Obituary: Bernard Archard

The actor Bernard Archard, who has died aged 91, established a forbidding presence as Lt Col Oreste Pinto, a character based on a real-life wartime counter-espionage interrogator, in the BBC television series Spycatcher (1959-61), writes Gavin Gaughan. Tall and angular, with receding hair and a prominent chin, he became a regular authority figure and inquisitor, though not in leading roles.

Archard was born in Fulham, London, where his parents were mayor and mayoress; his father was also a jeweller. He won a scholarship to Rada (1938-39), and an early stage role came as Orsino to Jessica Tandy's Viola in Twelfth Night at the Regent's Park open air theatre. During the second world war, he was a conscientious objector, and was sent to work on land owned by the Quaker movement. At the Edinburgh Festival in 1948, in a production of the Glyndebourne Children's Theatre, he met fellow actor James Belchamber, who was his partner for nearly 60 years.

Making his way around regional repertory, Archard worked at Chesterfield with Margaret Tyzack and at Sheffield with Paul Eddington, Peter Sallis and Patrick McGoohan; like many, he believed McGoohan to be a truly great actor, and they worked together again in a couple of episodes of McGoohan's 1960s TV series Danger Man.

In the mid-1950s, Archard and Belchamber ran a touring repertory company, based in Torquay, with Hilda Braid among its players. They also collaborated on the book and lyrics for Our Jack, a musical based on Walter Greenwood's The Cure For Love, in 1960. Nevertheless, by 1959 Archard was thinking about emigrating to Canada with Belchamber. He postponed his trip to appear in a TV medical drama, then again to do Treason (1959), a Sunday-night play about the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. Unknown to him, this rush of work resulted from a plan by writer-producer Elwyn Jones to demonstrate his suitability for Spycatcher.

Masterminded by Robert Barr, Spycatcher was also produced in the documentary manner, to the extent that Archard was not given billing in the Radio Times until some time into the run. Unlike later, action-orientated spy series, Pinto's half-hour cases, sometimes little more than two-handers, were based on true stories. The debriefing of wartime refugees afforded many opportunities for Archard's incisive qualities. One episode saw him get the desired answers from a suspect by throwing darts at a photo of Hitler.

Running for three seasons, the series brought Archard much recognition; he was wryly amused about receiving "two direct offers of marriage and about a dozen oblique ones". Although half of the episodes still exist, it has never been revived. Nonetheless, when on a continental tour of My Fair Lady in 1983, Archard's presence in Amsterdam caused excitement - Pinto having been Dutch.

He was proud of his role as a magistrate in Terence Rattigan's last play, Cause Celebre, in the West End in 1977, with Glynis Johns. Anthony Shaffer's mocking The Case of the Oily Levantine, at the same venue, Her Majesty's Theatre, two years later, was less successful. However, a full-scale theatrical disaster came with Peter O'Toole's Macbeth at the Old Vic in 1980. Archard played Duncan; he had previously been Angus in Roman Polanski's film version, in 1971.

In the film version of Dad's Army (1971), Archard was a regular general dismissing Captain Mainwaring as a "damn bank clerk!" He was in several of the popular Edgar Wallace B-movies, as well as John Huston's playful The List of Adrian Messenger (1963); he and Huston had a mutual friend in Deborah Kerr.

He was the Duke of Wellington in Number 10 (YTV, 1983), an anthology series depicting prime ministers. For publicity purposes, the actors who took the roles were photographed with Margaret Thatcher; Archard was not impressed by her, but then, he had been a lifelong Guardian reader. He also played a government figure in Hidden Agenda (1990), Ken Loach's controversial film derived from the John Stalker inquiry.

After retiring in his early 80s, Archard lived contentedly in Somerset with Belchamber, who survives him.

Bernard Joseph Archard, actor, born August 20 1916; died May 1 2008

Keeping a cool Head

Typecast as a coffee-drinking yuppie, Anthony Head left the UK for America, where a role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer revived his career. Then came that role as the PM in Little Britain and a newfound cult status in his native country. He talks to Patrick Barkham...

Not many dads work with Paris Hilton and then go home to muck out the donkeys, but these extremes are everyday experiences for Anthony Head. With a weakness for pouting in photographs but also for sturdy shoes, he seems one part 80s popstar and one part farmer - and has been both. But the part that everyone of a certain age still remembers is the aroma-loving yuppie he played in those Gold Blend ads 20 years ago.

To his daughters' generation, Head is better known as Rupert Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the prime minister and object of Sebastian's crush in Little Britain. His latest role is also paternal: in The Invisibles, a new BBC comedy drama, he plays an ageing criminal and father who struggles to come to terms with his "retirement" in a Devon fishing village.

It marks a new chapter in what is fast becoming a dynasty. The son of actor Helen Shingler, Head has two daughters with his "partner/girlfriend/wife" of 26 years, the animal behaviourist Sarah Fisher, and both children are making their first forays into acting. In The Invisibles, Head's eldest, Emily, 19, plays his on-screen daughter, who at first has no idea that her father was once the best safecracker in Britain.

Acting opposite his daughter was a pleasure, says Head, above the crackling and popping of an open fire in the Royal Crescent hotel in Bath. "For an actor it's a real joy for the emotions you are feeling to be real. You are not having to think. I've got these great scenes when Emily starts to twig who I am. I'd look into her eyes and I'd start to well up." He has played other characters with daughters, but "there's just that much more of a bond with Em", he says. "When I hold her hand or kiss her forehead, it's the most natural thing, there's nothing thought through about it."

Their father's career has obviously brought them a comfortable childhood, but Emily and Daisy, 17, have had to put up with a lot. When they were young, he spent seven years in America filming Buffy while Sarah agreed to stay in rural Somerset and be a "single mum". Then Head returned home to that role as a Blairish PM, opposite David Walliams' camp aide, Sebastian, in Little Britain. He appeared in one episode wearing a black posing pouch and wielding a feather duster. "I did feel sorry for my children because they had to go into school the next day," he says. Most of the time, though, having a dad in Buffy and Little Britain was a source of pride for them. "It's hard at school for any child of a parent with a high profile. They are going to get stick, but at least they've got the kudos of me doing something that - in the sight of their contemporaries - is cool. One of Daisy's friends said to her, 'Your dad's really cool, he kissed a black guy' [on Little Britain]. I'm really pleased he thought that was cool."

At first, Head did not encourage his daughters to pursue acting. He remembers being almost traumatised by performing auditions before the critical eye of his mother, who played the wife of the detective Maigret in the popular 1960s series. "I said, 'Why don't you do what I did - do as much drama as you can in school and if you still want to do it, maybe go to drama school?' Sarah said, 'Back in your box, why limit what they can do now? Who knows if they're going to want to do it when they are 21, but you can be sure if they get to 40 and haven't done it, you will be the person that stopped them'." Suitably chastened, Head contacted his agent, who took his daughters on.

Head has an unusually comprehensive website, suggesting a large, loyal fanbase (he also regularly attends the Collectormania autograph fairs beloved of Trekkies and Buffy obsessives) with its scribbled notes promising fans that the site won't announce new roles until they are confirmed, adding: "Sorry if this is frustrating for those of you who have caught a whiff of something going down."

The somethings going down include a film adaptation of Repo! The Genetic Opera, a bizarre rock opera brought to screen by the director of the gory Saw II, III and IV films. Set in a "Blade-Runneresque" future of mass organ failure, Head plays an organ "repo" man who rips out transplanted organs when their owners can't keep up the payments. "The idea is really cool. It's really fucked up. It's hugely sick. I get to eviscerate people and sing while I do it," Head giggles.

Repo! also stars Sarah Brightman and Paris Hilton. What was it like working with Hilton? "Oh, she's really sweet. She's odd, bless her, but I guess you'd have to be. I liked her, we got on fine. She just kind of curled up in her makeup chair and then occasionally fell asleep as her makeup was being put on, because all the time we were there she was out hosting parties. That's what she does for a career when she's not acting - she turns up to parties and they pay her. She was flying off all over the place so she was a bit knackered," he says. "She seemed a bit of a lost soul, a bit of a little girl in a strange world of somebody's making, I don't know whose."

Although Head thinks the distributors are puzzling over how to market the film - following the recent controversy over the trailer for Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd (in which Head has a cameo), which failed to mention it was a musical - it sounds as if he's found himself in another cult project. Does he have a nose for these zeitgeisty things? "I think they might find me. Little Britain completely found me. I was going to turn it down," he admits. "I had absolutely no idea it was going to be that big."

With Buffy, he'd gone to the US because he had found himself "very typecast as this smooth, coffee-drinking yuppie" in this country. He says he knew he would have to leave Britain when a casting director told his agent: "This is a serious drama - we don't want people reaching for their coffee jars." When he returned to Los Angeles recently, he found Buffy's influence has endured. "The number of people who are high up in the industry out there who grew up with Buffy, you almost get that ..." He bows with his arms in mock worship.

Head is not worried about his daughters taking up acting, although he frets about them in a fatherly way. What if people assume that they have careers due to a helping hand from daddy? "They earned their place in the agency by getting gigs," he says firmly. "It's been so formative for them. They have grown so much through the experience. They may find it's a nonsense business. So far, they have done really well, touch wood, but you never know what is going to happen. They've seen me: every time I'm out of work, I don't think I'm ever going to work again. We're insecure by our very nature. Why else would you want to dress up in funny clothes unless you were not secure in yourself?".

The Invisibles starts on BBC1 tonight

James Corden: The big time

A suspicion that has been buzzing for a little while became an official fact this week: James Corden is the hottest property in British television, says Robert Hanks. Gavin and Stacey, the romantic sitcom that Corden and Ruth Jones created, wrote and star in, won the Audience Award at the Baftas – in effect, the prize for most-loved programme. It's an achievement that is especially remarkable given that the series goes out on the digital channel BBC3, where audiences are not large. And Corden himself scooped the award for Best Comedy Performance.

