Johnny Vegas's gift is stillness: a big man in a dressing gown letting other people talk while his face does the work. It made Ideal sadder and funnier than a sitcom about a hash dealer had any right to be.
Fi1m perspective
The doorbell goes, someone comes in, sits down and talks. Moz listens. For most of Ideal (2005) Johnny Vegas is not the one with the line; he is the one being told something he does not want to hear, and the laugh arrives on his face a beat after the words. The voice, when it comes, is husky and thick with Lancashire, and it is mostly used to take offence. It is a performance built out of reaction, and it is the best thing he has done.
He came to acting from stand-up in the mid-1990s, where the act was a character: an embittered former Butlin's redcoat, surreal, aggrieved, prone to rants. You can hear that man in Moz, but Graham Duff's writing gave him somewhere to sit still, and over seven series and 52 episodes, from 10 January 2005, Vegas found something the stage act only hinted at. Moz is lonely and frightened and shrewder than his customers think, and Vegas never once asks us to feel sorry for him. There is a moment in the first series where he is alone between callers and simply sits, and it made us sadder than a sitcom about a stoner has any business doing. Nothing happens, and that is what does it.
The parts since have mostly been variations on the same down-at-heel everyman, in broader rooms. Benidorm (2007), as Geoff Maltby, known as The Oracle, and Still Open All Hours (2013), as Eric Agnew, took him to bigger audiences over a decade or so and asked less of him. We have not reviewed either and will not judge them here, but the Vegas of Ideal is a listener and those shows wanted a talker. The straight work is more interesting than his reputation suggests. Krook in the BBC's Bleak House (2005), Sackville in The Libertine (2004): a comic cast for the wrongness of his face and voice in period dress, and holding his own. Early on he was also in Sex Lives of the Potato Men (2004), which nobody liked much, though the notices were kinder to him than to the film.
The risk with a performer this recognisable is that the casting stops at the voice. Directors hear the accent and the wheeze and write the part around them, when the useful thing is the silence in between. In recent years he has gone back to ceramics, the thing he studied before comedy, and taken acting work selectively. The next director to hand him a room, a chair and nothing to say will find him ready.
Biography
Johnny Vegas, born Michael Joseph Pennington, is an English actor, comedian, writer and director. He trained in art and ceramics at Middlesex University before beginning his career in stand-up comedy.
He is known for his role as Moz in the BBC Three sitcom Ideal (2005–2011). Other television roles include Geoff Maltby in Benidorm (2007–2017) and Eric Agnew in Still Open All Hours (2013–2019). Film appearances include The Libertine (2004) and Grimsby (2016).
