The private life of Vic Reeves

The setting for the latest instalment of this compelling human drama – one might call it a real life soap opera – was Bar 11, a rather swish cocktail establishment in Canterbury.

One evening last month, however, the venue witnessed the kind of confrontation more commonly associated with less salubrious hostelries. There were the customary ‘dirty looks’ between two angry protagonists, followed by the inevitable exchange of words, then a flying glass which left one of the parties with a gash on the head.

Two things are worth mentioning here. First, the warring duo were not men, but attractive blondes.

Second, the aggressor was Sarah Vincent, sociology and economics graduate, mother-of-two . . . and estranged wife of comic Vic Reeves.

Following the incident, she was arrested, held in custody and cautioned for common assault.

The other woman involved in the fracas, it now emerges, was Angela Van Johnson, a former lesbian lover of Sarah, whom Miss Vincent claims has been harassing her since they split up eight months ago and she began seeing yet another woman.

Miss Van Johnson denies those allegations.

Nevertheless, Miss Vincent, 31, is now planning to return to her native North East with her current live-in lesbian partner and her two children by Reeves. Their home in Kent is up for sale.

Reeves, who lives nearby in the village of Charing with his new girlfriend (a one-time nightclub dancer), has been devastated by the news.

‘He is dreading the kids being so far away from him,’ said a friend last night.

Precisely what part he would be able to play in their upbringing – him still in the South, them hundreds of miles away in the North – is a question that hardly needs answering.

All of which begs the question: can the Vic Reeves story get any more complicated? Already, his bizarre private life could have come straight from a tabloid agony aunt’s casebook.

For anyone who is unfamiliar with the truly astonishing twists and turns in the plot to date, it can be summarised thus: Miss Vincent first dumped her husband Reeves for their builder after six years of marriage in 1996.

She then returned to Reeves at their home in Kent, but soon left him again – this time for a woman, her fitness instructor Julia Jones.

Sarah and her lover were soon joined at Jones’s house by Reeves, who began sleeping in the spare room. Meanwhile, Reeves, understandably turned his attention from his wife, and became engaged to actress Emilia Fox.

Remarkably, the (odd) couples – Vic and Emilia, and Sarah and girlfriend Julia – dined out and even holidayed together. The arrangement lasted until Sarah split up with Miss Jones, and Reeves split up with Miss Fox a year or so later.

What a psychologist would make of this game of sexual musical chairs, and the effect it might have had on their children, is really anybody’s guess.

Perhaps it was inevitable for a man whose life has always bordered on the surreal. For, with stupendous improbability, 43-year-old Vic Reeves (real name Jim Moir) from Darlington, shared a birthday with both his father and grandfather.

One could say that this extraordinary coincidence set the pattern for his career – both in front of, and behind, the cameras.

He came to prominence in the late Eighties – with Bob Mortimer – wearing quasi-Edwardian attire and wraparound sideburns with his variety show Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out (previous jobs, incidentally, included working on a pig farm and as an aircraft parts inspector).

Back in the early days, fans sent him pickled bullocks’ eyeballs as a token of their appreciation.

Later, Reeves, whose TV credits include Shooting Stars and Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased), took to playing the bagpipes (loudly) outside his home – neighbours were not amused – and caused further offence by putting two statues of Buddha on top of the pillars at the entrance to his house in Kent.

Reeves’ relationship with his wife seemed quite ordinary by comparison; admittedly he was 34, and she was 22 and had already given birth to their daughter five months before they got married at a London register office in 1993.

Nevertheless, initially at least, they seemed extremely happy and were often photographed at premieres and showbusiness parties. But ‘ conventional’ is not a word that would feature in the well- documented events that followed.

Yet what puzzled and intrigued in equal measure was Reeves’ reaction to his wife’s very public indiscretions.

Most men would have walked away. One reason why he didn’t was obviously his devotion to the children, typified perhaps by the scene that greeted a visitor to his home recently.

‘Vic was sitting there with a bucket on his head, wearing a raincoat and a pair of flowery swimming trunks. The kids were in hysterics.’

So the children were a factor. But those who know him say there is another reason why he and Miss Vincent have remained astonishingly close. ‘He has a “knight in shining armour” complex,’ said one.

‘He always chooses women who appear insecure or very much younger than him. The thing he said he liked most about Emilia Fox, for example, was her fragility because she is very slight physically and was so youthful.

‘The same mind-set was apparent at the start of his friendship with Ulrika Jonsson. Vic always denied there was anything between them. But there is no doubt that they enjoyed a close relationship when she first became a panellist on his quiz show Shooting Stars.

‘Ulrika was a floundering weather girl at the time, but he turned her career around. All of a sudden she was back in the limelight. She became a glamorous comedy ladette.

‘The irony of picking someone who needs help in one way or another is that sometimes those problems are insurmountable. Sarah was his first big love.

‘He has never given up on her. He is the one who wants to sort out anything that goes wrong in her life, even though it may seem quite humiliating.’

No doubt, this would explain why they moved back in together for a time last year – even though they were separated – after their respective flings with the fitness instructor and the actress inevitably ran their course.

