He doesn’t drink, rarely eats after 6pm and approaches every joke as if he were solving a puzzle. But for all his discipline, does Jimmy Carr sometimes go too far?

Sitting opposite me in a dimly lit bar in north London is a 39-year-old comedian whose appearance – black hair, black eyes, black top – seems to reflect his humour. Combined with his baby face, he reckons, this impression of blackness makes him look like a “Lego Hitler”. And it amuses him to tell people that when his girlfriend Karoline Copping, a television producer, first met him 10 years ago, she thought he had “the eyes of a rapist”.

The eyes may be one reason why passers-by give Jimmy Carr a double take, but more likely it is to do with his ubiquity – from guest appearances on BBC shows such as QI and Have I Got News For You to the shows he hosts on Channel 4: 8 Out of 10 Cats and 10 O’Clock Live. That and the constant touring he does of his live show. He tells me he has developed a comedy wiggle of his black eyebrows as a way of acknowledging fans who stare at him, without having to actually stop for a chat when he is trying to catch a train or get to a meeting.

“You never want to be the grumpy guy, although I do have quite a grumpy face,” he says. “So I raise my eyebrows like this.” He demonstrates. “I learned it from Jim Carrey 20 years ago when I was working as an intern in LA. I found myself in a lift with him and said: ‘You’re…’ and he did a perfect Mexican wave with his eyebrows.” Pause. “Then the lift door opened.” Carr tells anecdotes almost as succinctly as he tells jokes, talking quickly and using the f-word in the casual way that others use dashes and semi colons. “I like to write a joke without any fat on it,” he says. “The shorter the better. I cater for people with ADD, basically.”

He certainly employs a lot of these short jokes in his live shows. There are always 300 in a set. One from his new DVD gives a flavour of his comic voice. “The first few weeks of joining Weight Watchers, you’re just finding your feet.” As well as speaking quickly, Carr does something else which I didn’t notice him doing when I last interviewed him six years ago. He laughs easily, a double beat that fades away into an upper register: Ha-haaah! “Yes, I have this crazy honk of a laugh,” he says. “I started out deliberately deadpan, but now I do laugh more. When I look back at my old DVDs, I seem quite uptight.”

Certainly he seems happier; more comfortable in his own skin. Not worried about turning 40 next year, then? “No, I’m fine with it. I think I had my midlife crisis when I was 26. People are having them earlier. It’s to do with life speeding up. Now, I’m paid to have funny thoughts, which was all I ever wanted.” His meltdown came after he graduated from Cambridge and drifted into a job in marketing that he loathed. He gave up work, had therapy, renounced his Catholicism, lost his virginity and decided to become a comedian. “I was very secretive. I didn’t let anyone know I was doing it for the first six months. No friends and family coming along.’’ Can he remember any of his early jokes? “Um, yeah, there was this one where I said: You hear about boxers saying ‘I’m from the ghetto and there was only one way out’. Well, I was from the middle class. I lived in a cul-de-sac. There was only one way out.”

His background was indeed middle class. His father, from whom he is now estranged, was an accountant in Slough. His parents separated in 1994 and his mother died in 2001 from pancreatitis, a loss which affected him deeply.

Has he no need for therapy now? “This is my free therapy, talking about myself to you. I’m in a pretty good mood most of the time. Get a bit grumpy sometimes. But you can’t stay grumpy when you have to think of jokes each day. Joke mining.” It occurs to me that this “mining for jokes” may still be a form of therapy. At 26, he found something that chased away his black dogs. Since then, not a day has gone by that he hasn’t thought up a joke with which to do some more chasing. Indeed, he comes up with so many, usually as he is reading the papers, that he cannot help feeding them to his million-and-a-half followers on Twitter.

Doesn’t he worry that he’s squandering material? “It’s more I worry that someone will read my throwaway jokes on Twitter and think this guy isn’t as good as he used to be. If that’s the case, I want to tell them: ‘No. This is the stuff I’m throwing away. This isn’t my A material.’”

Although he has a reputation for performing jokes that can cause offence, Carr doesn’t regard his material as being gratuitously offensive. They may ostensibly be “about” rape, or paedophilia, or incest, or obesity, but, to him, the jokes are simply “about” jokes, to the point where the subject is almost abstract in his imagination.

