Johnny studied to be a priest; he was sent off to Skemsdale boarding school at the age of 11. 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."
He realised that the celibacy side of the priesthood would possibly be a problem when he started to fancy the dinner ladies. "I didn’t take to seminary school. I'd thought it would be a chance to develop my faith and feed the curiosity that I had about God. But the attitude was: 'Do as you’re told, and don’t ask questions.' It felt more military than spiritual. After four terms I went home for Christmas and never went back."
Johnny did not set out to be funny at school, but used to admire his mate, Mike Fairclough, who held court with his comic storytelling. "I went to college and I sort of copied his storytelling technique – not too consciously at first. I realised I wanted to be funny and, if you weren’t a looker, it was a good way of ingratiating yourself. If I went up to a group of girls and tried to play it smooth, I’d be laughed out of the club. If you went up and could be very disarming, you could get chatting to them."
For quite a while Johnny stopped doing stand-up. "I didn’t have that fear anymore." But he slowly started wanting to do it again. "I had a massive tirade at this cockney bloke in my local pub the other night. He’d been asleep in the pub for two hours and he woke up and his first words were, 'I don’t like TV and I don’t rate you and I don’t see why I should pay my licence fee.' I went off at him with a 20-minute rant. Then I thought, I definitely need to get on stage again. If you do nothing but stand-up you start to run out of real life experiences. You need to go away and watch a load of TV and sit back in the pub with your mates, and suddenly you build up a whole load of new things to shout about."
Stardom soon found Johnny, and with his celebrity status came a big TV advertising deal with PG Tips – promoting the pyramid bags with Monkeh (sorry – that was the best attempt at his accent we could muster). Oh, and he's also won his share of awards, including the Best Comedy Newcomer at the British Comedy Awards 2001, the Edinburgh Festival Critics Award 1997 and the Leicester Mercury Comedian Of The Year 1997… to name just a few. Although, we should point out that while these awards are good and all, when it comes down to it, Johnny did pretty much steal his mate's gig and make a career out of it. Which should make his victory all the sweeter.
As well as firmly establishing himself in the comedy world (he even got his very own gig on Dave's One Night Stand - and if that doesn't mean that he's made it, we're not sure what does) Johnny has also turned his hand to acting – appearing in everything from a BBC adaptation of Bleak House through to the 2004 film Sex Lives of the Potato Men. OK, so the latter got even worse reviews than your average Adam Sandler romantic comedy, but hey – Johnny also has one of the great British sitcoms – Ideal – to his name. Plus, he can do pottery. Really, really well. Hmm, perhaps a leading role in the stage musical version of Ghost is next for Johnny? Now that we'd like to see.
