Johnny Vegas expresses regret over showbiz career: ‘I’ve cheated myself’

Johnny Vegas has expressed regret over sidelining his passion for ceramics to pursue a career in stand-up comedy and acting.

The 54-year-old, real name Michael Joseph Pennington, has dubbed his showbiz career a big detour from his real passion, saying: “I never made the time [for art], and I wish I had. I have so much time to make up for.”

He added: “In a way, I feel I’ve cheated myself.”

The Benidorm star studied BA Art and Ceramics at Middlesex University in London, but said in a new interview that his disappointment with his third-class result ultimately led him to replace art with stand-up in the Nineties.

Vegas said that, at the time, he realised that comedy was something he could do on his own creative terms.

But Vegas said he started losing his edge when he began doing more regular TV work, telling The Guardian: “When you go into TV, everybody has an opinion and that slowly seeps into you.”

“You wonder what younger comics make of you,” Vegas added. “As you get older, you also go: how much time have you got left to make a difference? Rather than just have a career and cling on to it? Don’t make telly for the sake of making telly.”

Vegas explained that art had rescued him later in life and gave him a different sense of purpose.

Last month’s Channel 4 documentary, Art, ADHD & Me, followed Vegas as he made a public art installation in St Helens, Merseyside, where he lives. His joint exhibition with Rodgers at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery ended in June after more than a year.

The comedian is currently showing his work in an exhibition called Just Be There, with each form made with two people hugging around a soft clay column to shape it. It will feature at the British Ceramics Biennial.

Vegas told The Times earlier this year that rediscovering his love of art and ceramics had helped him deal with his ADHD, which he was diagnosed with aged 52.

“Ceramics, and art has recently found its way back into my life in a big way,” he said. “I see beauty in all sorts of shapes.”

In January 2023, Vegas told BBC Breakfast that his ADHD diagnosis “answers a lot of questions about behavioural issues”.

“A lot of things make sense,” he continued. “There’s that sense of disorganisation and doing basic tasks... Everybody has an element of it, it’s how strong your filter is, I think, and when you don’t have a filter at all, very simple things can become very time consuming.

“It’s like, ‘I’ll shift that cup’ and then you’ll have 10 other ideas and you haven’t shifted that cup and three weeks later, that’s still there... I suppose it’s how your brain organises itself. I always knew I was disorganised, but that was the kind of joke, that ‘I am as they made me’.”