A good example of the dangers of this approach came when he was branded “sick” by Twitter users, after tweeting a joke about a car crash just 48 hours after last month’s M5 pile up in which seven people were killed. The comic had tweeted: “A couple married for 66 years died within 3 days of each other. That’s nothing. My grandparents died on exactly the same day… car crash.” Perhaps more worryingly, he doesn’t seem to believe that people might be genuinely affronted. “I always wonder, were you really offended by that? Really? People tend to be offended on behalf of other people. I think generally people are pretty bright and they get that something is a joke and that is all it is.”

But what about the people who aren’t offended? Does he ever worry that they ought to be, just a little, if their moral compass is functioning properly? “No. Gallows humour has always been around because it’s the way that we deal with difficult taboo situations, with death and sex and things you don’t want to have to talk about head on.

“So the dark side seems like a very natural place for comedy to live. It’s difficult to come up with funny jokes about taking the dog for a walk on a sunny day… you don’t need to lighten that load. But if someone’s dying, that’s where comedy tends to occur.”

It’s an unexpectedly thoughtful answer given how cavalier Carr can seem on this topic. Black comedy saved him from his own darkest thoughts, he seems to be saying, so it might help others. In his live shows he plays to huge audiences. Presumably, though, they’re not all middle class graduates with a keen sense of postmodern irony.

Indeed, he tells me there is often a distinctive “Saturday night crowd”, which can be “quite in your face”, and which is different from the more “theatrical” Sunday night crowd. Is he ever concerned that some of the Saturday nighters might not appreciate that he is being ironic? That they are supposed to be laughing with him about the nature of prejudice, not at the victims of rape, or racism? “It will sound like I’m being overly protective of my audience, but I meet people after the show, signing autographs for them, and they’re all different ages, creeds, colours and backgrounds. The thing they have in common is a sense of humour.”

Isn’t that wishful thinking? “No. If there’s a woman in her seventies in my audience I know that there’s no point worrying that this material might be a bit rude for her. She’s fine.” Nevertheless, Carr has aroused anger in the past, in response to jokes he told about British army amputees and another (which occasioned the BBC to offer an apology) about gipsies. Over the last couple of years, however, it is Carr’s fellow comedian, Frankie Boyle, who has provoked thousands of complaints, over jokes he has told about Down’s syndrome, the Queen’s sex life and Rebecca Adlington’s nose, the last of which led to another BBC apology.

Is Carr slightly relieved that Boyle now appears to be taking all the heat previously directed at him? “Saw Frankie on Saturday for lunch when I was in Glasgow. He’s doing his thing…”

I suppose the context for this change of public mood was “Sachsgate”, the incident involving Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand and a notorious phone call. Have comedians had to become more circumspect? “Well, I’m very lucky working with Channel 4, but even when I’ve been working for the BBC they’ve been supportive and have said ‘Say what you want, we aren’t going to try and stop you.’” His defence seems to be that he and Boyle never offer an opinion one way or the other when they’re telling their controversial jokes. But did he offer Boyle any advice on how to deal with the fallout? “I don’t think he’s looking for solace, but I said to him, ‘OK, it was a joke, wasn’t it?’ There was no agenda. The media is partly to blame because they over-analyse and ask what point the comedian is making with that joke.”

That’s hardly fair. There are lots of comedians with political agendas, from Ben Elton onwards. “Yes, he did do some Labour rallies and was a brilliant and influential stand-up. But the idea that people might ask this Frankie Boyle, or this Jimmy Carr, who they should vote for.” He holds up his hands in exasperation. “No! We just want you to laugh and if you don’t find it funny, please leave, because it’s not for you.” Just out of curiosity, why is it, does he suppose, that all comedians on Channel 4 and Radio 4 are left wing? Take his co-hosts on the 10 O’Clock Show, David Mitchell and Charlie Brooker. Left of Lenin, the pair of them.

“Yes, on that show we are left-leaning and liberal but we do try and get beyond the paradigm of a two party system.” He shakes his head. “Even talking to you I’m embarrassed because why am I talking to the Telegraph about politics? There are a million more interesting people you could talk to about politics than me.” He read politics at university, though. Did he ever consider becoming a politician himself? “Not really. I was chatting to Eddie Izzard about this recently. He’s talking about running for mayor and I said I don’t understand it. Why would you go from having the best job in the world to the worst? Do you really want to spend your time organising barricades that will prevent Christmas shoppers from slipping on the pavement?”

