‘Punters let me cut their hair!’ Johnny Vegas on the

From performing in a bin to arm-wrestling rivals, the standup cut his teeth at a Nottingham pub’s chaotic Just the Tonic nights. As the thriving comedy club chain it grew into turns 30, he remembers really letting rip

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.”