From a “renegade, rundown pub” to a stately home: was rags to riches ever so clearly exemplified? When Darrell Martin founded Just the Tonic, he was “an unemployable young man, just out of university in a recession,” setting up a comedy club in Nottingham because he didn’t know how else to become a standup. Thirty years later, he is celebrating the anniversary of a now-thriving chain of clubs with a long weekend of gigs at Melbourne Hall in Derbyshire. Once home to Victorian PM William Lamb, it makes room this week for a roster of top-tier comics that includes an act closely associated with Just the Tonic and its maverick way of doing things: the potter turned standup turned glamping impresario Johnny Vegas.
“I don’t let Johnny out of the box much any more,” his creator Michael Pennington tells me, on the phone from his native St Helens. “But if Darrell gets me on the phone, I know I’m going to agree to it.” It’s a relationship that stretches back the full span of Just the Tonic’s three decades, to a time when Vegas was just breaking out of Lancashire to make a national name for himself. “I was struggling to get anywhere outside of the north-west,” says Pennington now. “It was like a no-go zone. But Darrell booked me. He got what I was about.”
What Vegas was about, as anyone who saw him gig in the 1990s will recall, was havoc and disruption. In Just the Tonic, then a startup in Nottingham’s unglamorous Old Vic pub, he found a spiritual home. “They let you off the leash,” he remembers now. “There was very little, ‘Here’s what we want you to do.’ It was much more, ‘We want to see what you’re going to do.’ You were given carte blanche. It didn’t feel like a business, it felt like a night of fun.”
Martin says: “I was an encourager of a free-form approach to standup. A lot of clubs look at the clock. But I just used to say, ‘Do what you want. If it’s fun, keep on going.’ I didn’t really know what the rules were. And my nights would be utter chaos because of that.”
You want examples? Johnny has examples. The night he arrived after closing time so staged the gig in the car park. The Christmas Eve when Martin shepherded him on stage, crying in a Santa outfit, after his tour van burst into flames. “It was always that thing of, ‘How can we make tonight unique?’” he recalls. “I’ve done gigs with the Tonic where I’ve sat in a wheelie bin and they’ve passed it around the room. And I’m like, ‘When I stop singing, the table I’m next to wins a round of drinks.’
“One time, me and Ross Noble got into an argument over who’d make the best barber – and punters got up on stage and let us cut their hair. Another night, we had a band playing downstairs, they were so loud. So I went down, brought the singer back upstairs, and we had an arm-wrestling match on stage: if we lost, we had to stop the gig and listen to them playing; if we won, they had to come upstairs and watch our gig. And I beat him! And all their audience came upstairs. It just wouldn’t happen anywhere else.”
It might happen somewhere else now, because Martin’s empire has since expanded to include clubs in Leicester, Reading and Birmingham, not to mention a substantial Edinburgh fringe presence. On the other hand, that expansion, and the passage of 30 years, have slightly diluted the club’s outsider identity. “I do still chase acts that are anarchic and different,” says Martin. “But I’m not in Nottingham every night running the club, because your life moves on a bit, doesn’t it?”
He’ll be present for the anniversary gigs, though, and promises fireworks to match the wheelie-bin glories of old. Pennington would love to feel that confident – but he’s never been accountable, alas, for whether and how his alter ego, Johnny Vegas, will turn up. “I can spend two weeks writing stuff then Johnny will go, ‘That’s terrible,’” says Pennington, mournfully. “So I can’t promise a brilliant night. As compere, it’s up to me to make it brilliant. But it’d be arrogant to promise that.”
He’s also anxious about the gig’s proximity to his campsite Field of Dreams, also now located (as Channel 4 watchers will know) on the Melbourne Hall estate – which complicates a clean getaway should the gig go badly. “But I’m loving the lineup Darrell’s got,” he says: Daniel Kitson, Guz Khan, Lou Sanders and more. “It was always a brilliant club, and back then was a brilliant time to be doing what we were doing. Darrell had such faith in me from so early on. He always wanted everyone to see the best gig that I had in me, because he wanted to share it. And that’s a lovely thing. So it’s going to be an exciting weekend one way or another.”