Since then, the BBC has announced that Corden and Mathew Horne, who plays Gavin, are to get their own series on BBC3 – described as "a traditional comedy entertainment show in the style of Morecambe and Wise", though that characterisation is somewhat undermined by the proposed title, Horne and Corden Have Come. Meanwhile, NBC has bought the rights to make a US version of Gavin and Stacey, signing up Corden and Jones as executive producers of the pilot. This is success on a Ricky Gervais scale – a comparison that has more point when you recall that it was NBC that made The Office a hit in America.

For those who haven't seen it – still the vast majority of the British public – Gavin and Stacey follows the romance between Gavin, from Billericay in Essex, and Stacey, from Barry Island in South Wales, who after six months flirting over the telephone at work meet, fall in love, and decide to get married. But there are complications, not least their best friends, Gavin's loud, childish sidekick Smithy, and Stacey's older, experienced – very experienced – mate Nessa, played by Corden and Jones respectively. Their anti-romance, involving mutual hostility and insults, several regrettable drunken flings, and, in the second series, Nessa's pregnancy, provides a slightly darker, funnier counterpoint to the predominantly optimistic tone of Gavin and Stacey's own relationship.

The show has two exceedingly rare qualities. The first is its fundamental sweetness – none of the cynicism, the need to épater les bourgeois that characterises so much modern comedy. Gavin and Stacey have their ups and downs: in the first series, the engagement barely survived Gavin's discovery that Stacey had been engaged five times before; in the second, the couple underwent a prolonged separation after Stacey, living in Billericay with Gavin's parents, began to feel that the cultural barriers between them were too big to overcome. But their love each other is never in doubt, and the most hardened viewer will end up rooting for them to make a go of things.

The other point is that, as Corden has noted, "everything I do is inspired by truth". Admittedly, this came moments after he had jokingly claimed, while presenting a film award to Keira Knightley in her absence, that he had been shagging the actress for the past three days: "Some of it sensual, sensual lovemaking, but on the whole quite brutal. Took me by surprise, quite dark, a lot of it." But others have backed him up.

Henry Normal, who with Steve Coogan runs the production company Baby Cow, recalls that when Corden and Jones first brought their script for Gavin and Stacey to him he was struck by "the working-class truth of what they were writing". Normal knows what he is talking about, having been co-writer of the first series of The Royle Family, which Corden has cited as a big influence, along with the film director Mike Leigh. (He appeared in Leigh's film All or Nothing in 2002.)

Normal is used to seeing scripts full of funny lines that could be said by anybody; with Gavin and Stacey, "every person there is a distinctive character. When you read it on the page, every character has a distinct way of talking. That's quite an art". So Stacey is always upbeat, always looking for the positive, even when sad; and Nessa has a whole idiolect, including her customary mobile-phone greeting "What's occurring?" (the closest the programme has to a catchphrase, and now a popular mobile ring-tone in its own right).

Nicholas Hytner, who directed Corden in the original stage production and subsequent film of Alan Bennett's The History Boys, saw the scripts for Gavin and Stacey quite early on. "I was expecting them to be good, because he is extraordinarily funny and clever, but I was bowled over by them. They were actually looking at the world and writing about it with a degree of humanity which is more or less extinct among those who adopt the current comedy formula."

Most writers for TV, theatre and film, he suggests, tend to recycle things they have already seen. "People who write a script, for instance, about a wedding, write about how weddings get written about in plays and films. You watch what James and Ruth wrote about a wedding, and you say, 'Oh my God, that's what weddings are like.'" This is percipient: the germ of Gavin and Stacey was an actual wedding Corden attended in Barry, and he and Jones were insistent that it should all be shot on location.

Corden's own background was unremarkable suburbia, in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. He was by his own account a poor school student, quitting A-levels to act: it's interesting that he has typically been cast as a clever boy, playing a swot in the Channel 4 comedy Teachers, as well as one of the Oxbridge scholarship class in The History Boys. Given his obvious quickness and intelligence, his indifferent academic record probably says more about the English educational system than it does about him.

The two features of his childhood that stand out are his early and burning desire to act, and the utter sense of love and security bestowed on him by his parents: something he has spoken about in interviews, and of which Hytner has observed: "His mum and dad are lovely. On the odd occasion they appeared at the theatre or on set, you thought, 'Lucky old James.'"

This must account for his remarkable self-confidence – all the more remarkable given that he is, in his own words, a "chunky unit" in a business that generally adopts a narrow view of physical attractiveness. In his diary for 2004, Alan Bennett noted that Corden simply took charge of his own audition for The History Boys. That's also Hytner's recollection – "He blew in, he took over, he had the part within seven and a half seconds" – though at the time, there was barely a part to have. He ended up as Timms, the fat boy with a knack for telling teachers exactly what they want to hear, but with a sincerity that invites the suspicion that the piss is being taken; his most memorable scene had him role-playing as a prostitute in a French brothel, offering to show clients "ma prodigieuse poitrine", and showing an unnervingly feminine charm.

Confidence is what Lucy Lumsden, who as BBC comedy controller has commissioned the Horne and Corden series, noticed when she saw him in Cruise of the Gods, a one-off TV comedy from 2002, about actors from a long-defunct sci-fi programme reluctantly reunited on a fan cruise. Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon and David Walliams were the big-name stars, but Corden, playing Brydon's son, managed to register his presence. "For somebody so young, he has such impact on screen, and such obvious confidence – that's something you don't forget easily." (This was a key moment in Corden's career: not only did Coogan's company go on to produce Gavin and Stacey, but also Brydon plays the key role of Stacey's repressed uncle Bryn.)

The confidence is obvious, too, in his increasingly frequent appearances at awards ceremonies and chat shows: as when, in March this year, he appeared on Lily Allen's BBC3 show and proceeded to flirt outrageously, telling her, "I don't think you realise how lovely you are." They have since been spotted about town together, and despite Corden's insistence that they are just good friends, the outlets that pay attention to this sort of thing have begun to take it for granted that they are an item.

This new presence on the gossip pages is merely the latest instalment in Corden's elevation to "sex god", as he proclaimed himself at the Baftas. Messages are exchanged on websites about his relationship status – until recently he was dating Sheridan Smith, who plays Smithy's sister in Gavin and Stacey – his lovely blue eyes, sense of humour, and other attributes. The appeal cuts across gender divides: an American gay website called chubarama.net has taken to referring to Corden as "my future husband". Corden himself seems to revel in a touch of sexual ambiguity: presenting a theatre award to Daniel "Harry Potter" Radcliffe earlier this year, he seized the actor and subjected him to a long, intense-looking kiss. (Corden denied afterwards that tongues were involved.)

There is one other aspect of Corden's character that deserves comment, and that helps to account for his success: he sticks by his friends. People like to work with him again. His first role, at the age of 20, was in Kay Mellor's weight-watchers comedy-drama Fat Friends; from that came his friendship with Jones (to whom he paid tribute in a genuinely touching acceptance speech at the Baftas), as well as Alison Steadman, who plays Stacey's mother. After a couple of years of touring as well as the film, half the cast of The History Boys ended up in Gavin and Stacey.

Hytner says: "He's phenomenally good company. Hysterically funny to be with, and doesn't give a shit. When the mighty Hollywood executives came to visit us [during filming of The History Boys] and took us out to dinner, all James wanted to tell him was what crap he'd been responsible for for the past 10 years: 'You can't actually have thought that was good when you were making it.' And somehow got away with it." Could I point out, Hytner asks, that he would love to have Corden back at the National Theatre: as actor or playwright, he doesn't specify. Either way, it would be worth seeing.

'People really needed convincing that they wanted me'

We know him as Don Draper, the misogynistic, chain-smoking, hard-drinking Sixties advertising man at the centre of the brilliant TV show Mad Men. But it took Jon Hamm seven auditions to land the part and he'd been toiling in Hollywood bit parts (and worse) for years, reports Chrissy Iley

There are many things to love about Mad Men. Its impeccable style - the suits, the martinis, the ashtrays. The lighting (fluorescent office, amber nightclub), the permanent halo of smoke, the way women wear corsetry to work and are revered and despised in equal parts, the sexualised selling of ideas - all are period-perfect. It's a Polaroid of the advertising world of early Sixties Manhattan on Madison Avenue. It is politically incorrect and recreates an era where great change was about to happen but had not happened yet. It has the repression of the Fifties more than the swing of the Sixties. At the heart of the drama is Don Draper, rarely without a chunky glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He has a Grace Kelly-style wife, a beatnik mistress and another lover, a gorgeous Jewish woman from the Upper East Side.

Draper is played by Jon Hamm. This year, he won the Golden Globe for best actor ahead of Hugh Laurie (House) and Jonathan Rhys Meyers (The Tudors). He is 37 and is being compared with George Clooney, who was about that age when he got his ER break and had similarly been toiling unnoticed in lesser-known US series.

I am waiting for Hamm in a cafe in Silver Lake, a boho-chic part of LA, wondering what he is going to look like without the suit and Brylcreemed hair. And here he is, as tall, lean and buff as could be in jeans, battered navy polo shirt, all unshaven and solicitous. How is my jetlag? How is my life? He recommends Devil's Nest, a scramble of avocado, sour cream, spicy sausage. Hamm is not self-consciously Hollywood, showy or full of himself, which probably comes from several years working at the coalface of showbusiness and before that as a waiter and a teacher. 'I taught daycare when I was in college. I taught after-school stuff for little kids.

