Johnny Vegas says ADHD has helped him rediscover his love of art
Johnny Vegas has said that rediscovering his love of art and ceramics is helping him deal with his ADHD.
Vegas, real name Michael Pennington, was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in 2003. The condition includes symptoms such as restlessness, trouble concentrating, constant fidgeting, or acting without thinking.
Speaking to The Times, the 54-year-old comedian, whose acting credits include Benidorm, Bleak House and Ideal, revealed that his ADHD starts as soon as he wakes up in the morning. He said he often becomes overwhelmed when thinking about the projects he needs to tackle around the house.
“ADHD is a bit like being surrounded by butterflies and trying to decide which one to catch,” he explained. “So many thoughts and ideas, it becomes white noise. The flipside is if I do lock on to something, I can lose myself for five or six hours.”
The comic said that ceramics and art are two areas that have helped him focus; he studied the practice before his comedy career began.
“Ceramics, and art has recently found its way back into my life in a big way,” he said. “I see beauty in all sorts of shapes.”
However, the dedication to his craft has come at a painful cost: “I gave myself a hernia bringing back a load of sea-worn bricks that were dumped on Crosby Beach after the Blitz. Some of them remind me of little lost souls.”
In January 2023, Vegas told BBC Breakfast that his ADHD diagnosis “answers a lot of questions about behavioural issues”.
“A lot of things make sense,” he continued. “There’s that sense of disorganisation and doing basic tasks… Everybody has an element of it, it’s how strong your filter is, I think, and when you don’t have a filter at all, very simple things can become very time consuming.
“It’s like, ‘I’ll shift that cup’ and then you’ll have 10 other ideas and you haven’t shifted that cup and three weeks later, that’s still there… I suppose it’s how your brain organises itself. I always knew I was disorganised, but that was the kind of joke, that ‘I am as they made me’.”
New NHS England figures have estimated that nearly 2.5 million people in England have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), including those who are undiagnosed.
The figures mark the first publicly available estimate of how common the condition is among the population.
Of the estimated 2,498,000 people with ADHD, around 741,000 are children and young people aged five to 24. The figures were developed using estimates from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), which suggests that around 3-4 per cent of adults and 5 per cent of children and young people have ADHD.
The new data also suggests that more than half a million people (549,000) in England were waiting for an ADHD assessment at the end of March 2025. This is up from 416,000 a year earlier at the end of March 2024.
