to have signed a £3 million deal with the BBC, but neither his "very unsuccessful" sitcom 'Orrible nor his chat show were a hit. He had more luck on radio. In 2004, he took over from Chris Tarrant on Capital and has become a well-loved fixture.

Still, the past 12 months have been difficult, he explains, as we walk along the shore. His wife suffered a miscarriage (the couple have 10-year-old Tabitha and seven-year-old Rafferty).

His beloved dog also died. He looks gaunt and speaks more slowly than he does on radio, though still with the same muscular force.

"When we lost our baby, which was really awful, I had a week off and it was just a really, well, crushingly sad time. I haven't really dealt with it yet. But I found salvation came in front of that microphone and I could escape from the world and fall into my world. I had my listeners, and I had Snowy [Snowdon] and my team. And for four hours, Dr Showbiz healed me, you know?"

He's touching about the people around him that he loves, whether his wife and family, Lisa Snowdon, or his new dog Geoff or his latest best buddy, Brooker - who later confides to me that he initially found Johnny difficult to work with as he either talked non-stop or would zone out.

However, just as pensiveness descends, he's up again, back into wondrous mode. He reckons his enthusiasm is why critics don't like him nearly so much as his public. "Critics hate enthusiasm because they're not enthusiastic themselves. The world has its faults but it's an amazing place dominated by humans who are quite the most extraordinary things on the planet. And that's what we're looking for, remnants of what humans have left behind," he says, as sheep's jaw bones crunch underfoot. "I find it much more fascinating than anything the animal kingdom can serve up argh! A true find! For the journalist."

Vaughan hands me a clay button on which is printed: PRESS.

"Everything is possible in London. It all comes back to this river."

Next up from Johnny will be a book about his time in jail. He wants to make a serious point: "It costs a fortune to send people to jail. They'll come out with less than they had when they went in. I know what it's like to live in a world without women, without love, without intimacy." And then he declaims a poem he has written for the inside cover.

" 'Nature can be cruel, Man can be evil, but Time can only be merciless. It gives just to take, destroys all we create, and lets us hope when we all know the end.' "

"I've never written a poem before. I was trying to get across how awful time is Did you get it down? Make sure you put loads of spacing in between so it looks really poetic. Like Bukowski.

It scans perfectly. It's anapaestic catalytic tetrameter not really. I've just been dying to say that."

As he poses for photos in the water, Brooker shouts out: "He looks like something from Rain Man."

"I've got a bit of that," Johnny exclaims. "A suspiciously good memory. But I'm quite good emotionally, so it rules me out of Asperger's just. It's heartbreaking that I remember everything that no one else does. But everything seems to be more important to me than it does to everyone else."

So that's Johnny Vaughan - charming, eccentric and occasionally demanding, yet never boring. And isn't that exactly what we want from radio DJs and TV presenters? I go home with my pockets jangling with booty and a reminder of Vaughan in that gun cartridge that could go off at any time.
Mud Men begins on Monday at 9.30pm on HistoryTM.

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