'I was a theatre major in college and they didn't prepare you for the massive amount of rejection you have to go through. Most people who are successful, like George Clooney and Brad Pitt, had to eat shit at a lot of auditions and still not get the parts. So you have to develop resilience. Especially for Mad Men, where it took seven auditions to get the part. People really needed convincing that they wanted me.'

The show was created and written by Matthew Weiner who was a writer and producer on The Sopranos. He pushed for Hamm despite the cable network's nervousness because this was the cable channel AMC's first foray into drama series and it wanted the security of a star name.

Hamm had been a regular for three years on a show called The Division. 'It was on a network called Lifetime, which is soft programming for women. It was a cop show, five women and me, but the women got to be much more macho than me. I was the slightly emasculated cop; now I get to be a little more masculine,' he says. But, he shrugs, he's no alpha male. 'I was raised by a single mother and I've been in a 10-year relationship with my girlfriend. My whole life I've been surrounded by women.'

Does he at all resemble the slick but haunted ad man Don Draper? 'The closest thing I have in common with Don is that I'm looking for something. If you look at the literature of the early Sixties, like Cheever and Updike, it's existentialist. People sitting around smoking, thinking 'what am I doing with my life?'. Postwar America was riding as high as it's ever ridden. It had an incredibly paternalistic sense of its place in the world. America was the good cop. It healed Japan after it had utterly destroyed it, protected the world from communism. Americans had money, ability to travel and see the world. And at the core of it was: I'm still not happy. What Don Draper is doing is trying to sell happiness because he can't buy it himself. I think that resonates.'

The eggs arrive and he eats heartily. Does he smoke as much as Draper? 'I gave up 10 years ago when I started teaching kids. I don't miss the hacking cough in the morning or the mouth that tastes like cat litter, but I miss it when I'm on this show. It's glamorous, I got to tell you. [They smoke a non-nicotine herbal blend.] In the show, we know smoking kills, but we don't give a shit. These guys had three-martini lunches... I appreciate alcohol. I love the place that alcohol holds in our society, but I'd never attempt to drink as much as Draper.'

Hamm may relate to the smoking and the drinking, but not to the way the women are treated. He is devoted to his girlfriend, the actress and writer Jennifer Westfeldt, while Draper and his colleagues spend most of their time humiliating women when they are not sleeping with them and even when they are. They refer to Peggy, his frumpy secretary, as 'a lobster. All the meat in the tail'. At one point, Draper says to one of his inamoratas: 'What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.'

Draper sells lies for a living. He cheats. He is emotionally withholding, morally ambiguous, with a past he can't face up to, yet we can't help rooting for him. There's a genius in this portrayal. Hamm stares into his Devil's Nest. 'There's a vicarious thrill in it. When we see people misbehave, sometimes we want them to get away with it. I've gotten away with a lot in my life. The older you get the more you realise you're not getting away with it, it's taking its toll somewhere. So you try not to put yourself in those situations. Part of the mysterious process called growing up. Some people do that better than others. It's a daily struggle, especially in this city where everyone is a child and often rewarded for it.'

I tell him I cannot imagine him as a child. 'Well, I was forced to grow up very early because I lost my mother when I was 10. So that tends to take a lot of childhood out of the equation and you become very aware of adult things.' Hamm's parents divorced when he was two and he lived with his mother. 'She died suddenly over the course of about three months. A stomach ache one day turned out to be an advanced cancer that spread rapidly through her internal organs. She had two-thirds of her colon removed and it killed her.

'When you are 10, you just don't have the tools to process it. You're coming home from playing kick-ball to talks about how they've got to set you up a trust fund [which paid for his high-school education]. I do have very good memories of being a kid running around, but that all pretty much got lost. It was hard to bounce back from losing my mum. It's an incredibly tough process and you see a lot of that in Don as well. His childhood was... ' He searches for the word. Tortured? 'Yeah.' This would be the moment where Don Draper would light a cigarette and smoke the pain away. Hamm dips his sourdough into his eggs and swills it about.

It must have been strange suddenly to go and live with his father? 'Sort of. Though I loved my dad and I would see him every other weekend. It wasn't like he was a guy I didn't know. He had not remarried, but he had two children from a previous marriage, one of whom was living with him, as well as my 80-year-old grandmother. My dad was in many ways essentially Don Draper. A businessman in the Sixties, very powerful, self-assured. I didn't find out about that when I was a kid. He passed away when I was 20. We didn't have a chance for many adult discussions or to deal with each other as adults. He was sick for several years. He just degenerated over the last couple of years until he passed away. He packed a lot into his 63 years. It was a hard life.'

Hamm came west to LA from St Louis in 1995, prepared for hard work. 'I tried to get my affairs in St Louis in order the last year I was there, but I was never very good with money and by the end of the summer I had saved only $150. Fortunately, gas was cheaper then and I made it here in my car. The car died an interesting death. I had $1,600 of parking tickets accrued in my first four or five years here and the good people of Los Angeles decided to take the car back on their own.'

In Los Angeles he lived in a big house, just down the road from where we are having breakfast, with four other guys. In those days, the eastern district of Silver Lake was not cool or sought-after. It was rough. 'It was a crazy house and it was so cheap even I could afford it. An 85-year-old woman owned the house. She was a soap actress who lived in New York and we were four guys, my size and bigger. But we broke so many pieces of furniture, these little-old-lady chairs you would sit on and they would crack. Plus we would have parties and the keg would leak. It was my job as the diplomat of the group to say to her, "Marilyn, we love you" and make her feel good. I was always the one who was behind on the rent. I was very proud that once I started working I was able to pay her back completely.'

Hamm now lives just down the road in his own place with his girlfriend. 'We met through some mutual friends at somebody's birthday party. We didn't really hit it off immediately. She thought I was a cocky asshole.'

Soon after, she called him from New York to ask if he would come over and work on a project with her. It started off as a sketch. She thought maybe it would be a play and it turned into the critically acclaimed movie Kissing Jessica Stein in 2001. 'I was working downtown as a set dresser for some very bad softcore porn when I got the call from New York. I was making $150 a day and my friend was the electrician, so we would share a ride to work. I would carry my little bucket around and move what needed to be moved, but I would be terrible at it. I would fall asleep in a corner and they could never find me. So when I got the call, even though we had not particularly hit it off, I was like, yes, anything but this. I had no money, no car and all these parking tickets. Anything to get out of here.

'I borrowed the money from a friend and went to New York and we did this cool little play which turned into Kissing Jessica Stein. That's when Jen and I became really close. A year after that, we started going out and that was 10 years ago. We just had our anniversary in Mexico. We had a blast. We very much complement each other in this insane industry. We live and we work it out together. It's been great.'

It sounds as if she was a grounding force in his life? 'It's hard when you move cities and don't have a lot of friends and you're just trying to keep your head above water and trying not to get caught up in all this bullshit, to go out on auditions and not be totally soul-crushed when you don't get it. Especially out here, especially in the television industry where they dangle all this in front of you...

'And then they pull it back at the last second every time. How many more times am I going to be like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football and have them pull it away again? A lot of people after five or six times think, this is not for me, I'm done. It is so arbitrary and capricious.'

'Eventually I got there. Everybody on Mad Men is at the top of their game and it feels great.' And is he happy? 'Absolutely I am. I have a pretty stable relationship that brings me love and happiness and comfort. I have a great house and a great dog.' He shows me a picture of a dog wearing a baseball cap. What about babies? 'I don't necessarily want kids. A lot of our friends are having children and I don't know if it's for me. I haven't come down hardcore on either side of the argument. I think when people come from a stable family having children becomes a celebration and I'm not sure it would be that way for me.' And perhaps, for the moment, being the main guy in the best show on TV is enough. 'It doesn't suck,' he admits.

With that, he picks up the bill for breakfast as if that's perfectly normal when, in fact, it's unheard of. No Hollywood actor has even bought me a chai latte before. And then he offers to drive me home, as he doesn't want me to wait and call a taxi. I live half an hour away. We sit in his car listening to Steve Jones on the radio. How much better can it be?

Slices of Hamm: His life story

Early years
Born 10 March 1971 in St Louis, Missouri. His mother died when he was 10, his father when he was 20.

Career
1995 Moves to Los Angeles.
2000 First TV role, as a firefighter in NBC's Providence.
2001 Starred alongside his girlfriend, actress Jennifer Westfeldt, in Kissing Jessica Stein.
2008 Wins best actor Golden Globe for his role as Don Draper in Mad Men.

He says: 'I'm not the kind of actor that craves attention 24-7 - but it's part of the deal. You're the leader on the set.'

They say: 'The sexual politics are remarkable; the sex is even more interesting, and the hot centre of it all is Jon Hamm.' Salon.com, which last year voted Jon Hamm the sexiest man alive.

The poster boy for British TV talks...

Gosh. What a strange surprise. I had - hadn't we all? - thought Ricky Gervais would be something of an annoyance, muses Euan Ferguson. At best, a cocky man with, admittedly, much to be cocky about. At worst, screeching laughs, boasts camouflaged in drapes of irony: being 'entertained'.

Instead, it's just a clever man, talking quietly, often passionately, meeting my eye and subtly letting me realise, over an hour or so, why he has such a claim on this nation. And it's not, I come to grasp, that he is necessarily the 'funniest man in Britain'. There is an oddly, likeably serious side to him, too. A ripe disrespect for cant and mendacity, certainly, and a hitherto unseen principled political strain running through him - it's like Ben Elton gone right. Above all, there's a savage and all-consuming need to create.

The one time I'm properly taken aback by a response, for instance, comes when we're talking books. What does he like to read? (I can only assume that he does.) 'I don't read books. I'm sorry. I can't. I can't read books, other people's books. After the first sentence, the first paragraph, I'm off on my own scenario. It's no longer their book. I'm not reading it any more, I've put it down before turning the first page, I'm writing my own chapters, fitting in my own characters, trying to make it take off my way. So this would happen, then that would happen, of course that character would ... no, it's hopeless, so now I just don't.'