I ask what gives him pleasure, apart from thinking of jokes. “Play a bit of tennis.” Who does he play with? He hesitates and grins. “Ah no, that would be a bit name-droppy…” (I Google “Jimmy Carr” and “tennis” later and see that his partner is Jonathan Ross.)

Another difference between Carr now and when we last met is that there’s less of him. “I know, I’m thinking of writing a diet book. Its title will be ‘Put That Down, Fatty’.” (His secret, he says, is hardly ever eating after 6pm). Carr doesn’t drink, either, but he is, he says, a caffeine fiend. “I’m a devotee of Starbucks. I’ve had three ventis today. People knock global brands but when you pull into Kings Lynn and see a Starbucks, you feel so relieved.” Doesn’t he get sick of spending so much time on tour, living in hotels? “On the contrary, they’re a home from home. Last month I spent more nights in the Manchester Malmaison than I did at home.” And his girlfriend is happy about this? “I think she’s been very patient, but I do think my work-life balance has been crap. But when you’re self-employed, you take the work when it’s there.”

I wonder if, after 10 years on the road, he couldn’t now afford to slow it down a bit? “Actually, I only work two hours a day. People give themselves years off in showbusiness, that doesn’t happen in any other job. You never meet a plumber who says I’ve been plumbing for five years and thought I’d have a year off.” When pressed he eventually reveals what really drives him: a desperate need to be loved by his audience. “A great comic is loved and I’m not a great comic. But I aim to be. I’ll work on it. I’ll put the hours in. God knows, if it can be done through sweat, I’ll do it.”

