Leaving Fat Vegas

Earlier in the week I bumped to a friend I hadn’t seen since we all got together for pre-Christmas drinks. Since he had time to kill before a late afternoon appointment and I was going to scoot off home anyway, we decided that was the perfect excuse to settle in at the nearest pub and from there pretty much carried on the dialogue from where we left off.

With him a regarded writer/historian of British comedy, we touched on the worthiness or worthlessness of BBC4’s recent quartet of dramas that came under the umbrella title The Curse of Comedy. Like me, he was more enthusiastic for the hour-long Mark Lawson Talks To interviews, first with Galton & Simpson, then George Cole, Barry Cryer, and finally David Renwick.

Although I have some years on him, he’s still old enough to lament the decline of the chat show. Hidden away on BBC4, Lawson comes to his subjects informed rather than opinionated and creates an intelligent and entertaining dialogue. Who else is there to compare to? Jonathan-bloody- Ross? After we stopped laughing I went to the bar to get another round in.

I made the mistake of catching Friday Night with Jonathan Ross last night because I’d heard that “S’Ralan” Sugar was going to be a guest. With the new series of The Apprentice featuring a bunch of the most hapless muppets, Wednesday nights are currently the real comedy nights on BBC1. Last week’s edition in particular, with the whole kosher chicken fiasco, was one of the most hilarious things on the box.

He might have made an interesting interviewee. The problem was one of the other guests was that lardy talent vacuum, Johnny Vegas. This is the sort of person who really should have taken Dean Wormer’s advice to heart: “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life.” If Vegas had listened, he might have stopped being such an attention-seeking cock-knob long before now and made the world a far better place.


Does anyone find this guy the least bit amusing? Even on a repeat of QI a week or so back, even Stephen Fry looked like he was sick to the back teeth of him well before the recording was over. I flicked over to Peep Show instead. But I did swap back to see him, finally, tongue-tied and subdued. Wossy had actually asked him about the recent Bloomsbury Theatre gig.

According to one of the writers for The Grauniad’s arts&entertainment blog who was in the audience, Vegas arrived on stage admitting he had no material and was there simply to get laid. After some preamble he managed to persuade a teenage girl in the audience to come up on stage. While everyone seems to agree up to that point, reports varied after that.

Before the lawyers were parachuted in and the post was pulled from the newspaper’s site, the 400+ comments had started to get heated and were ending up combustible. What it boils down to is that, allegedly, once he had the girl lying on the stage, Vegas then behaved inappropriately in the writer’s eyes.

Sitting opposite Wossy, just for that moment, Vegas looked humbled. Unfortunately, by the time Sir Alan Sugar arrived on the sofa, Vegas was back in the green room being an obnoxious, unfunny arse who didn’t like the fact that the attention was now on somebody else.

So Sugar, annoyingly, kept being interrupted, and quite rightly didn’t look too happy about it. He’d get halfway through answering a question and the audience would start laughing at the retarded shenanigans. Of course the real problem was Mick Thomas, the show’s director, allowing the childish behaviour to be shown on the studio screen.

Once they had indulged him, the fat idiot just kept on doing it. At that point I just didn’t know who to be more annoyed at.