Riding high on Planet Vaughan

Full of energy: Johnny Vaughan

11 April 2012

It's 8am and I am sitting in on Friday morning's breakfast show on Capital Radio. There is debris all around me: old coffee cups, McDonald's wrappers and half-eaten iced buns nestling in hurriedly torn-open paper bags. It's the last hour of the last day of a long week for Zoe, SJ, Welsh and Gareth, who produce, present and engineer the threehour programme. Today, understandably, everyone is flagging.

Well, not quite everyone. For, standing in the middle of them all, spinning like a top, mouth going, arms whirring, hair bouncing, is Johnny Vaughan. A tall, thin, tufty-haired, Pringlesweatered 38- year- o ld Johnny Vaughan.

"Let's play Didn't We Have A Lovely Time the Day We Went to Bangor!" he says excitedly. "That'll get them listening! Won't it?" No one answers. For a moment, Vaughan starts to deflate but then suddenly spins round, virtually vaults over the sound desk, grabs a muffin and munches it whole in two seconds flat. "Yes!" he says, punching the air.

Johnny Vaughan has a right to be on a high today. His career has, by anyone's standards (although, oddly, not by his own), flip-flopped around. In the Nineties he shone as the wacky, funny, fast-talking, quick-witted frontman of the Big Breakfast. Then, in 1997, he left Channel 4 for the BBC and a number of doomed projects - the sitcom 'Orrible, Johnny Vaughan Tonight, Live at Johnny's and Passport to Paradise. The last, starring his Big Breakfast sidekick Denise Van Outen, was supposed to bring in that crucial early-evening Saturday night audience. It didn't.

Nine months ago, when he took over the Breakfast Show from the muchloved Chris Tarrant after 17 years of domination, critics predicted doom and gloom and the mass exodus of listeners to Heart FM. Audiences did drop at first, with 300,000 defecting in the first six months, but now Vaughan has clawed back 100,000 of those listeners. "Aha, those fatal ratings," says Vaughan. "I don't really understand them but I'm very happy that Capital's still number one and that's what counts."

There's no doubt about it, it's the Johnny Vaughan show. The others are all sidekicks, there to laugh, to smooth, to banter, to rein him in when he gets a bit too manic. Later he tells me he suffers from a form of Asperger's syndrome. "Everything for me is tricky. For example, I can't remember directions. If you told me the way to get to the loo was left-right-left I could remember that but when I'd get out I'd fail to reverse those instructions and carry on going leftright-left until I ended up completely lost. It's sort of funny," he says, "but actually it's really rather isolating."

I wonder if he feels isolated most of the time. He may well be the epicentre of the show, making everyone laugh, buttering up the listeners, going off on one of his wonderful esoteric ramblings to do with cowboy cosmetic surgeons, demanding, very loudly, that Welsh find him some honky-tonk piano music. But, when you sit and watch, he's really rather alone there on planet Vaughan.

There were, he says, pockets of his life, in the past, where he did feel different in some way, so maybe he's used to it. The most obvious example was the time he spent in jail. He was arrested for dealing cocaine when he was 19 and went on to spend two-andahalf years in prison.

"I've talked about prison a lot," he says, once we have sat down on the sofa, only he doesn't sit but jiggles. "It's a horrible place to be, especially when you're a middle-class public schoolboy. It is awful not to see the people you love, not to have any warmth or intimacy. And most of the other people there are completely out of control and violent. Others, though ... you could see that if they'd had a better chance in life, a better education, a dad, then maybe things would've turned out differently for them."

This gets him on to one of his favourite subjects, the dadless society.

"I'm talking about all those kids brought up with no one to look up to, no one to do that male stuff with them, to lock horns with, to keep them in line. There's no one to respect. It's at the core of problems in our society."

HE, himself, is not dadless, although his father was, for a time. "My father went into business with my grandfather and, to cut a long story short, found out that my grandfather was creaming off all the profits." This meant Vaughan's father, Randal, went broke and had to sell the factory and the house in Nottingham and goodness knows who paid the school fees for Uppingham, where Vaughan went.

