“I heard someone say that there are too many podcasts recently,” Johnny Vaughan tells me. “That’s like walking into a bookshop and going: ‘Who’s reading all these books?’ or going into a record shop and saying: ‘We don’t need any more music.’ My dad, God rest him, died last year and was known for saying the most extraordinary things – he could be quite pompous unless it was about sailing or engineering. I’d mention something about playing some new music and he’d say: ‘What do we need new music for? We’ve got enough music – we need someone to fix the bloody potholes.”
Look up the word raconteur in the dictionary and you’re likely to find Johnny Vaughan’s name listed. He has built a name as one of the UK’s most irreverent and entertaining broadcasters and podcasters over the past four decades – but his path to success was far from straightforward.
Born in London, the young Vaughan and his family moved to the Midlands, where he was duly enrolled in a local boarding school and suffered abuse at the hands of both staff and students. “It was miserable,” he recalls. “The men in charge were nasty bullies. It’s just not normal to beat eight-year-olds, or for a 13-year-old prefect to beat an eight-year-old, or to stop people writing home – or sacking cleaners for smuggling letters out. It was good practice for jail, actually.”