Before I meet Gerald Ratner I meet his wife Moira. She is in their kitchen, wearing sportsgear, on her way to pilates. The couple live in an Edwardian house with electric gates on the outskirts of Bray, Berkshire. It’s not the sort of grand house they once lived in — ‘The house that crap built’ as the Sun rather cruelly called it — but it is comfortable, and big enough to have a tennis court. That is where he is now, with our photographer. Just wrapping up.
I tell her that a friend of mine heard her husband give a speech recently on the rise and fall and rise again of Gerald Ratner, and thought him not only funny but engaging. ‘Oh,’ she says, in a deadpan voice. ‘I think you’ll find he’s pretty unengaging in person.’
I like him already, and her.
The ‘rise again’, it should be explained, relates to his on-line jewellery business geraldonline.com. We shall come to that. For now it is worth noting that, at its peak in 1991, the Ratners jewellery chain had a turnover of £1.5bn, with profits of £125m, from 2,500 shops in Britain and America. He had taken over the company from his father seven years earlier — when there had been 100 shops, most of which were making a loss — and had expanded rapidly, swallowing up the opposition, including H Samuel and Ernest Jones, to become the most successful jewellery business in the world.
Then came his infamous — and much misquoted — speech to the Institute of Directors at the Royal Albert Hall, the one in which he joked that the reason his cheapest sherry decanter was so cheap — £4.95 — was that it was ‘crap’. He had told the joke in public several times before — it had even been reported in the Financial Times several months earlier — and, because it always got a laugh, he thought that the line would be the perfect way to lighten what was to be a heavy speech about the business and the economy. But by the time it was reported in the tabloids the next day the quote had turned into him saying that all his jewellery was crap. Overnight, Ratners had become, to quote another Sun headline, ‘Crapners’. The Mirror’s front page informed its readers that they had been taken for “22 carat gold mugs”.
The company unravelled with astonishing speed. Women no longer wanted to wear jewellery that came in a Ratners’ box, however cheap it was. Shares plummeted. Within 18 months, Gerald Ratner was not only out of a job but broke, and broken. Gone was the yacht, the helicopter, and the chauffer-driven company cars, including a Rolls Royce and a Bentley. Both his town and country house had to be sold. He even lost his family name — the people who took over his company wouldn’t allow him to trade under the name Ratner in future business projects.
When Gerald Ratner saunters into his kitchen now, the photographs done, he does indeed seem a little disengaged, with a resigned, Eeyore-ish manner and a delivery even more deadpan than that of his wife. But there is a friendly openness about him that is disarming, and a certain vulnerability, too. Like Uncle Tom in PG Wodehouse, he has the look of a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow. But not that secret…
He takes off his tie, opens the collar of his lilac shirt, and leads the way into his sitting room. ‘My eldest daughter Suzy,’ he says, when he notices me noticing a framed photograph of an attractive young woman. ‘She works on The X-Factor. A producer. I never watch the show on principle, because I’m a music snob.’ It seems the habit of saying what he thinks, however tactless, dies hard. ‘I tend to listen to new Indie bands, which I download from iTunes. I keep telling my wife the stuff she has on her iPod is abject. There is no excuse for Westlife.’
If there was vanity once, it seems to have gone now. ‘Back in the old days someone took my photograph from below and it made my already big nose look twice as big, which I wasn’t keen on, but now I don’t care how I’m photographed. Your photographer asked me to lie down on a bench, which I would never have agreed to back then.’
Yet he did pose for that ironic — and now iconic — photograph in which he held a toy gun to his head, shortly after he became the author of his own downfall in 1991. ‘Yes, I felt cursed by that because it kept being used whenever there was a story about me in the papers. I only agreed to it because Kelvin MacKenzie, who was then editor of the Sun, said they would be more positive and lay off me if I apologised to my customers. So I played the game, and it didn’t work.’
Did he feel he was going mad? ‘It was like being in a Greek tragedy. I remember walking in Hyde Park with the dog, and there had been stories about the collapse of the company in the Sunday papers that day, and I was thinking: “This is horrendous. How could it go from the crest of wave to this in such a short space of time? How did I ever let this happen?” I was cursing myself. That was when it hit me. Up until then I thought I would get through it.’
He went to see the banks to try and find a way of rescuing the company, but he soon realised that there was an elephant in the room. ‘And the elephant was me! No one would mention the fact that I was the problem. Eventually someone did and said that I was the one who had brought all this bad publicity on the company. What could be done about it? I said there was nothing that could be done because, for the press, this story ticked all the boxes and wouldn’t go away. I mean, they only stopped picking on Jade Goody when she got cancer. Then she was popular again.’