(Later, I hear, he can't stop creating, even under the arc lights: the photo-shoot was not quite directed by him but there would have to be serious subsidiary credits. He threw himself exuberantly into every aspect of the way his look might look to ensure it was both a joke and well-done: he was polite but intense, focusing on everything from pan-sticks to props, to the final late touch, slipping open the top button of the leather trousers.)

What Gervais does, instead of reading others, is of course his own thing. Create The Office, then Extras, and his sell-out one-man stand-ups, and quietly take America. Now he's directing a film for the first time, This Side of the Truth. 'It's set in a world rather like this one, but there's no gene for lying. Except for me. My character. I can suddenly lie. So I do. A lot.' There will be, I assume, redemption? 'Maybe not quite that but with all the cynicism, everything I've done, I think there always turns out to be ... a certain forgiveness. Which surprises me sometimes, for such an atheist.'

Meanwhile, he's on the final drafts of his new television series, written again with Stephen Merchant, the one who hasn't yet won quite as embarrassingly many Baftas as Ricky Dene Gervais (who has seven so far, along with three Golden Globes, couple of Emmys, as you do) but could start coming up on the rails tonight, nominated as he is for his acting in the Extras Christmas special.

The working title, says this oddly serious Ricky (a change I like but which I find strangely disconcerting nonetheless), the working title is The Men from the Pru. It's about a group of twentysomethings working in an insurance company in the early Seventies. In Reading. This is where Gervais was born, in 1961. 'It's a period piece for a couple of reasons,' he says. 'We wanted to show, for instance, that the sexual revolution was only really going on in Carnaby Street. Not Swindon. Not Reading. It is, essentially, about blue-collar people getting white-collar jobs.' And it is about people who would live and die in one town. 'Which was one of the big differences between then and now,' he says. 'So much, we forget, was door to door. Ten pence for a duster, the man from the pools, the insurance man; people saving a penny a time for their funeral. Tens of thousands of people knocking on doors. Also, you would get married at 18 and still live with your mum. And then, at that time, some would watch the telly, have their eyes opened to different countries. There's a line in it where we have a character being asked, "What do you want to go abroad for, there are parts of Reading you haven't seen?", so it's a bit like that.'

Gervais thinks that, in many ways, things are still the same now as then. 'We haven't ... the country hasn't changed all that much,' he reflects, 'not in everything. Some things remain the same. Friendships. Love and death. All the big ones. The Office wasn't about selling paper. Nor Extras about extras ... they were about friendship.'

One thing that has changed, and about which he is supremely conscious, is celebrity, which he has described before as the new class. 'There are no apprenticeships any more, no one learning anything off the back of someone who knows something. Footballers get paid more than surgeons. Everyone wants to fast track into celebrity, publicity, whether it's actually, you know, true, or, well, not. And, yes, I can go on about it, because sometimes it's stunning, but there's no point getting worked up that much about it because no one cares. No one minds, no one's getting fired up, no one's not buying the magazines, no one's refusing to keep watching people living their life like an open wound. They've already had celebrity enemas. I mean, God. It will eventually implode, it will self-destruct, but it's with us for the moment. The PR has become more important than the product.'

And with too much of British television today, he says, there's a lack of love for the product or respect for innovation. 'They might as well say, "We need 29 minutes filled, what have you got?" But why do I mind? I love the fact that most TV's rubbish, it makes me look better. And with film, well, it's not that we can't make good British films, it's just that it's too easy. Too easy to make a film here. And then you get the PR machine, something's all over the sides of buses for two weeks, and you're meant to think it's huge, but actually, it's going straight to DVD. So it might as well have been a TV show.'

What a nicely serious, but seriously serious Ricky, thoughtful and sometimes angry. But I don't want to give the impression he's not smiling, not funny, that he's like Ben Elton gone ... um, even more wrong. It's just that he doesn't really do gags, he does looks, gestures. Gestures are important. He does it, and knows you'll get it. Sometimes, as with Billy Connolly - 'I always wanted to be a cross between him and Seinfeld' - the gesture is everything, everything, the words themselves meaningless otherwise. 'If I do that thing I do about Hitler for instance, when he's being quizzed on what he did: "Come on, Hitler, how many did you kill?" Well, you need the gesture, need the thumb to make it funny. Otherwise, it's just a straight answer.' And the thumb comes out, begins to turn on the table, nubbing away on the leather desk between us in tiny embarrassed circles, the eyes downcast, the answer muttered ... "Six." "Speak up, Hitler." "Six. Six ... million." The world's most phenomenal tyrant turned instantly into blushing schoolroom twanny, and I hardly know why I'm repeating it because, looking at DVD sales, most of Britain has seen the routines twice over.

'Yes, things have turned out to be very ... successful. Which is lovely. But that wasn't necessarily the aim. I'd wanted, with those series in particular, The Office and Extras, mainly to touch a few people a lot. If something's well done, poignant, moving to the deeper side of shallow, it touches a few people hard. The point is to make a connection, and I'd rather there was that genuine connection to one million people than nothing at all with ten million.

'And, I suppose, to do it, you have to work hard. I do work hard. I can't really not. It has to feel right. I'll sit with Stephen, when we have meetings, and for five and a half hours out of six it's just talking to be sure the other's thinking the same way. What are you thinking Freddie should look like? Are you sure? No, he'd have ... he'd look more like ... he'd be wearing ...'

When you imagine Gervais and Merchant in a room together, you'd imagine they'd take their inspiration from schoolboy pranks and juvenile jokes. The reality is rather surprising. 'We use mood boards. Poems, music, reminding us of the place, the time, of what we're writing. For The Office, for instance, Betjeman's poem about Slough was there, reminding us. For Men at the Pru it's Springsteen: "Thunder Road". We need to be sure of every aspect of what's being created, and, yes, I am a control freak. Always have been. They could have said, at the beginning, "No, we're not doing The Office like that, we're changing it," and I would have been fine - shame, but gone back myself to working in an office. But I don't see the point in that compromise. There's that quote about a camel being a horse designed by a committee - I love that quote. I don't think creativity can work like that. I remember getting an email when they did the first testings of the American Office, and their focus groups had tested worse than anything in the history of ... anything. Well, so had The Office here: tests were awful, the figures were outrageously bad. I simply wrote back saying congratulations, same here, it'll be a triumph. Which it was.'

He breaks off, rocks gently on his chair in the spring sunshine, to recall on one attempted piece of editorial interference: not mocking, necessarily, but amused. 'After the first series they had a letter from Slough County Council. Asking for some input. We don't want to actually script edit or anything, they said, but you do realise that the place is changing, and perhaps you could reflect... Right. I can just see how we would have pulled that off. Me looking out the window, going ... "Say what you like, Dawn, but this new pedestrianisation initiative in Slough is really working. And clever work with the traffic lights ..." Yes, that would have worked.' There is no insane chortle, but there is a big, big smile.

This creativity, could it simply be an end in itself? Does he actually want to change anything? 'I don't know if we can. I don't know if any comedian can. I know a lot kid themselves. Trying to bring down the Coca-Cola company. Or thinking George W Bush is going to bed in tears because someone had a pop at him in Jongleurs.

'But creating something ... it is so terribly, terribly important. I've got, now, far too many ideas I want to do. My head aches if I don't. When I'm shooting this film, I'll be thinking of the Pru. When working on that, I'll be thinking of something else, something next. I have to have a lot of projects. And yes I do have a great job, it pays ridiculously well, I am my own boss, and I'm pretty good at it: but there is a rush. I need to do things. If you want to get into a little cod-psychology, then yes it's because I started late. I feel I need to make up for lost time.'

He and his long-term partner, Jane, have no children: he has said many times they never will. They have their quiet life in London, 'almost normal. Almost. I do my normal things, but in my own way. I'll walk up and down Hampstead, but won't go for drinks in the pubs, just see friends at home. Yes, I have my pyjamas on early, and no, I still don't go to many parties: I have to chat to people, have to interact, and often I simply can't wait to get home.

'But everyone gets to a point where they feel the need to leave a legacy. Something they've brought into the world. It is so urgent, so important. You have to do something creative. Not a film or a book or a painting or whatever, it could be a garden. A tiny garden, a bit of a garden, something that's yours, your idea: your very own ... shrubbery. And lots of people could do it, be more creative, but they don't. I was one, couldn't do it or wasn't really doing it for fear of failure. What happened? I met Stephen Merchant, who woke me up. Said nice things. That happened.'

It's an absolutely fair point, and self-aware, that he's not here to change anything, just to add to it. But, I say, simply by watching his shows, or the stand-up comedy, you feel there are aspects of life which he really hates. Hypocrisy, for instance? Recreational charity, perhaps?

'Well, yes, a bit, there is that. When I did Comic Relief, I was in Africa, and there was a bit of upset over me crying on camera, when people realised what I was doing was ... well, taking the piss. But I do think, of course it's serious, awful, but when you get actors, celebs, out there, I do think it is absolutely possible, if they are crying, when they are crying, to ask for the camera to turn away. Rather than looking for it, and looking like you're trying to gain attention through crying. Maybe it was the wrong thing to do, try to get a laugh out of Comic Relief.

'But there are three things I really hate. Religious intolerance. Ignoring the laws of the land, of humanity, in favour of ones they've made up about a God who didn't say them in the first place, who doesn't exist, who they've made up, and it's just "Shut the fuck up, you fascists". Also, deliberate ill-treatment of animals, people who treat their dogs in that way, or run bullfights; I could happily put a spike through the back of their heads. People wearing fur. Sometimes I wish there was a God, to punish them.'

