How were we to know that when the Saviour manifested himself, he would have a tight curly perm, be of a very impressive girth, wear white trash Elvis cast-offs and speak in near indecipherable Mancunian tones. Ladeez n'genlemen, please welcome the one and the only Johnny Vegas, the star of stage and pub lock-in who in his dizzy ascent to the top of the showbiz pile has managed to kill off so-called "alternative" comedy and restore sing-alongs and the picture quiz to their rightful place in the canon of light entertainment.
"I just can't be doing with any of that clever, subversive stuff that comedians get away with these days," rasps the 28-year-old icon-in-waiting. "I mean you go along to the clubs these days and you get these guys on stage sipping mineral water and talking about anarchy - what's that all about. The best piece of advice I ever got from my days doing Butlin's was always be as pissed as your audience."
From St Helen's near Manchester (the global headquarters of the Northern Working Men's Clubs), Johnny Vegas learnt the trade the hard way - doing stage nights, working on the cruises and keeping the punters entertained on many a wet weekend in many a Butlin's around Britain. Thanks to an explosive debut at the Edinburgh Festival two years ago, his old school talents have now been recognised by previous hate figures (to him) such as Channel 4 and the Guardian. It's comic revisionism and Johnny's writing the script - no more soft southern drivel about dinner-party politics and "bloody musical pastiches", and in its place getting up on tables and singing New York, New York after a few swift rounds of Bingo.
A man with a mission, Johnny Vegas is now wreaking his awful revenge on a generation brought up on oh-so-clever BBC 2 comedy shows ("alternative my arse") and fancy notions about surreal and idiosyncratic comedy. "People just don't get it, do they?" he implores, "I'm not a comic, I'm an entertainer. If you're going charge folk £5 in a for show, you can't be having some young one on stage using bad language and talking about women's bits - as they do these days. People want their money's worth, they want beer and ale and some real entertainment. That's where I come in - that's why I have them up on their feet at the end of the night, with their arms around each other, singing songs - that's what they want and that's what they get".
Away from the feel-good factor to his performance though, there's a darkness to his act, as evident in his many monologues, that stems from his upbringing and initial choice of employment. "I had a tough, working-class upbringing", he explains, "I was shunned by my father and my brothers in the most despicable manner because I didn't follow them into the family building trade. I knew from an early age what I wanted to be, I wanted to be a potter - pottery is the number one love in my life. Even when I went to study it in college I was ridiculed because it's not seen as a classy degree like graphics or fashion. I even felt alone amidst my pottery colleagues because all they talked about was glazing and stuff like that whereas I all wanted to do was to go to the Student Union bar and chat up lasses. We were despised by the fine art community and I still bear those scars, pottery and ceramics will have their day though, I'm convinced of that, we just need a Picasso type to emerge from the pottery world."
Such is his love for pottery, that he includes it in his stage show, regularly inviting members of the audience up to have a go on his wheel and throw a cup or a mug ("cup or mug? that's the biggest question in the pottery world"). After leaving college, he was an unemployed potter for a number of years, then he was a drunk, all the time licking his wounds at being dismissed first by his family and then by fashionable society. He took to entertainment to get his message across that potters (and he uses the term as a metaphor throughout his show) were just as good as anybody else.
A Perrier nomination at his first Edinburgh ("I should have won outright") coupled with a sell-out West End theatre run swiftly turned him into an entertainment star, but he's still as bitter, twisted and obsessed by pottery as he used to be - "it never leaves you, once you've been kicked around and despised like I have been, you don't just forget, you keep on hammering the message home - I still use my potter's wheel on stage, I won't let it go," he says.
A Channel 4 special about his remarkable life and times brought him back to his home town of St Helens for the first time since becoming an international star (he's big and getting bigger in Australia). "People there just couldn't be arsed about Perrier nominations and Channel 4 documentaries. I went back to my local pub and the first thing they asked me was did I know what the picture was in the photo round of the pub quiz. Channel 4 were filming on location and we had all the usual St Helen's stuff going on in the background - people flicking V signs at the camera all the time and lads setting fire to their pubic hair outside the kebab shop. The town is only known for its fibre optics factory and its rugby league team, but I'm hoping to do for it what The Full Monty did for Sheffield. If I'm going to be a star, then so is the town . . ."
The incomparable Johnny Vegas performs at The Temple Bar Music Centre next Friday night at 8 p.m., as part of the Murphy's Ungagged Comedy Festival. Others acts on the bill include Ben Elton, Dylan Moran and Tommy Tiernan at the Olympia Theatre next Wednesday, Thursday and Friday respectively, a city-wide pub trail featuring Ed Byrne, Barry Murphy and Michael Smiley, The Nualas at the Temple Bar Music Centre on Saturday 14th and Jason Byrne at Murphy's Laughter Lounge on Sunday week. For further information and tickets, phone: 01-4569569.