Rubber-faced, jug-eared Martin Clunes describes himself as a “character actor” who would be hopeless in, say, a serious police drama . . . “Tosser of the Yard,” he says. “Can you imagine how loudly my mate Caroline Quentin would laugh at me, sloping round corners with my gun poised? It just wouldn’t work.”
Happily for the actor, comedy is his natural milieu. “I don’t like programmes where nothing funny ever happens because I don’t have a single day where nothing funny ever happens. I love to be with people who make me laugh as much as making them laugh myself. I also love the honesty of comedy. People go and see some awful turgid thing such as The Duchess of Malfi and fake their response. ‘Oh darling! It was marvellous!’ But audiences won ‘t fake laughter.”
He is not keen either on dramas with unrealistic characters. He was in the BBC’s weird adaptation of Gormenghast, for example. “And everyone in it was like, ‘Waarrrgh!’,” he says, pulling a face like Edvard Munch’s The Scream. “Personally, I don’t know anyone like that, so it bored me rigid. I couldn’t even watch it long enough for ME to come on.”
Hopefully he’ll enjoy his latest venture, Doc Martin — a six-part comedy drama series for ITV — more. After all, it has been made by Buffalo, the production company he owns with his wife, Philippa Braithwaite, who produced the show.
They brought in the writer Dominic Minghella (brother of Anthony), whose credits include Hamish Macbeth, and between them created the gloriously grumpy Dr Martin Ellingham, an eminent surgeon who develops a blood phobia and winds up in general practice in a remote Cornish village. “He has no people skills at all and couldn’t care less if people like him. It was deeply liberating for someone like me who needs approval all the time.”
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Lack of likeability shouldn’t stop audiences enjoying Ellingham and even sympathising with him. “There’s a pathos about a man unable to do the one thing in the world he’s brilliant at,” says Clunes. “Also, he’s a bit of a loner. No wife. No kids. No real emotional life.”
The opposite, then, of Clunes himself, who these days defines himself as a father and husband. Before meeting Philippa on the comedy movie Staggered (1994) he was recovering from the break-up of his first marriage to the actress Lucy Aston. He was drowning his sorrows in the Groucho Club, coming across as a kind of complex and troubled version of the garrulous lager-swilling Gary, his character in Men Behaving Badly. “I met Philippa and it seemed to change almost overnight,” he says. When pressed for the internal logic of their love, he laughs, “She’s a tyrant and I’m a man who needs clear instructions.”
Their marriage, seven years ago, produced Emily, 4, who’s about to go to school near the six-bedroom Georgian mansion in Dorset where the couple now live, away from the hustle and bustle of London life. During the filming of Doc Martin the whole family, including the cocker spaniel, swapped one rural idyll for another, decamping to Cornwall and renting a beautiful house overlooking Port Isaac. “We loved everything about it and it was also great to have Philippa there. When I’m working away, I miss her a lot. I just feel that I’m not any good without her around.”
The same is true for Emily. During breaks from filming shows such as William and Mary, the hugely successful series in which he plays a genial undertaker, and Beauty (a modern reworking of Beauty and the Beast), in which he stars in late September, Clunes can be spotted in the lanes of Dorset, Emily on his shoulders.
“Recently, we’ve been learning which birds are which,” he says. “For me fatherhood is a state of grace. I find myself constantly close to tears of euphoria when I’m with Emily.”
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The emotion, he concedes, is tied up with his own rather fractured childhood. His father, the actor Alec Clunes, died from lung cancer when his son was just 8. Clunes was shipped off to school as a weekly boarder — a small, vulnerable boy with a bed-wetting problem.
“Even now I can’t watch period dramas without feeling sad and car sick because they remind me of Sunday nights when my mum would drive me back. I hated it. I hear former public schoolboys saying: ‘My father went to Eton and so did I. We were buggered rotten, but it didn’t do us any harm.’ They don’t question the tradition. But now, we’re looking at lovely little local schools for Emily and I’m bereft at the thought of her being away from the house, even for a morning. I could never send her away.”
His childhood experiences account, he says, for “the actor’s neediness, which I have in spades”.
“Also, before Philippa, the whole notion of family didn’t mean a thing to me,” he says. “But now we have this fantastic extended family which includes her brothers and Emily’s cousins, and I even love the sound of the word ‘family’.”
At 42, he’s clearly in great shape — both in body and soul. For the part of Doc Martin he employed a personal trainer and shed several stone. “I didn’t have a midlife crisis,” he muses. “Just a midriff one.”
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Age has deepened him, “but I’m not sure if you improve as an actor as you get older. You find yourself worrying more and hoping your chins won’t be too embarrassing. You look at new actors who have no life experience and are still fantastic and you think, how did you get so f****** good?”
Compared with them, of course, Clunes is a veteran. He has even cut the trademark floppy hair to look sharp and professional. A grown-up’s cut for the man he now perceives himself to be.
“As a child I always wanted to be a grown-up,” he says. “And now, you know, I think I’m finally there.”
Doc Martin, Thursday, ITV1, 9pm