He pauses, before describing his third pet hate. 'People who just make things up. When they're not true. I don't mind people saying I'm useless. Fat. Saying The Office and Extras were shit. But when someone prints an out-and-out lie, it seriously, seriously angers me: I actually want to go and find out where they live. Hell, I should just shut my mouth, shouldn't I! But for instance ...' he begins to describe his most recent grievance, 'well, yes, I'm definitely rich. Not hugely proud of it or anything, but I do like the wealth. But I also think you have to pay tax. I think that's a good thing, and I said so. I feel guilty to an extent, and if I'm handing on 40 per cent, then fine, and I don't hugely agree with tax exiles, and said so. Then there was a story about Jenson Button, and tax, and a paper conflated the two stories, and made one up and said I had had a go, personally, at Jenson Button. Not, not true. Not true. It wasn't actually true, wasn't the case, actually, so how can someone write that?'

But the love-hate relationship with the press is always, surely, going to be here, always was: ever since they began to champion him. He must, constantly, be prepared for a backlash: any hint that he's getting too big for his boots? 'No, no, that's OK, because I started with a backlash, on The 11 O'clock Show. And you must remember, in this kind of industry, for everyone who loves you, two don't. It's not criticism I can't stand, it's untruth.'

In the years to come, either here or in America, he feels he would like to phase out acting for directing. 'I do love it. And the acting is tiring, all the standing. Or at least, when I'm acting, be sitting down a lot. I'd love to do a remake of Ironside.'

Ricky Gervais stands and takes his genial leave, not even checking to see whether I've got the joke, which I like. David Brent would have had his head back round the corridor twice, grinning. Easy physically to remember that these two terribly different men, separated by the chasm of self-knowledge, inhabit the same body; but easy, too, to know, immensely, which one to prefer. 'Ah, yes,' he says. 'Well. It's a strange thing. I stopped being funny when I became a comedian.'

The fall and rise of the Baldwin dynasty

One is in celebrity rehab, another's an evangelical preacher. And the other two? They're in hit TV shows. Andrea Hubert celebrates the rise, fall and miraculous return of the Baldwin brothers...

Audiences are notoriously fickle creatures. We'll happily hum along to our favourite tarnished pop princess' catchiest tracks while simultaneously giggling over her latest mental breakdown, justified in the smug knowledge that if she presents us with even a half decent attempt at her former glory, we'll welcome her back with open arms. Ultimately, despite our tabloid-addicted bitchy streaks, everybody loves a star that bounces back. Which is why, right here right now, it's good to be a Baldwin.

Currently riding the glorious comeback wave are Alec, in the hit comedy 30 Rock, and William, in new drama Dirty Sexy Money, as an arrogant TV exec and a politician respectively. Over in the US, the two younger, less successful Baldwins, Stephen and Daniel, are keeping their end up with appearances in Celebrity Apprentice, Celebrity Fat Club and, naturally, Celebrity Rehab. A few years ago, you'd be hard pressed to recall the last time you saw any of their faces in your living room. Now, the challenge is finding a Baldwin-free zone on your box.

Not that you'll want to. 30 Rock marked a brilliant return to form for Alec, cementing his status as not only a great dramatic actor, but a truly talented comedian. His portrayal of Jack Donaghy, the obnoxious "vice president of East Coast television and microwave oven programming" (also a member of a clearly parodic multi-siblinged Irish Catholic family prone to violent fighting), showcases his dry wit and seductive voice. It takes a truly engaging charisma to make shrink's dream client Donaghy ("I like you. You have the boldness of a much younger woman") as likable as he is. Meanwhile, former heartthrob William, now in his forties and slightly jowlier than the good old verging-on-gay-porn Backdraft days, is finally proving he's more than just a pretty face as Patrick Darling VI, a reluctant senator who (in the grandest departure from former roles one could imagine) enjoys sleeping with transgendered prostitutes. Which makes a welcome change from whatever he thought he was doing with Sliver and Fair Game.

William, though he has more skeletons in his movie closet than his older brother, has at least held down a stable marriage, to former Wilson-Phillips singer Chynna Phillips, since 1995. Alec has been far more noticeable over the past few years for his politics, his loud mouth, and an epic public divorce battle of Mills-McCartney-esque levels of bile with ex-wife, actress Kim Basinger. Their ongoing war came to an ugly head in 2007, when a ridiculously angry voicemail message from Baldwin to his 11-year-old daughter Ireland was posted on the internet, in which a publicly excoriated Baldwin called his daughter, among other things a "thoughtless little pig". With repeated reports of on-set histrionics and some amusingly inappropriate diehard democrat political descriptions (Dick Cheney is a "terrorist" while George W merely "a trust-fund puppet"), Alec's public profile has taken something of a battering.

Which only makes his return to popularity all the more remarkable. Perhaps it's because everyone loves a celebrity dynasty. The Kennedys, the Barrymores, the Arquettes (don't laugh) - all occupy a sacred space in the hearts of Yanks who cling to any scrap of legacy that could be deemed as historically significant. They'll put up with a lot from their dynasties, and even when every member is wading neck-deep in a cesspool of career sludge, they'll still give them enough wiggle room to dazzle us with a brilliant new album/movie/TV show/presidency (delete where appropriate). And there's something endearing about those slightly chubby Baldwin boys.

No matter what risible antics they get up to, they're an indelible part of popular culture, scratched into our consciousness firstly in Clueless as a byword for hot ("Okay, so he's kind of a Baldwin") and later by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, first in South Park: Bigger Longer Uncut, when Canada bombs the shit out of their cartoon mansion ("Hey Alec," yells 'toon Billy, in painfully ironic last words, "you know what sucks about being a Baldwin? Nothing!") and later in Team America, where they remind us, cheerfully, in cruel song, "You are worthless Alec Baldwin/You failed in every way/And now my stock in you has fallen/Your career is stallin'." Sung with love, obviously.

Besides which, the Baldwins are significantly useful in areas of life that people actually care about. While William's the poster boy for happily ever after, everybody's least favourite Baldwin, drug-addled overweight Daniel (does anybody even remember that two-year career zenith on Homicide: Life On The Street?) is drying out and losing weight on camera. And Alec, despite his marital strife, self confessed OCD, and unsteady string of girlfriends (Ally Sheedy, Kristin Davis and Tatum O'Neal to name a few), has fully embraced an issue close to many people's hearts - animal rights. A strict vegan, he recently narrated Meet Your Meat, a promotional PETA video that shows the appalling conditions of tasty animals. "What you are about to see is beyond your worst nightmares," he warns, leaving you terrified, a little turned on, and (ashamedly) waiting for a punchline. Now how many PETA videos can claim that?

Fresh from his onscreen feud with Piers Morgan in the US Celebrity Apprentice (we love you Stephen!), the littlest Baldwin has gone one further, heading straight to the heart of middle America by eschewing a potentially successful acting career (he was one of The Usual Suspects) to become an evangelical preacher, combining the word of the Gospel with extreme sports. And in true Baldwin fashion, he's not holding back even a little bit. His best-selling memoir, The Unusual Suspect, includes an open letter to Satan's alleged disciple Bono, criticising his dedication to erasing third world debt.

Oh, and he also promises that if you try and stop him making disciples of the youth of America, he's going to "break your face". It's a tough call working out which is funnier - 30 Rock or this?

As champions of the underdog, even us Brits have to agree there's no feeling warmer than seeing formerly chubby, formerly shamed or formerly addicted members of a notorious dynasty blast their way back from the brink of oblivion. Our boys may once have been a laughing stock but if you think they're ever out of the game, you really don't understand what it means to be a Baldwin.

Dirty Sexy Money, Fri, 9pm, C4

Masi Oka- superHiro

In Heroes, Masi Oka is an office worker who bends time and space. In real life, he's a computer genius who creates special effects for Georges Lucas and Clooney. He could be the biggest geek on earth. He's certainly the most popular, finds Horatia Harrod

The first time that Masi Oka became the face of Asian America was in 1987, when, aged 12, he appeared on the cover of Time, small and blue-shirted, a rucksack slung awkwardly over his shoulder. He's dwarfed by the headline above him: 'Those Asian-American WHIZ KIDS'. He happened to show it to one person and now it's become part of his story (see also: his very high IQ; the fact he still drives a 2000 Honda Accord). But the funny thing is that although he was a clever child who went to a school for the gifted, he was there mainly because his mother knew the photographer.

The second time Oka became the face of Asian America was in 2006, and this time it was less down to luck (although in his self-deprecating way he insists that it was) and more the result of a leap of faith he took six years earlier when he decided to become an actor. The pay-off was huge: a lead role in the NBC series Heroes, the big-budget, ratings-dominating show about ordinary people all over the world discovering that they have superpowers, which airs from Australia to Japan to Germany to South Africa, and whose second season begins this week on BBC2.

What's more, Hiro Nakamura, the time-freezing, time-travelling character Oka plays, has become the fans' favourite, an unlikely sex symbol and object of affection, even more so than the nubile cheerleader Hayden Panettiere and the conventionally handsome Milo Ventimiglia. Oka's internet fan sites show that he hits the part of the brain normally only stimulated by newborn babies and sleepy kittens: they are a babble of delighted gurglings about how 'cute' and 'adorable' he is. None of this was part of Plan A, but, as he tells me as we sit in a garden in Silverlake, Los Angeles, 'I always like to surprise.'

The surprising life of Masi Oka began in Tokyo, and took its first fateful turn when he was six. His mother had already created a family scandal by divorcing Oka's father, and she was bolder still when she decided to take her son and fly off to the United States. 'She gave up pretty much her life for me. She realised that the Japanese education system would stifle me, and she wanted to bring me to America where they would nourish me and let my "academic gifts" expand. She was willing to take all these risks against the recommendations and the wishes of my grandparents.'

