Johnny Vegas laid bare

There's nothing diminutive about the stand-up comic from St Helens. He's a massive drinker. A stupendous talker. And a magnificent failure

I meet Johnny Vegas early in the morning in Edinburgh, where he's appearing at the festival. It turns out to be a long day. I get through two Biros and both sides of the paper in a whole notebook. We talk a lot. Johnny's a stupendous talker. We talk and talk and talk and talk. We talk about drink – Johnny is a stupendous drinker – and the places he's found himself after rather too much of it. "I once woke up on the miniature merry-go-round. I must have crawled in under the tarpaulin during the night. I slept on a teeny bus."

We talk and talk and talk, then take a jaunt to £-Stretcher, because Johnny needs coat-hangers. Johnny walks slowly, with a happy sort of "plop". Johnny is quite big, yes. Johnny doesn't have a chin, as such, he has "chops". Very soft chops. The sort you could lose a finger in.

Sadly, there are no plain metal coat-hangers in £-Stretcher. Only pastel shades of blue, pink, mint- green. "They're going to play havoc with the colours in my wardrobe," Johnny sighs. Then it's off on another jaunt to Superdrug, for toiletries. Actually, Johnny is more a Body Shop man, but we don't know where Body Shop is in Edinburgh. Johnny is a great one for toiletries. He likes bubble bath and nice soap. Johnny is not like most men, "who don't know that tea-tree oil exists, even though it makes your scalp sing".

We find another café, where we talk and talk and talk, about when he lost his virginity at 18 – "a very bungled affair... it was a while before I could get on that horse again" – and the other places Johnny has found himself after rather too much drink. "I once woke up midway through sex with someone I couldn't remember meeting." No! "In the morning I felt awful." Did you make it up to her? "I said: 'Go get some pork chops, and I'll cook them for you'. And she did. She came round with chops. In my own style, I think I loved her."

Mostly, though, we talk about failure, because that's the big thing with Johnny. Failure. It's Johnny the failed priest, who went to a seminary at 11, but dropped out after 18 months, although not before making his mark. Once, he got drunk on the sherry laid out to celebrate the seminary's centenary, then convinced the priests he could play golf. "It took me hours to get round the course. I got a terrible bollocking."

It's Johnny the failed Argos employee. He was useless in the warehouse. "Kept getting nosebleeds and bleeding over the stock. The stuff would come down the conveyor-belt with blood all over it." He was useless on the tills, where you had to input the catalogue numbers and say out loud what the product was. " 'A horse duvet?' I said to one customer, who replied: 'I think you'll find you mean a hors d'oeuvre set.' " He was useless as a porter, carrying shopping to cars. "Argos didn't have a uniform that fitted me, so when I'd say: 'Can I help you with your stuff?' people thought I was a weirdo."

He was even rubbish as a pet- owner. "One day, I came home from school to find my father had skinned my pet rabbit, Blackie, and put him in a stew." How awful, I say. Terrible, he agrees. Did it take you long to get over it? Ages, he says. Well, at least until teatime. You ate Blackie? "Yes. I'm afraid to say that while my sister was upstairs crying her eyes out, I tucked in."

So, this is the thing about Johnny. The failures. The disappointments. Or is it the thing about Michael? Because Johnny Vegas is, of course, really Michael Joseph Pennington, failed potter. Yes, he studied ceramics at Middlesex University, and made extended female forms that he thought were really cool until he had his first show and people wrote "love your candlesticks" in the comments book.

So, Johnny isn't Michael's invention in the way that, say, Alan Partridge is Steve Coogan's invention. Johnny is Michael, magnified. Or Johnny is comprised of the bits of Michael – the pain, the rejections – that Michael has hived off, to save himself from the Priory and, possibly, out-and-out alcoholism. Johnny, the stand-up, is Michael at his most brilliantly hurt and resentful.

"How would I describe Johnny, the performer? He's a drunk who's the author of his own failure, although never accepts it. He's the failed redcoat who thinks he's the man who built up Butlin's. He admires Evita, because they've both used their looks to get out of small towns. And his big love is ceramics." And why is he so funny? "Because what happens to Johnny is what everyone fears will happen to them."

Johnny – and let's call him that rather than Michael, if only for reasons of my own sanity – is not a failure now, though. His show at Edinburgh is proving the fastest-selling ticket of the festival. He's got quite a few tellys under his belt, including Paul Whitehouse's alcoholic mate Charlie in Happiness. Plus, of course, he's now the bloke who stars with the knitted monkey in the ITV Digital ads.

"I do stand-up for years and now I'm known for a monkey. Wherever I go, it's: 'Where's the monkey?' I recently came back from Montreal, and even the customs officer who inspected my bags said: 'Where's the monkey?' He's only an old jumper, you know." Now, Johnny's fear is that merchandising will come off the back of it. There will be Johnny dolls and knitted-monkey dolls, but while the monkey dolls will sell out, lots of Johnnys will be left on the shelves. Touchingly, it doesn't occur to Johnny that they might not bother to make Johnny dolls at all.