In reality, however, they were together only in name, for their new home in Charing, near Ashford, Kent, has 14 rooms, and Sarah Vincent’s roving eye was at work once more.

Having settled in there, it was not long before Miss Vincent became a familiar face at the Pink Cadillac (now the Cotton Club), based at the Woodlands Country Club in the village.

Miss Vincent, young, blonde, attractive – and with the added cachet of her celebrity connections – proved extremely popular, with two women in particular.

One was a glamorous disc jockey, Angela Van Johnson, the other unemployed Trudi Sketchley, and both in their 20s. The pair, it emerges, had once been a lesbian couple, and Miss Vincent ended up having affairs with both of them.

The first was with Miss Van Johnson. She and Sarah Vincent began dating last August. It was a passionate – some might say steamy – encounter.

They went on romantic weekends to Brighton, but ‘Angie’ was also a regular visitor to the house in Charing, where she and Miss Vincent, it is claimed, would often have sex downstairs on the sofa while Reeves was asleep upstairs.

Miss Vincent had become very quickly ensconced in her new-found gay lifestyle after it first came to the surface three years ago, when she ‘fell in love’ with her personal trainer.

But by last January, her intense relationship with her latest paramour Angela Van Johnson had ended in acrimony. ‘I thought we were very happy together,’ Angela told the Mail this week.

‘But then I found out Sarah was seeing Trudi as well, so I finished with Sarah. It all sounds very messy, but when Sarah is involved that’s how things turn out.’

Indeed, Sarah and Trudi Sketchley are still very much an item.

Earlier this year, Miss Vincent, a bank clerk (she also receives financial support from Reeves), moved into a house near Canterbury with the children and her new girlfriend.

‘Trudi was a bit butch at the start of their relationship, but Sarah persuaded her to grow her hair, dress up more and wear make-up,’ reveals a friend. ‘She now looks fantastic.’

The source adds: ‘Trudi looks remarkably like Sarah now. She has a similar hairstyle and wears the same nail varnish.

‘They were both guests at a recent gay wedding and both turned up in the same matching white trouser suits.’

But what of Vic Reeves, the forgotten man in this lesbian intrigue? The new woman in his life is Nancy Sorrell. At 25, she is 18 years his junior.

True to the script, before they met she gyrated for a living in Peter Stringfellow’s nightclub. Essex girl Nancy has also posed for a raunchy photo session in a lads’ magazine.

Her colourful CV includes an entry which reads: Most Famous Previous Boyfriend: Steve Coogan. So, on the face of it, not the usual credentials you would choose in a future wife.

Nevertheless, Reeves, who ‘fell in love’ with Nancy while filming sketches for his celebrity gameshow Shooting Stars in the summer, proposed to her at London’s fashionable Groucho Club in February.

He slipped a diamond ring on her finger in the bar, by all accounts, and ordered several bottles of champagne to celebrate.

‘He phoned to tell us he had got engaged and we are delighted for him,’ says his mother Audrey, who lives near Darlington with her husband James.

So, an ex-nightclub dancer for a fiancÈe, and an estranged wife who is lesbian. That seemed to be the state of play until a little over three weeks ago; cue the incident at Bar 11.

Miss Vincent, her partner and another female friend were enjoying a quiet drink when they spotted a face they recognised. It was Angela Van Johnson.

Miss Vincent, it is fair to say, was seething. Her ex-lover had recently sold a salacious ‘kiss and tell’ account of their affair to a Sunday newspaper for which she is said to have been paid a lucrative sum. Moreover, she was convinced – rightly or wrongly – that Miss Van Johnson had been harassing her since they split up.

Her car, she claims, was vandalised on the drive of her home, glass bottles have been thrown at her in the street and she has been receiving abusive phone calls and text messages.

So when she entered the cocktail bar that day, Miss Vincent told her old flame exactly what she thought of her. Needless to say, the confrontation turned ugly and police had to be called to the premises.

Eventually, Miss Vincent, in tears, was arrested on suspicion of assaulting Miss Van Johnson.

Angela says: ‘Sarah came up to me and started shouting abuse at me. She completely lost it. I was really scared of her so I decided to try to get away from her.

‘But the next thing I knew a glass of wine hit me on the back of the head. It cut me and I ended up in hospital having stitches.

‘Now she is saying I’ve been harassing her, which isn’t true. If her car has been vandalised it has nothing to do with me – and I certainly wouldn’t waste my time ringing her up.’

Miss Vincent – said by a close friend to be ‘out of her mind with worry’ – and her children, are now staying with friends.

Police have promised to investigate her allegations. Meanwhile, her home is understood to have been placed on the market just a few days ago and she is now making plans to leave the area.

‘The problem is that Vic doesn’t want Sarah to move so far away with the children,’ the friend added.

In fact, he is said to have phoned his estranged wife the moment he found out about what had happened and pleaded with her to change her mind. Only time will tell if he has been successful.

But one thing is for sure: the story of how Vic met Sarah, who left him for Keith the builder, then Julia the fitness instructor, then Angela, and finally Trudi (not forgetting Vic’s engagement to Nancy the ex-nightclub dancer), is unlikely to have a conventional ending.