The two of them touched down in Los Angeles, and landed up in Van Nuys, a cheap, rough-edged area in the San Fernando Valley. Oka wasn't too fazed by the freeways and palm trees and everything else that made up the new world he'd found himself in; at least not until the first day of school. He was at the Mirman, which is a school for the academically gifted, but the other children weren't exactly sophisticated: 'I remember getting a weird nickname, like Kenickio, I think it was because there was a Japanese bookstore named Kinokuniya; and I realised that people do find it weird that I eat raw fish or rice at lunch and not peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.'

Fortunately, though, the brainy little monsters who clung so spitefully to their sandwiches wouldn't tease their fellow pupils for being clever. At a school for the gifted it isn't so much whether you're going to be a geek, rather what type of geek you're going to be. Oka was a maths geek: 'I did love playing with computers and maths and puzzles. I just loved solving problems, and there's something about trying to figure things out and making things work that was always a big thing with me.' When he finished school, he got into Brown, the Ivy League university in Rhode Island, and his major was in maths and computer science.

The instant associations conjured up by 'maths and computer science major' aren't pretty: a pallid face lit up by the unearthly glare of a computer monitor, gazing intently at numbers, typing furiously, possibly wearing one of those shirt-pocket protectors. Oka wrestled with the stereotype and managed to push it aside. At college he discovered another side to himself. 'I was so focused on the left brain, about being logical, about problem solving, that I wanted to do something that was right brain, to kind of balance myself, to see the world in a different way. So I started doing a lot of theatre, music, performing, singing.' Admittedly, joining the college a cappella group didn't exactly make him the big man on campus (although, he insists, 'we thought we were rock stars'), but getting a bit of 'wiggle room' to reinvent himself was liberating.

The left brain/right brain wiggling didn't stop at Brown. His first job out of college was a covetable position at Industrial Light & Magic, the visual effects company owned by Lucasfilm. What he loved about computer graphics was that 'when you write an algorithm, you can visually see it, so you can show it to a friend and say, hey, check this out. And they say, oh wow, that's cool! You program a database or something, it's an artform in itself. No offence, but if I show it to my mother it's like...' He gives me a glazed look of deathly boredom.

His job, roughly - I think - was to create a system to allow the special-effects artists to create things visually without having to crunch all the numbers to make them happen. Halfway between the physicists and the artists, he could crack asteroids into a million pieces (in Star Wars Episodes I, II and III) or bring waves crashing down onto boats containing George Clooney ( 2000's The Perfect Storm, Oka's big break in the visual-effects community) or Captain Jack Sparrow. He was inspired and happy and his seniors took an interest in him. 'I realised I could stay there for ever, because I really enjoyed what I was doing.' But he didn't stay: 'I realised that when that happens, you need to shake things up.'

In his spare time he had continued to study acting: 'I learnt how to improvise, the skills and tools. And it was so attractive to me because it was technical; comedy in America is very scientific. There is a fine line between art and science, and there is a reason why some things are funny. There are just certain things: a derailment of thought or repetitions, light after heavy, heavy after light. There are so many rules you could use that can work out.'

Armed with his comedy databases, he knew where he wanted to go. At ILM he was working for Hollywood movies. 'But we never really got to experience the Hollywood glitz and the glamour. So for me, I was like: I just want to try Hollywood, just to see what it was like, before I regret not doing it, or before I get too old and can't do it. When you're in your early twenties, you think the world's your oyster and you can do anything you want. So I was very naive.'

It was 2000, a pretty good year for starting something new, and Oka decided to make another momentous journey to Los Angeles. He wasn't travelling as far as his mother had 20 years before - ILM was based in San Francisco, only a few hundred miles up the coast - but he was taking his intelligence, wholesomeness and optimism to a place where none of those things really mattered.

He kept his job with ILM through 'telecommuting', which is not like the travelling through time and space he does as Hiro, but involves telephones and the internet. He managed to keep everything going - the tech work as well as the auditions - but the roles he was getting weren't great: 'Asian man', 'Japanese tourist', 'Japanese pedestrian'. Sometimes the writers actually thought of names for the characters he played - Wonsuk, Deng Wu - but evidently they didn't think very hard. He had a mini-breakthrough when he got a recurring role in Scrubs as Franklyn the lab assistant, but on the whole it was frustrating: 'I realised people weren't writing roles for my type.' Six years after returning to LA, he'd reached a crossroads. When he got the script for Heroes, 'it was my last pilot season as an actor. I was ready to give up acting.'

His agent must have had a heart attack when the script hit the desk. 'It was the first pilot that came to my agents where they were like: we have your pilot?. They were looking for someone fluent in Japanese, who had a comedic background and who had some American television experience.'

Despite the excited flutterings of his agent, Oka was still sceptical - 'I was like: I've been through this.' But as he read the script, he knew it was the one. It was well-written and, more to the point, he had a lot in common with the character of Hiro: 'We're both from Japan. We both felt kind of isolated from society in some senses, thinking that there might be more to our lives. I love manga, he loves comic books, American comics. We're both fluent in Japanese. We both worked cubicle jobs: fortunately I enjoyed mine; Hiro didn't enjoy his too much. And there's an optimism for life. Like Hiro, I do have a childlike curiosity for a lot of things.'

When he told the comedian Sarah Silverman, whose show he'd appeared in, about the part, she tried to put him off. 'That sounds so gay!' she squealed. Fortunately, he didn't listen.

Hiro has become probably the most popular character on the show, quite an achievement when you consider that almost all of his dialogue is subtitled. Amazingly, he didn't appear in the first drafts of creator Tim Kring's script; it was Kring's wife who suggested he add a lighter, comic character to the mix. Kring doesn't speak Japanese, and it shows in the cry of delight that Kring intended to spring from Hiro's lips when he first manages to stop time: 'In the original script Tim wrote "bonsai". On the first day on set, I asked Tim: "Is it OK to change this, because bonsai means little tree."' The word he was looking for was banzai (Americans, doh), and on Oka's advice this eventually became yatta, which has become an unlikely playground catchphrase.

When he's approached by fans, he reckons about half of them address him as Hiro, and half as Masi. The demands of making television programmes in the States, where a season can run to 20 or more episodes, mean that 'television characters tend to be an extension of who you are, versus cinema, because they just don't have time to have you create this character, and you have to wear it for such a long time that you have to be comfortable, so you start to grow into that character and the writers start to write to you. So there has to be a very big part of you that associates with that character.'

Of course he isn't Hiro. Oka may share his basic optimism, but he's more serious and less anarchic than Hiro. When we meet he's tired after a late night/early morning reshoot of some scenes from Get Smart, the spoof starring Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway which is out in August. In the LA apartment where he lives by himself, he's been working hard on writing, too: things he can't discuss because they're being negotiated over (but one is a science fiction series, and he's making forays into romantic comedy, for which he has an unexpected passion). He even does occasional work for ILM. In other words, he doesn't always have time to be as silly as Hiro. Besides, his appearance is low-key: he flattens down the hair that's been shocked into a little quiff by the groomer as soon as the photo shoot is over, and his spectacles and understated outfit make him look fairly nondescript.

He does get recognised all the time, though. 'I have people who recognise me from my back. I mean there's the whole stereotype that all Asians look alike, but people just pinpoint me out of nowhere.' He loves his fans, and can even get a bit gooey about them: 'People from all over the country and all over the world, with different religious backgrounds, with different cultural backgrounds, different economic status, political beliefs: so many diverse people watch our show, and it's just so wonderful to know that we were able to inspire them in some way.' Sometimes, though, he finds the attention, the lack of respect for his privacy, difficult to deal with. With friends, too, it can be hard. 'It's like the theory of relativity in many ways,' he tells me with a typically scientific flourish, 'because they've changed towards me, they see me change.'

Oka is very conscious of the way people see him, and it's clear that he really isn't a fan of labels. He resisted the uniformity of being stuck in one job, and he's an intriguing mix of Japanese - he greets and bids me farewell with the hint of a bow - and American, his speech sprinkled with California-isms - 'woah' and 'like' and even a 'dude' or two.

But the label that continues to attach itself to him, a hangover from school that has got worse because of the character he plays in Heroes, is 'geek'. He's not annoyed when I bring it up, but perhaps slightly fatigued. 'This has been like my mantra: to be a geek is to be human, because being a geek means that you're passionate about something. And I'd rather be passionate about one thing than be apathetic about everything.'

Perhaps the geek doth protest too much, because part of Oka's appeal is that despite the Grammy and Emmy nominations, there's still a lot of the sweet little guy from the Time cover in him. He's not arrogant, or complacent, and he's sincere when he tells me the most important thing he has in common with Hiro: 'The biggest thing, you know, is that he gets to live his dream of being a superhero, which is something he's dreamt of being all his life, and I get to live the dream of being on a great show, working with so many people and touching so many lives.'

Not-so-alter ego of Kenneth the Page

When Jack McBrayer began pursuing an acting career, the first quality that agents and casting directors noticed was not his quick wit, his excitable nature or his youthful countenance, which seems not to have aged a day since he left Conyers, Ga., to attend college. It was his accent, a Southern-fried drawl that would curl the toes of Tennessee Williams. That was never a good thing, writes Dave Itzkoff.

“The first words out of their mouths would be, ‘Can you lose the accent?’ ” Mr. McBrayer, 34, recalled in a recent interview. “And, unfortunately, I can, but it sounds like I’m making fun of people.” Yet as Mr. McBrayer honed his skills in the improvisational comedy theaters of Chicago, he realized there was no reason his inflection should impede his career. “We could be anyone and say anything,” he said, and he became more comfortable playing other characters or “just playing a heightened version of myself.”