Success is nice, yes. Johnny used to live in a bedsit over Mary The Quality Butchers in St Helens, his Merseyside home town. But now he has a big, six-bedroom house in the posh part. He's had the house for a year, but aside from "a new fitted window", he has yet to do it up or get any furniture.

His fridge is an old minibar. He'd like to put a big bath in this year, though. One where the water will come right up to his chin. Or chops. I say that the thing I've always really wanted is one of those electrically controlled beds that can be raised and lowered at the touch of a button. He says: "Why not get a long-term illness and go into hospital? Much cheaper."

Whatever, his mum Patricia is dead proud that he's got this big house. His mum, he says, hasn't been so proud since he did a tour sponsored by Hobnobs and she got a free tin of biscuits. "She took them down the bingo and said: 'Here, have a Hobnob, courtesy of my son'." He's just booked a holiday for his mum and his dad, Lawrence, in Malta, but "never again". Oh? "My mum phones and says: 'Will there be drink?' Mum, it's all-inclusive. 'Will there be food?' Mum, it's all-inclusive." Also, "she didn't want to go by coach, but wouldn't hire a car, in case they got lost".

His family were never especially worldly-wise. Indeed, the first time Johnny ever ate out was at his sister's wedding reception when he was 17 or thereabouts. It was not a triumphant occasion. "Because the beef had been done with a pink heart through the middle, everyone sent it back to be cooked properly."

Johnny is the youngest of four – three boys and a girl. His dad, a carpenter, was often laid off during the Thatcher years. Johnny remembers his childhood as skint. Once, he went with his dad to sell some scrap metal to the scrap-metal merchant across town. It was a boiling hot day. They worked out what they would do with the money when they got it. Johnny would get an ice lolly. His dad would get a cup of tea in a café. They pushed the metal there in an old pram. "But when we arrived, the merchant was closed. So my dad tipped the metal out and we went home."

One Christmas, he got a second-hand bike on which his father had painted the words "Michael's Flyer". Johnny felt awful for his dad when his friends laughed at it. The thing about Johnny is that all disappointments are tempered with warmth and affection, which is, perhaps, what makes him so utterly endearing. He doesn't hate his dad for cooking Blackie, by the way. "While I saw him as a pet, he saw him as livestock." Plus, he had other pets, "including my budgies, Bluey and Greeny. As you can see, naming was always done on a colour basis".

His family is Catholic, and Johnny wanted to be a priest – not through any religious devotion but because, he says, he liked the reaction that he got from people when he said this was what he wanted to do. "They'd go: 'A priest? Oh, that'll be lovely'." After the seminary, it was the local comprehensive, where he got four O-levels. Then it was Argos, by which time he was already drinking heavily, yes. Draught sherry. Cider. Whatever he could get his hands on. Perhaps to boost his confidence? Or diminish his loneliness? He wasn't very good at pulling. It was the weight. "I'd go clubbing with me mates, who'd send me over to a group of girls to break the ice, and then they'd move in to get off with them, while I'd be left on my own."

As I've said, Johnny is funny because if he wasn't, he'd be in the Priory. He didn't, he says, have his first proper relationship until he was 26. He's still only 30. Nothing has ever endured, though. "I think I'm just so used to being on my own."

How does pottery come into all this? Well, while at Argos, he did A-levels at evening classes, swapping subjects "as soon as I diminished the teacher's patience". He liked art, though, and particularly ceramics. What makes a good pot, Johnny? "Aesthetics and spirituality. The potter has to put something of himself into it. Or, if all else fails, a picture of a kitten on the side. They sell."

As a student at Middlesex, he would get blind drunk at the student bashes and do 30 minutes of stand-up off the top of his head. A mate got him a gig in Glasgow. The gig didn't go too well. Johnny stayed in Glasgow and got... very Johnny. "Drinking for all the wrong reasons. Drinking because I felt rotten and wanted to stop feeling rotten." He ended up working in a bar, where the drunks frightened him. "It was, God, I'm turning into one of those." In 1995, he came up with the idea of Johnny Vegas, and took Edinburgh by storm in 1997. And he doesn't drink for the wrong reasons any more, he insists. Oh? "Yeah. I do it not to blot anything out, but just because I enjoy it so."

And what now? Can Johnny continue to be such a magnificent failure, now he's such a magnificent success? I think so. We talk and talk and talk, for seven hours. Seven hours! "Have you stripped me down to my very core?" he asks, when we finally finish. No. Probably not. Down to his chops, maybe. But there's a lot of chops to get through.

Johnny Vegas is playing at Edinburgh's Gilded Balloon until 27 August, 0131-226 2151