"My father had to rebuild his life totally," says Vaughan. Then, to make things worse, Vaughan's mother, Fay, a psychotherapist, left. "My dad didn't speak to his father for 20 years. My mother spoke to everyone but I couldn't speak to her. My friends could. They'd all come and tell her their sexual problems but I'm a very moral person. I would've found it weird."

This in turn gets him onto the fact that he thinks paedophiles should remain in jail for life. "I can't change my sexual desires," says Vaughan, "and I don't think they can either so they're obviously going to reoffend." Which, somehow, leads to him telling me that he thinks women don't really like each other. "This is what they do," he says, grabbing my arm. "One woman points to a girl on the street and says to her friend, 'Isn't she pretty?' The friend then says, 'Oh, do you think so?' obviously thinking the girl is not pretty at all. That's women, isn't it? Every time I think about fairytales I see more things about women and the roles they play. Anne Robinson's the wicked stepmother, isn't she? And columnists like Vanessa Feltz and all the staff of Heat magazine are the Ugly Sisters.

"They're always banging on about blah blah's cellulite. We're all human, you know. It's not very supportive."

Thank goodness Vaughan has a calming influence in his life in the form of his wife, Antonia, who is 35 and the 'Women are always banging on about blahblah's cellulite. It's not very supportive'

Continued from Page 23

mother of his two children, Tabitha, four, and Rafferty, one-and-a-half. The couple have been together for 19 years and live, with their bulldog, Harvey, in Wandsworth. They met when Vaughan rented Antonia a video from the shop he was working in. "I called her up and she said, 'Oh, you want that video back, don't you?,' and I said, 'No, I want you to go for dinner with me,' and that was that." Apparently, Antonia's parents didn't have a problem with the fact that, soon after the couple met, Vaughan went to jail. "Her mother, Rose, is Australian and a great crack. She's more fun than Antonia. She believed in me.

"Antonia's dad is Nick Davies, that Mirror journalist who was accused of having links with an arms dealer. Don't suppose he could say much about the jail stuff, could he? Anyway, her parents split up ages ago."

Vaughan tells me he loves Antonia, whom he married in 1999, to pieces. "I recited You're the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me, by Gladys Knight and the Pips, to her at the wedding," he says. "It's such a great song and I meant every word of it. And then Elvis Costello played She for us as our first song and everyone cried and it was great." Does Antonia find him hard to live with? I imagine she has to put temazepam in his cocoa to get him to shut up for five seconds. "We get on very well," he says. "I work hard but I'm nearly always there to pick Tabs up from school. And, hey, I earn a lot of money [reportedly £1million-plus from Capital] and my wife seems to like spending it, so ..."

Which leads us back onto his career. "I don't worry about it," he says. "I'm trying not to do so much at the moment because sometimes I just can't stop myself." He's got a spin-off of his Radio 5 Live show Fighting Talk about to be shown on BBC2 and also a "dope opera", as he calls it, Top Buzzer, on MTV.

"I think that one will cross over to terrestrial TV at some point."

But why haven't his major projects worked out that well so far? My theory, for what it's worth, is that it's probably more to do with television bosses who try to contain him and make him mainstream and relatively non-threatening intellectually (he could never be entirely intellectually emasculated) rather than tapping this amazing energy he has. He is, without a doubt, the funniest person I've met in ages. He's very bright and a great mimic and free-associates all the time. If someone could cleverly direct it ...

"But that's what this radio show is!" he says. "Look, I got out of the Big Breakfast because, by the end, no one cared about us. We were being looked after by the sports department, by a bloke who was in charge of scheduling American baseball or something. It all got very political. That's the problem with TV. The pilot for Passport To Paradise was great but the show was dire. Too formulaic. But radio ... oh, radio flows. I love it!" With that, he gets up, tells me a rude joke, and directs me out of the building. Interestingly enough, I end up in a broom cupboard.

MORE ABOUT

Johnny Vaughan

Riding high on Planet Vaughan

Read More