And what would a heightened version of Mr. McBrayer look like? “Well,” he said, “it’s pretty much Kenneth the Page. ”

Kenneth the Page is, of course, Mr. McBrayer’s character on 30 Rock, a wide-eyed, blazer-clad naïf who works the most thankless of thankless jobs at the sitcom’s fictional incarnation of NBC yet remains in rapt awe of colleagues like the self-important executive Jack Donaghy (played by Alec Baldwin) and the harried producer Liz Lemon (Tina Fey). In that sense Mr. McBrayer really isn’t too different from his inexperienced alter ego. “People in television can get a little jaded a little quickly,” he said. “Fortunately, I have done so little of it that I have not had the opportunity to grow weary of it.”

Though he grew up a fan of subversive children’s television shows like The Electric Company and classic sketch programs like The Carol Burnett Show, Mr. McBrayer did not consider comedy his calling until after he had graduated from the University of Evansville in Indiana. In the summer of 1995 he moved to Chicago during a blistering heat wave and took refuge in the Second City comedy theatre simply because it had air-conditioning. There he found himself entranced by the performances of troupe members like Ms. Fey, Rachel Dratch (the future Saturday Night Live star) and Adam McKay (the future director of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby), and he quickly joined the group himself.

After leaving Second City in 2002, Mr. McBrayer appeared in small roles on Late Night With Conan O’Brien and Arrested Development and in Talladega Nights. But he also worked in numerous menial jobs that would provide unexpected preparation for the role of Kenneth, which Ms. Fey, creator and producer of 30 Rock, conceived specifically for him.

Mr. McBrayer has worked in a colorful array of places: a factory that made swimming-pool liners; an Applebee’s restaurant, where he was named employee of the month; an office where his job required him to reorganize a huge storage closet. “If I was hung over,” he said, “I would stack boxes just so I could curl up in a fetal position for 15 minutes. Money well earned.”

As a star of 30 Rock (whose new episodes resume on Thursday) he has somewhat brighter career prospects. He recently appeared with the pop singer Mariah Carey in her video for “Touch My Body” playing a nebbishy computer repairman who arrives at Ms. Carey’s mansion. Shot in a single day and directed by the filmmaker Brett Ratner, the video was a surreal experience for Mr. McBrayer.

“To hear Brett Ratner say, ‘O.K., now walk more slowly with the unicorn’; ‘O.K., Mariah, spank Jack more,’ ” he said. “What is happening to my life?” The fantasy was nearly derailed, however, when an errant Frisbee tossed by Mr. McBrayer hit Ms. Carey in the face. “Her bodyguard came and explained to me that I should probably be more careful,” he said. “And we never saw that Frisbee again.”

He can be seen beginning April 18 in the film Forgetting Sarah Marshall, playing a newly-wed who finds connubial bliss as awkward as Mr. McBrayer felt shooting his character’s sex scenes. “For me I had to wear these little nudie pants, and they are not flattering on nobody,” he said. “I looked smooth like a little Ken doll.”

As he continues to build his résumé, Mr. McBrayer doubts he’ll ever be able to shake the sense of wonder he feels working with 30 Rock co-stars like Mr. Baldwin. “The hardest acting for me was not to freak out and say, ‘Oh my God, I loved you in Prelude to a Kiss!’ ” he said. “But ask me again in five years. ‘Ugh, I’ve got to do a scene with Alec again? Boring!’

David Tennant and his landlady

On Saturday night David Tennant returned to the small screen as Doctor Who. The 36-year-old is considered by many viewers to be the best incarnation yet. Far from milking his celebrity, though, he hardly ever speaks to the press and is wary of adding his name to worthy causes. In this rare interview, his former landlady (Arabella Weir) talks to him about his religious background, his hybrid car and his views on fame. She also reveals what she knows about his steely character and his flamboyant take on clothes

Since he was just three years old, David Tennant has passionately wanted the role of Doctor Who. No doubt he wasn’t the only one who thought he could play a Time Lord – but it was an unlikely aspiration for a boy who, like Gordon Brown, was a son of the manse. And unlike all those other little boys, he did indeed grow up to play the Doctor – currently in his 10th incarnation on Saturday night television.

His father, the Rev Sandy McDonald, is a Church of Scotland minister in Paisley, near Glasgow. So David went to church regularly all through his childhood – and his father also happened to be the minister for his primary school. According to David, Sandy is “a dramatic, lively, engaging and entertaining speaker” (and I can attest to this, having seen him in the pulpit).

Was it witnessing the effect and popularity of his father’s addresses, I ask, that drove him towards acting as a career?

“Possibly. I was very young when I decided that’s what I wanted to do, so it’s hard to know how much of a conscious influence Dad was. I remember, after seeing Jon Pertwee turn into Tom Baker in Doctor Who, having a conversation with my parents at a very young age about actors and what they did. I remember getting the distinction between a character and an actor, as they explained it. I understood what fiction was very clearly – and I always feel uneasy when people talk about children not understanding the difference between fantasy and reality. I can only have been three, and was just enthralled by [Doctor Who]. But I was quite clear that I didn’t want to be a Time Lord – I wanted to be the person who played a Time Lord,” says David, who had to change his surname to Tennant when he started acting because there was already a David McDonald in Equity, the actors’ union.

His parents, though always encouraging and supportive, tried to steer him towards more secure careers. However, David tells me that he “never once wavered” from his chosen path – rather extraordinary, considering that he’d decided on his future while still a pre-primary school toddler. Steeliness is probably his defining characteristic – and he was obviously just as steely then as he is now.

We know each other well, having first met in October 1993. As a jobbing actor, I’d gone to Glasgow to play a part in a series called Takin’ Over the Asylum – about a hospital radio station based in a mental health facility. My first scene was with a young Scottish actor – it was of course David, who was playing a bipolar teenager. He was 22 and had only just started acting, yet his confidence and determination were extraordinary. We hit it off straightaway, and early the following year he moved to London where he rented a room in my house for five years.

His subsequent success owes much to his aforementioned steeliness. That is not to say he’s ruthless, unkind or lacking in generosity; quite the contrary. But he is absolutely determined – in fact enviably so for a man in a business that positively engenders insecurity and self-doubt. He has always been able to look after himself. At 17 he left home to go to live in Glasgow – first with his older sister and then with a succession of fellow students – until he graduated from drama school in 1991. This made him unusually self-sufficient for his years. And he’s very organised. When we lived together I was always teasing him about his alphabetised CDs, for example.

Still single (the tabloids have, usually erroneously, linked him with various women, including Kylie Minogue), David is pretty careful in all his choices. The only area in which he goes positively mad is in his choice of clothes. In fact his wardrobe can be very flamboyant, which is why those who know him quickly gave him the monicker of “metrosexual”. In the early days many of my friends (principally male, I’ll admit), thought that he must be gay. “He has to be – you’re his best friend, and look at the way he dresses,” they’d protest.

Leaving aside the suggestion that an association with me reflects on a man’s sexuality, I had to break it to them that just because a guy wears a red velvet suit and is able to form a close friendship with a woman he isn’t sleeping with doesn’t necessarily mean he’s homosexual. David, meanwhile, took all this teasing in his stride; he is so unmacho and fair-minded that the speculation about his sexuality never bothered him . “Why would it?” he’d say. Now, that’s what I call a real metrosexual.

In all the time I’ve known David he’s never been out of work. It’s not that he is the best actor in the world – it’s more that his success is down to a fusion of talent and unshakable self-belief. It’s quite bizarre witnessing how famous he’s become. Often, when we go out together, large groups of women will visibly go weak at the knees. Does he mind being pestered by fans? “It comes with the territory,” he says. “Some days it’s tricky; other days, not at all – and, anyway, who am I to complain about how hard it is to be famous? It’s not.”

Unlike some, David doesn’t leap indiscriminately at the endless party invitations and goodies offered to celebrities; he’s also increasingly reluctant to give print interviews. Is this because he’s a control freak, I suggest, and doesn’t like the idea of not being able to control what’s written about him? “Erm, it is slightly controlling of me, I agree,” he says. “But it’s all too easy to become defined by your press cuttings. I’m much happier going on a radio show and talking nonsense for 20 minutes. I’m an actor, after all.”

He also subscribes to the Marlon Brando take on actors who sound off about world affairs: “Just because a guy’s famous doesn’t make what he thinks interesting.” But, I point out, I know he cares about climate change – and he did just buy a hybrid car.

“Exactly,” he replies. “Now, I’m clearly no Al Gore, but I liked the idea of doing my bit. And then you get someone telling you that the environmental cost in manufacturing a [Toyota] Prius [petrol-electric car] is worse than driving some gas-guzzling monster for 10 years. I have no idea what the truth is, although of course I should have found out. The person who told me that may have a grudge against Toyota. So I really don’t want to get into the trap of sounding off about anything I don’t know enough about. It’s very easy to get seduced into believing your opinion is informed just because people ask you for it.”

What about using celebrity to promote a worthwhile cause – isn’t that a good idea?

“It is a fact that sprinkling a bit of celebrity over certain causes probably can make a difference. And maybe it’s pompous to sit at home thinking that I want to preserve my integrity when, actually, if you waved a wee flag for something, it might make a few quid for a worthy cause. It’s a balancing act that I find a bit of a struggle, to be honest. Mostly I just muddle through, trying to do the decent thing from moment to moment. Is it churlish to have the power to influence things and choose not to because you fear being misrepresented? I don’t know. I don’t manage to be consistent about it, anyway. I’m never sure how vain to be.”

It takes a cool head not to be inflated by the news that fans voted him the best Doctor Who of all time, in a BBC magazine survey. And they will certainly be pleased to know that David hasn’t come close to tiring of his Time Lord role yet. Indeed there are three feature-length specials on the horizon. Meanwhile, he is about to take on the arguably more challenging role of Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Naturally, he’s quite nervous about scaling this particular rock-face – but then, if he weren’t, he’d probably cock it up. “I always have that Presbyterian voice in my head, saying, ‘Could do better’,” he admits. “But I quite like that.”

