Johnny Vaughan: 'There's not many who get out of jail and go on to become the highest-paid man on TV'

Johnny Vaughan was born in Barnet, North London, in July 1966. His big break came in 1993, when he started presenting Moviewatch on Channel 4. In 1997 he took over as host of The Big Breakfast, presenting alongside Denise van Outen for a four-year stint which made him one of British TV’s most well-known faces.

His own BBC chat show (Johnny Vaughan Tonight) and sitcom (‘Orrible) followed. In 2003, he devised and hosted BBC Radio Five Live’s Fighting Talk, kickstarting a successful career in radio and podcasting.

Speaking to Big Issue for his Letter to My Younger Self, Johnny looks back at his music-mad teenage years, going off the rails and all the things he learned in prison, and the football match he wishes he hadn’t watched.

My main concern when I was 16 was music. We didn’t have much money so I worried a lot about how to afford albums. It’s funny, I took my daughter shopping recently and I looked around the mall and realised, music has left the building. There’s nowhere to buy music any more. That was so central when I was a kid. You bought maybe two outfits and all the rest of your money went on records or tapes to record music off the radio. You begged your parents to run you to concerts. My room was all about music – I had posters of The Smiths, Jimi Hendrix, The Jam, The Stray Cats. I subscribe to Ray Charles’s belief that there are two kinds of music – good and bad.

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When I was about eight, we left London. And we were just kind of dumped in this suburban village near Nottingham. We were suddenly in this big house – we used to kick around with the local kids and I still know some of them today, which is quite nice. But my sister and I were sent away to school because we were bullied quite heavily at the village school. They didn’t really like us there because they thought we were weird Londoners. My dad was always thinking of business and my mum was kind of left at home. So the family just drifted apart really, went our separate ways.

I think I was a bit of a dreamer, but I always sort of felt I had that thing. I was a good talker and I could make people laugh. I had lots of interests, and I found things like schoolwork actually quite easy. I was good at English, I was a good mathematician. I was good at music and I loved theatre, but I guess you can get that thing where you think, ‘There’s nothing I can’t do.’ And that’s when I left school. And what I ended up doing at uni was nothing. My dad had lost everything at that time, and I didn’t really want to go to university and be poor. So I started working. I was enjoying actually having a bit of independence, not having to cadge from my parents the whole time. And so I didn’t ever go on to further education. That was a big error.

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I think I’d have absolutely loved university. I’d love to have studied ancient history, because it’s something I’m just fascinated with. I find the world a very interesting place in terms of how we got here. Historians tidy the past up into narratives all the time and we see how it repeats itself. I wish I’d studied it. Really, I’ve got so many regrets. It’s crazy, but another big regret is giving up the violin because I was a really good violinist. And I wish I’d learned the piano.

People might know I went to jail. [Vaughan tried to sell cocaine to undercover police when he was 21.] I got a four-year sentence. I used to be ashamed of my past. But actually, as I move forward and see my oldest son approaching the age I was, I think, ‘God, he’s young.’ I think, ‘Well, I really turned that around.’ And far from being something I’m ashamed of, I should rate myself a bit more for how I came out of that. When I was in jail, I read voraciously and decided the best thing I could do when I got out was become a journalist. I also wrote a couple of plays when I was in prison, including a pantomime. So I got out and was a different person. Prison can teach you how important time and freedom is and I knew how much I’d just wasted it before. So I came out with a new drive not to waste life. And to be fair, there’s not many people who get out of jail and go on to become the highest-paid man on British television.

If I met the teenage Johnny now, we could definitely talk about the books we’ve read. I don’t think I’ve changed that much – I perhaps became a bit more reflective, rather than always acting so spontaneously. I was very loud and probably exhausting. But I’ll still go away after a conversation and think, ‘Oh, god, what did I say to her?’ I just come out with stuff in the moment. But you know what, I should have a bit more faith in myself, you know? And I don’t think I’ve said anything particularly obnoxious.

I’d tell my younger self, be very careful of friends. We all blame parents for who we are, but sometimes, you know, I look at my friends, and all our parents are so different. I mean, really, really different. It’s bizarre how much parents get blamed for stuff, when the friends you make and perhaps the humour you share with them, that’s what shapes you. But be your own man. Don’t give in to peer pressure. Don’t do something you know you shouldn’t do just out of fear of letting your friends down. You’ve got to trust your gut instinct about what’s best. I think of some of the most awful things that have happened, like getting in a car with a drunken driver as a kid. I lost friends because they got in that car and I know those people were thinking, no, I shouldn’t get in.

I would tell my younger self, just never give up. I know it’s a real cliche, but perseverance alone is king. It really is. The world is full of educated derelicts. The world is full of people who’ve got all the qualifications and are very capable, but haven’t made it. You’ve just got to keep persevering. You just can never, ever let the knock backs put you off.

I’d done a couple of tryouts for The Big Breakfast a few years before I got the job. But, because I was presenting Moviewatch on Fridays, they didn’t let me fill in for Chris Evans when he wasn’t there on Fridays. Then, a couple of years later, I filled in for the presenter one summer for two weeks and did those two weeks with Denise [van Outen], and that was that. It was fantastic doing live TV. I never found it scary. When I started doing The Big Breakfast, it felt like the dawn of a new era of freedom in television. Production techniques were getting cheaper. The digital age was coming in. Cameras were getting smaller, making potentially every person an outside broadcast unit. And you’d have thought television would have got more and more exciting. Actually, it’s been quite the reverse. It feels less and less free, more and more jaded and more and more formatted.

I always wanted to be a dad. Funnily enough, when my cousins, who were big achievers and smart and weren’t irresponsible like me, when we were very little we were all asked, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ And I said, I want to be a daddy. That was when I was about six. And my mum said it made her cry, because everyone laughed at me and said it wasn’t a real job, so I changed it, obviously, to pirate.

If I could relive one day it would be a day when suddenly my stars were aligned. It would be a night when I was briefly young, free and single, and all these chances just came at me. And instead of taking them, I went off to watch this big football match and perhaps I had much too much to drink, and I blew all of them. So I’d like to go back and maybe – because now I know the result, I don’t have to watch the match again – maybe take those opportunities. I can’t really talk about it, because it might offend people, really. I just had some real chances. I don’t know if I was looking good, or if my mojo was just working, but I had about four options. If I had a sliding door I wouldn’t drink so much, and I’d just stay in the pub and see what transpired.

Johnny Vaughan is co-host of history podcast Bloomin’ Legends, which is available now on Global Player and all major podcast platforms.

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