Plasticine-faced, jug-eared and ... so sexy

He's revived the restless Reggie Perrin on our TV screens, but this unlikely ladykiller and 'luvvie farmer' admits to being smugly satisfied in real life. Rachel Shields meets Martin Clunes.

(ABBIE TRAYLOR-SMITH)

Likeable. Down-to-earth. Charming. And, inevitably, funny. All adjectives dished up by the countless interviewers who have passed an hour with Martin Clunes over the course of his 27-year career. But sexy? Not a word I, for one, had ever associated with the jug-eared, plasticine-faced actor. Yet the evidence is sitting in front of me, tall, tanned and holding court with half a dozen women in a London club.

Dressed in a pale blue, checked shirt and jeans, his face and forearms brown from hours spent outdoors at his farm in Dorset, Clunes is winning over every woman present, from the photographer to the waitress bringing him endless cups of tea. And while the unlikely ladykiller is supposedly here to discuss the second series of Reggie Perrin – the TV show in which Clunes is currently starring as the eponymous middle-aged middle manager – women are exactly what we end up talking about. The women he has loved –the ex-wife from whom he split acrimoniously in 1997 and his current missus – those who inspired him – largely his grandmother – and the women he has worked with, namely his former Men Behaving Badly co-stars Caroline Quentin and Leslie Ash.

Now happily married to TV producer Philippa Braithwaite for 13 years, Clunes seems to have grown into himself, bearing no trace of the awkwardness which characterised his early TV appearances. Approaching 50 (48 actually), Clunes seems to be in his prime. Perhaps this is why he has little time for actresses who resort to cosmetic procedures in an attempt to stave off time's ravages, particularly Leslie Ash, who endured ridicule after botched injections of lip-filler left her with a "trout pout" in 2003.

"I don't know what the pressure is; it is weird isn't it?" he says ruefully. "It is always the prettiest actresses who go and butcher themselves."

Clunes has often talked about how he toyed with cosmetic surgery himself in the early days of his career, joking: "When I was younger my cousin offered to pay for me to have my ears pinned back. I might have starved if I'd had them done, so I had them enlarged instead."

Surgery was never really an option for someone as down to earth as Clunes, who refuses to take himself too seriously. Even when the actor's chair gives way just as he is launching into an impassioned speech about his charity work, leaving him sitting on the floor amid broken chair legs, he is unperturbed.

Clunes clearly takes his charity commitments very seriously indeed. As well as working with national charities, Clunes does a lot to support local causes. For the past few years, he and his wife have organised a summer fair at their 135-acre farm, the proceeds of which go to a local hospice. This year, the actor took on the arduous task of selling "Clunes' kisses" to visitors.

"My gran lived in a little village in West Sussex and was unselfish to a fault. She was always doing the flowers for the church, meals on wheels, because she could," he says. "I think in an old-fashioned sense it is almost a duty. When you give England the chance to help; through comic relief or live aid, we do."

He works for a stable of charities, including Macmillan and Cancer UK – a cause close to Clunes's heart since the death of his father, the actor Alec Clunes, to lung cancer when Martin was just eight.

While this affected Clunes profoundly, overshadowing his childhood and propelling him into acting as a way of trying to emulate his dad, he hasn't allowed himself to be defined by this early tragedy.

Best known for his role as laddish Gary in Men Behaving Badly – which turned Clunes into a household name and netted him a Bafta – and lately for the long-running comedy Doc Martin, in which he plays a GP in a sleepy Cornish village, Clunes has been working constantly since his first stage appearance at Colchester's Mercury Theatre in the early 1980s. He claims to have nothing in common with Reggie Perrin, who is constantly dissatisfied with his dull job and suburban life.

"I'm very smugly satisfied with my lot," he says, stirring his tea. "Growing up, getting married, having a daughter, all of that is very normalising; it puts you in the human race.

However happy Clunes is now, he can relate to Perrin's depression. "I think it is an 'everyman' thing. They aren't big problems, no one is starving, they are middle-class worries."

While Clunes may be doing well in his private life, he is less cheerful when quizzed about the bad reviews the show received as the series launched. Compared unfavourably with the 1970s classic starring Leonard Rossiter on which the programme was based, the show was described by one critic as "hopelessly wheezy and club-footed".

"The papers thrive on outrage and anger," he says, brow furrowing in irritation. He brushes his hair back from his forehead and I notice that sweat patches are darkening his pristine shirt. "No one was trying to undo what Leonard Rossiter did. I don't think anyone out there on the street was fuming about it, shouting, 'Martin Clunes killed Leonard Rossiter!'"

Confident the second series will get a better reception, the actor perks up as he explains that he has also been juggling with numerous other projects, from filming an upcoming documentary about manta rays to running his own production company.

However, this equilibrium doesn't last long. At the mention of his short-lived marriage to the actress Lucy Aston in the 1990s, who periodically talks to the press, his face falls.

"She does it every now and then, via Max Clifford. Classy," he says, a little bitterly. "I never saw fit to pass judgement on the demise of my first marriage ... but I suppose if they ever start the Hammer Horror Series again, I could use it as material."

Aston has claimed that Clunes's drinking and drug-taking destroyed their marriage, after three years, when he left her for his current wife.

While relations with his ex-wife are decidedly frosty, this bitterness hasn't poisoned his love of women in general. Many of his closest friends are women, not least the actress Caroline Quentin, who played his long-suffering girlfriend Dorothy in Men Behaving Badly.

"Caroline is about my best friend," he says. Like Clunes, Quentin has also escaped city life in favour of a simpler existence on a farm in Devon with her husband and kids.

Having "sold everything" to buy his own farm six years ago, Clunes is thoroughly chuffed with this new rural life. "I'm a luvvie farmer now," he says, adopting a camp pose. "Get off my land, dahling!"

He loves animals, sells his own hay and admits that he'd even be keen to have a crack at hunting.

"They have drag hunting now; they come across our land. I wouldn't mind having a go, but someone would make something of it," he says ruefully.

Also, one imagines that he'd struggle to find the time. Clunes works almost non-stop, and despite complaining about how tough it is to be away from his family filming for months at a time, doesn't see himself retiring anytime soon.

"I will go broke, I've got all these animals to feed. A man should do what he does ... that's profound, isn't it?" he laughs, revealing straight white teeth. "And done correctly, it is really good."

Dr Who to Doc Martin

1961 Born in Wimbledon, south-west London

1966 Attends the Royal Russell School in Croydon before moving to the Arts Educational Schools in Chiswick

1970 His father, actor Alec Clunes, dies of lung cancer

1983 First TV appearance comes with a role in Dr Who

1983 Appears as a son who won't leave home in the BBC sitcom No Place Like Home

1992-98 Stars as Gary in Men Behaving Badly alongside Neil Morrissey

1990 Marries actress Lucy Aston

1993 Separates from Lucy Aston

1997 Marries TV producer Philippa Braithwaite

1998 Bags a minor role in the Oscar-winning film Shakespeare in Love

2004 Takes the lead as a GP with a terrible bedside manner in Doc Martin, for which he wins Best TV Comedy Actor at the British Comedy Awards

2009 Appears in the title role in Reggie Perrin, a remake of the 1970s classic The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, which starred Leonard Rossiter