Actually, Ratner was told he might have cancer around that time. He had an emergency operation to remove a suspected tumour from the roof of his mouth and, at that point, felt so low he considered killing himself. ‘Jewellery was all I knew. The only thing I was in interested in. Losing my family company was like loosing a child, God forbid. I suppose I become inward looking and self-absorbed but I was also as miserable as hell and there was one day when I was walking around a shopping mall that I thought, well, if it had been on the second floor, who knows? I thought of my father and grandfather building up the business only for me to destroy it. I thought of my kids growing up being called Crapner for the rest of their lives, and I just thought: “It can’t get any worse than this.” It was probably the lowest point in my life. But as Joan Rivers said, suicide is so Eighties.’
It is an odd subject for him to make light about, given that when he was 19 his sister Juliet killed herself. A defence mechanism, perhaps. ‘Religion has a lot to answer for,’ he explains. ‘I still have an affection for it and I have started going to synagogue again because it’s my roots, but Jews don’t welcome non-Jews into their family. They have this ghetto mentality. My parents certainly did. They disapproved of my sister’s boyfriend because he wasn’t Jewish and when they drove him away she became depressed and eventually took a fatal overdose.’
His parents were certainly domineering to their children. He had what amounted to an arranged first marriage the following year, with his parents buying the engagement ring and giving it to his first wife before he had a chance to propose himself. The marriage didn’t last. They had two children then got divorced. ‘I think because of what happened with Juliet, my parents were going to the other extreme of not standing in the way with me.’
His father died of the hospital superbug MRSA shortly after Gerald Ratner had re-made some of his fortune in 2001, so that was a blessing of sorts. But his mother died right at the height of the ‘Crapner’ episode, just as he was having his cancer scare.
A dark period followed in which he sank further into depression. Saw therapists. Stayed in bed all day. ‘I felt everything was against me. I did take some pills. A type of Prozac. And that was a terrible mistake because I needed to get back on my feet and you can’t do that if you are feeling half asleep. I did a lot of damage in that state because I was meeting people and not making a good impression.’
Did he confide in his wife, as well as his therapists? ‘Well I was in a bit of denial for a while, so I probably didn’t talk to my wife as much as I should of done. I was hoping it would go away and everything would be back to normal. I suppose there was an element of pride in it too.’
He found therapy, meanwhile, a fairly pointless exercise. ‘I went to see one shrink and I was the only one in the clinic apart from the actress Charlotte Rampling, so that was a nice experience, even though I was quite drugged up. She said it was all-wrong that the press had driven me to that clinic.’ The shrink didn’t cheer him up particularly. ‘One I saw just kept saying ‘OK’ and left me to do all the talking. Another one did give me one good tip. He said the man who has 2000 shops is no happier than a man who has one shop, and that helped because I realised that material things were not that important, that it was all about self-gratification.’
Talking of materialism, why did he buy a Bentley when he made some money again? ‘I thought if I got a Bentley again it would be a way of proving to myself that I had made a come back. But I’m over that now. I sold it last month because I realised how ridiculous I was being. That’s the old Gerald. It’s not me anymore. I guess I wanted to prove to everyone that I could still have it.’
The removal of his chauffer when his own company fired him in 1992 was, he felt, a particularly gratuitous insult. ‘And I wasn’t equipped to deal with it. I drove myself home that day through pouring rain and nearly ran out of petrol. I found a garage just in time, and as I pulled up to the pump I realised I didn’t know what side the petrol cap was on: the chauffeur had always filled up. After a bit of fiddling around, I eventually got the petrol cap off, but it had been years since I’d used a pump and I only succeeded in covering myself in petrol. I must confess, I actually found myself in tears at that point.’
This black dog lasted for about seven years. ‘In all that time I didn’t have a sense of humour about what had happened at all, because it was quite serious and meant all my staff — we had 27,000 — might lose their jobs. I resented what had happened because I had become known for one thing only, and that thing was stupid and negative.’
He became obsessed with fitness, especially cycling, and he still clocks up 28 miles a day. ‘Cycling beats the depression and makes your mind much more alert. I get my best ideas cycling. I’m totally addicted to it now. When I’m not cycling I go mad. Whatever the weather I have to cycle.’
He also started doing public speaking and found that when he made jokes at his own expense, the audience really warmed to him. ‘My delivery is quite deadpan, I suppose. Moira is right; I come across as quite dour and hang dog, so no one expects jokes. I think they laugh because they have such low expectations of me.’ People often come up to him after his speeches and say how much they enjoyed them. ‘They also admit that when they heard it would be me they thought it would be a miserable person feeling sorry for himself. Some people say: “You really cheered me because your situation was worse than mine.” I suppose there is an element of schadenfreude to it.’