The new series of Doctor Who continues on Saturdays on BBC1

Omid Djalili:'How many other small, fat , bald men get their own show?'

Omid Djalili is one of Britain’s most popular stand-up comics, as well as a star of film and TV. Not bad for an Iranian boy who failed his A levels – three times – and was rejected by 16 drama schools, writes Deborah Ross...

When I arrive at the comedian Omid Djalili's house in nicely tree-lined East Sheen, south- west London, it's his wife, Annabel, who answers the door. Omid's just popped out for milk, she says. He'll only be a tick. They've just returned from a few days in Devon with the children – they have three; the oldest is 15 – and the fridge is empty. Come in, come in. Cup of tea? She puts the kettle on. We chat for a bit. She is lovely; very pretty and smiley. Then Omid returns. "Hello, Omid," I say. "Milk?" asks Annabel hopefully. Omid opens his plastic carrier. There is apple juice. There is a newspaper. There is no milk. "I forgot," he says. "Oh, Omid," we both say in the way women do when they wish to capture centuries of female disappointment. Omid looks sheepish and smiles that smile, the one that says: "Please don't hit me, clever ladies who would get milk if they were sent out for it."

I am minded to stay in the kitchen with Annabel to talk about why men cannot do the one simple thing you have asked them to do (it's not my favourite subject – I'm just determined to get to the bottom of it one day) but Omid is ushering me into the living room with my black tea. That is: tea, which is black, there being no milk. Nice.

The house is 1920s and big but not fancy, with a living room that's all old rugs and comfy sofas. Omid says he doesn't do fancy. "I don't have extravagant tastes. I don't buy fancy cars. I'm not ostentatious. Buying a nice house in East Sheen was really pushing it for me." Having grown up without money, he now worries about his kids growing up with it, worries that they're becoming "bloody rich twats". The other day he overheard them talking about the houses they would like to live in when they were older and so he said: "Not with my money, you won't." He adds: "I saw my parents work desperately hard."

He settles on to a sofa, feet up, yawns, then yawns again. I'm keeping you up, I say. He says he's sorry, he's knackered. He's mid-tour plus has just driven the four hours back from Devon. He says that once, returning from a gig in Liverpool, he was so tired while driving down the motorway he hallucinated pterodactyls flying around his head that he had to flap away. He was eventually stopped by the police who asked him: "How fast do you think you were going, sir?" He said: "100mph?" No, they told him, "you were going 10mph in the middle lane while slapping yourself." They were nice, though, the cops. "They sat in the car with me while I had a little rest." He is amazed that "more comedians don't die on the road". I say I'm amazed more can't remember milk. Honestly, we send you out to do one simple thing...

He is a big man, hefty, but not Channel 5 freakomentary fat, although the way he speaks about himself you'd think he was. When I ask him if he still has a personal trainer he says: "I have to, I'm so heavy." I tell him he's not that heavy. Come off it. He disagrees: "I'm deceptively heavy. I'm 15-and-a-half stone, four stone overweight." He's not sure what the problem is, but thinks it might be food. "I eat too much on tour, because of the stress. It's comfort eating. It's soporific." What can't you resist more than anything? "A bowl of chips." He does like to cook, yes, and particularly Iranian dishes "full of walnuts and pomegranates".

Born in London to Iranian parents, he is that rare thing: a comedian in the West who, having a Middle Eastern background, can tell jokes about the Middle East. But although culture and ethnicity – as well as some wonderfully silly dancing – are at the core of his act, I do think he is mostly funny just because he is just funny. I like his joke about the Middle Eastern equivalent of our knock-knock jokes. "It's the Floomph, Floomph joke. Floomph, Floomph? That's someone knocking on a tent." That said, he often will make a point: "An asylum seeker arrives at Dover. 'Why are you here?' asks the customs officer. 'My house was bombed,' comes the reply. 'No, why are you really here.' 'Um... because I've always wanted to work in a chip shop in Basingstoke?'"

Success is good, and the money is good, but he's not in it for the money or the fame. "For me, it's always been about respect." He's failed a lot, and has been rejected a lot. He took three A-levels three times and failed them all. He was basically booted out of school. He was refused a place by 16 – 16! – drama schools. He says he's had to fight all the way to get to where he is with his sell-out tours, film roles and his own BBC sketch show. "How many other small, fat, bald men get their own TV shows?" he asks. "Kojak?" I suggest. "Apart from Kojak," he says.

One of his most recent film roles was in the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which I could not make head nor tail of. What was it about, Omid? He says he has no idea. He took the part because he was told he'd get to do a scene with Keith Richards. He adds: "I didn't understand the script or even the scene I was in! I'd ask the others: do you know what this is about? They'd say: no idea. Just shut up and do it." He is most proud of his performance as Picasso in the film Modigliani, although wishes he had been given more time to lose weight. "I was Picasso in his porkadelic phase."

His parents moved to London in 1957 – Omid was born eight years later – where his father, Ahmad, worked as a journalist for the Iranian newspaper Kayhan. However, this career came to a sudden end with the Islamic revolution in 1979 and the new regime's official campaign of persecution against the followers of the Baha'i faith, which include Omid and his family. To earn money, his parents turned their small Kensington mansion-block flat into a sort of pension for sick Iranians who had travelled to Harley Street for medical treatment.

"Iranians don't like staying in hotels. They want to stay with families. So my parents would take them in and cook for them and translate for them and take them to their appointments." Omid rarely, if ever, bought friends home from school. "Too embarrassing and too complicated. They'd want to know why a sick old man was wandering around in his pyjamas at four in the afternoon and I'd have to explain." He didn't have his own bedroom – "bedrooms were money" – so slept in the lounge. When I ask about siblings he says: "I have an older sister and brother who shared a room and escaped as quickly as they could." His mother, Parveneh, was also a dressmaker. What was her style? "Very flamboyant, very few clients," he says.

He went to trendy Holland Park school which is where, he thinks, he first learnt that being funny could feel really, really good. In his first year he wrote a sketch for his classmates that his teacher suggested he perform in front of the whole school. The sketch involved a monster lying under a blanket that no one could look at because the monster was so ugly that if you did look at him, you'd die. He primed a few kids to come up on stage, lift a corner of the blanket, then scream and drop dead. He then asked the deputy head to come and have a look but when the deputy head did so, the monster died, "because the head was so ugly". The sixth formers, he says, "roared with laughter and I felt like a rock star".

Alas, Omid did not make it to the sixth form himself. He was expelled, although never formally. The head – perhaps the deputy had been promoted and didn't think he was that ugly – just said: "Please don't come back." Why? "I was told I was disruptive. I was a real tearaway. I'd run into the staff room, take down my trousers, play the piano and then run out again." He went to some kind of college to take his A levels (English, Economics, French) which he thought he could do in a year. He could not. "I failed in January, took them again in June, and then again the next January." All in all, he has worked out that "I failed 49 separate papers". Omid, I say, you're obviously a smart guy, so what is with all this failing, already?

He says it was probably his chaotic family life; he could never get down to any studying at home because he was constantly being asked to drop everything and go and pick someone up at the airport, or drop everything so he could go and translate for someone. Your parents weren't interested in your education? No, he says. I say that's weird. Usually immigrant parents are mad for their children's education; mad for them to become doctors and lawyers so the whole family can feel somehow legitimised. This is true for some, he says, but not for him. Weirder still, he says, he comes from a background of doctors and lawyers on both sides. There was an actor though; his mother's brother. "He married a Mormon, went to live in Utah, and had a small part in Starsky and Hutch. Unfortunately, he died young, but when I said I wanted to be an actor, she encouraged it." And your dad? "He paid no attention until I started making money."

He didn't take his failures lightly. When his A-level results would come in the post he would implore: "Please let it be an A, maybe a B, and it would always say 'unclassified'." Each time, he'd get the results investigated but "they were always right". In the end, "I was so desperate to go to university I lied on my UCCA form, putting down Bs and Cs instead of Es and Fs." This led him to an English and Theatre Studies degree at the University of Ulster. When he graduated, pretty much top of his year, he confessed but was not run out of town. "They said that I obviously deserved to be there."

Next, all those auditions for the drama schools. Sixteen! Maybe you were crap, I suggest. He didn't think so, he says. He even got to the point where he phoned one school up to ask: why? They sent him a letter saying "that although I was very talented they also thought I was very arrogant". He probably is a bit arrogant – he couldn't believe his A-level results, he couldn't believe anyone would turn him down – but still. Do actors require humility? "I think you do have to be quite malleable and I was too much the finished article."

Luckily, at around this time, he met Annabel (Knight, an actress and playwright) and together they moved to the Czech Republic where they became involved in experimental theatre. Their company, In Theatre, was highly rated and travelled extensively. "I did think: this is it. This is what my life is going to be." But he felt he had to come back to London in 1995 when his mother died because "my father took it very hard, and was lonely". What does Ahmad think of his TV, movie and stand-up star of a son? "He does like the fame by association. He's 84 and says he has a lot of women in their sixties and seventies flirting with him."

I say I don't see where the stand-up comes into all this. He says it was Annabel, who just kind of saw it in him, and persuaded him to put something together for the Edinburgh Festival. You have her to thank for all this yet you can't remember to get milk? Omid, you should be ashamed. "I got apple juice!" he protests.

Anyway, our time is nearly up. He's got to get to Salisbury for a gig. Omid kindly gives me a lift to Richmond station, wearing a peaked cap that makes him look all cheeky. He says his life seems fantastic to him now, as if it is happening to someone else. He may be considerably more vulnerable than he cares to let on. Still, this is no excuse for not doing that one simple thing.

Never is, never will be.