But if his audiences come away feeling better about themselves, that is as nothing to how his after dinner speeches make him feel. ‘I do find them quite cathartic. I should point out though that if I’m self-deprecating in these speeches, it’s only because I’ve got a lot to be self-deprecating about.’
Boom, boom. Does he ever think his ordeal by tabloid might have been a positive experience, in that it has given him a form of immortality? After all, ‘doing a Ratner’, has entered the language as a synonym for being the author of your own downfall. ‘I know what you mean. In those lists of History’s Worst Decisions, I always come top, ahead of Nero allowing Rome to burn and the guy who failed to install a Tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean.’ He rubs the back of his neck. ‘I was doing a speech at a university in the Midlands and a professor came up and said: “Do you realise you will be remembered 500 years after you die for this?” And I said: “I knew it would be with me till I die but I was hoping that would be an end of it.” It is a fact that people know me for that. I was in the Isle of Man not long ago and a taxi driver just said out of the blue: “Why did you say it?” It is extraordinary. I don’t know why it stuck, yet here we are talking about it 19 years later.’
Actually, he is being self-effacing again, because the story of his come-back will also surely feature in the obituaries. After seven years of feeling sorry for himself and, as he puts it, ‘watching too much Countdown’, he decided that the best therapy would be to start again. Realising how therapeutic he had found his cycling, in 1997 he decided to open an upmarket gym, converting a warehouse in Henley. Because no investors would go near him, he hit upon the idea of selling membership for the gym before it was even built. By 2001 it was making £75,000 a year and he was able to sell it for £3.9 million. With the money he bought himself this house, and that Bentley. He also set up his on-line jewellery business, which now has annual sales of around £25 million. Ratner says his best days are Mondays when customers have been round the shops, seen what they want, and then go online to buy it cheaper.
‘The gym was the stepping-stone and I did it with no money, selling membership in advance for a non-existent club. It was a great way of market testing something without any risk. Now with Geraldonline I am trying to manufacture products after we have sold them, because they are so quick making them for us in India.’
Has this enterprise given him almost more pleasure than Ratners, given that this has been his baby from the start, rather than something passed down to him? ‘I was happier sitting in the portacabin in the site for that gym than I was in Ratners’ huge, lavish office on Stratton Street. I felt I was really achieving something. I’d had my success taken away from me and so to get it back I really appreciated it. As Joni Mitchell sang, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.’
Now that he can run his business ‘from a deckchair in Southend’, he finds it a bit soulless though. ‘I’m stuck in front of a computer all day. That’s why I love doing the speeches because it means I meet people. I miss that from Ratners. My trouble is, I spend too much on the Internet when I’m bored. Buying cycling stuff. And one-clicking on ITunes. Looking out for new bands.’
He may get bored and restless from time to time but he does seem comfortable in his skin these days and reconciled to his peculiar fate. A couple of years ago he even published a memoir,  The Rise and Fall… and Rise Again, which he found a therapeutic exercise.  ‘Because I’ve made some sort of a come back I can put my head above the parapet now.  I didn’t want to write that book before because my story didn’t have a happy ending.’
It is time to wind up, so before I go I feel I ought to ask my Mrs Merton style question: So, Gerald Ratner, any regrets? He has the good grace to laugh. ‘What do you think!’
OK, here’s another one, why was his jewellery so cheap? ‘Actually that is a good question. I only achieved the success I had back then because the jewellery business was so conservative and traditional. Like they wouldn’t have prices in the window, which was crazy. I came up with the idea of having one price for everything on a display. But the reason we could be so cheap was that we cut the margin, bought in bulk and used gold that wasn’t of the highest carat. It was a simple formula and other jewellers hadn’t thought to do it because they considered it beneath them.’
Gerald Ratner has acquired a degree of composure these days, it seems. The only thing that annoys him now is if the press call him hapless, as one tabloid did a few week ago, when making an analogy. ‘Such lazy journalism,’ he says with a shake of the head. A final question then. What has he learned from his extraordinary experience? ‘That there is a certain kind of peace that comes with accepting bad luck.’ Pause. ‘It was Noel Coward who said that the secret of success is the capacity to manage failure, and I have managed to be successful two or three times now, despite making that dreadful mistake.’
There is something else he has learned of course, that the only way to stop it hurting when people laugh at you is to laugh at yourself. They are making Gerald Ratner the Musical, he tells me with a grin. ‘Simon Nye is writing the music and the BBC have put money into it. I’m told the first line is “I had it all in my lap, until I said the word crap”.’ He gives an Eeyore-ish shrug and adds: ‘And I don’t even like musicals.’
It is time for us to part company — he has two children from his second marriage, as well as his first, and it is time to do the school run. Parked outside, I notice, is a smart Volvo 4×4. It’s not a Bentley, but it is new.

He’s well-educated, handsome and impeccably connected. Then why is Dominic West so good at playing deeply flawed losers?

Before meeting Dominic West in a pub near his house in Shepherd’s Bush, I’m told by a publicist that the actor is tired of people only ever asking him about The Wire, the gritty, understated, critically acclaimed police drama set in Baltimore. Although “cult” must be one of the most overused and misused words in the arts world, it can be applied with some justification to this series, which ran from 2002-2008.

Its devotees are fanatical and there aren’t that many of them, considering the canonical status the series enjoys – it was aired on an obscure digital channel in this country and so, when word of mouth spread, most people watched the box set on DVD instead. West was its unlikely star – unlikely because his background is so very different from that of McNulty, the hard-drinking, womanising blue-collar American detective he played.

He is, after all, an Old Etonian, as well as a friend of Samantha Cameron.

He’s also married to an aristocrat, Catherine Fitzgerald. They met at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was reading English, but went their separate ways – she married Viscount Lambton, and he had a child with Polly Astor (granddaughter of Lady Astor). They met up again and had three children, all of whom came along to their wedding last year at Glin Castle, her family seat.

Given the baggage that must come with the OE label, you would think that if any subject were off limits, it would be that one. We will, of course, talk about The Wire, because it would be perverse not to – like interviewing Paul McCartney and avoiding The White Album. But for now, let us describe our man as he arrives on a bike wearing a baggy flat cap and an orange patterned scarf. He has just turned 42, and presumably the first thing casting directors notice about him is that he is tall, dark and handsome, though not in a conventional way – indeed, the words that keep cropping up whenever he is profiled are “simian” and “carnivorous grin”. He has teeth like “nutcrackers”, according to one critic. And to this descriptive mix are usually added “oaky voice”, “booming laugh” and “cut-glass vowels”.

But the first thing I notice about him is his beard. He grew it for his much-lauded role as Iago in Othello at the Sheffield Crucible, which has just finished its run. This followed another 1,000-line role in Simon Gray’s Butley in the West End. In that West played a lazy, drunken, extroverted don. He said at the time that he liked that role because it meant he got to be “monstrously camp” and “bitchy”. He has also been all over our television screens this year, having starred in the BBC series The Hour (a second series of which will start filming soon), as well as his chilling and utterly compelling portrayal of Fred West in ITV’s Appropriate Adult. On the big screen he is currently playing the baddy in Johnny English Reborn (a rare taste of critical disapproval for him this, but the critics didn’t stop it becoming number one at the box office) and he is about to appear opposite Rebecca Hall in The Awakening, an atmospheric story set in a Twenties country boarding school, loosely based on The Turn of the Screw.

West plays a wounded veteran of the First World War who is now working as a teacher. “There is an elegiac sadness to the film,” he says. “It plays with this idea that ghosts come out of grief. That they represent a human need to see people because so many had died in the war. The Twenties were a time of grief. People were living in the past because so many of their loved ones had recently died.” West’s grandfather fought at the Somme. “He got injured. Lived a long and happy life in Sheffield. He was an industrialist. We’ve got his medals and his hat. But the best research I found for understanding that period was the poetry. That was the medium of the First World War.” We talk about ghosts and I say that, annoyingly, the film gave me goose bumps – annoying because I don’t believe in ghosts. Does he? “I’m not a rationalist like you. I like to believe there are ghosts all over the place! The country house we filmed in had a lot of history. Several members of the same family had killed themselves there. The son shot himself and I was constantly trying to find that room.”

So he enjoys scaring the bejesus out of himself? “We’re drawn to that which frightens us,” he says. “Morbid curiosity. It’s the reason I like playing evil people like Iago or Fred West. We are fascinated by them.” But at least Iago is fictional. What was most disturbing about his Fred West was his normality. He seemed so matter of fact in the way he talked about his deeds. Worse, he seemed quite vulnerable and almost sympathetic. “My words were almost entirely taken from the transcripts, apart from some of his worst excesses. Everything I did was what I heard on those tapes. There was no acting involved, really. I suppose the psychopath in him meant that he looked to the appropriate adult for cues, because he had no idea what the social convention was on this. He had no understanding of what was thought to be shocking. For him, sweeping up leaves and leaving them in the garden was no different to chopping up his daughter and leaving her there.” In an interview at the time it was screened, he admitted he understood the dark sexual fantasies of West. “This is very, very dangerous territory,” he said. “But necessarily, one has something in common.”

“It got pretty dark,” he now says. “I was having bad dreams about it. It was filmed quite quickly, though, so I could come home and be with my kids and take my mind off it. I realised researching him that anyone who goes near that man, be they a biographer or actor or a relation of the victims, becomes tainted – you’re changed by him in a malign way. It’s extraordinary the power of people like that, they go on after their death. I don’t know whether you would call it charisma, exactly, but he was a lovable rogue, like Iago. Not very intelligent, but likeable and quite charming in his jack-the-laddish way.”

What was really freaky about that performance was that he looked and sounded just like Fred West, even down to the Gloucester accent. “Actually, I thought no one would buy it. But I am hyper self-critical.” I liked the way he kept chewing on his cheek. “Did I? I think that was the fake teeth which gave me even more of a monkey mouth, like his. It helped having a mouthful of too many teeth.” Meeting him in person, I realise that the cheek chewing wasn’t acting. He does it in real life, too.

Dominic West was born in Sheffield, one of seven children. His father made his fortune by manufacturing vandal-proof bus shelters. He played Iago with a Yorkshire accent. How did that go down in Sheffield? “They liked it, but I dare say there were some asking why I was doing it in a Yorkshire accent, asking if I thought Yorkshire sounded evil. But it was the opposite. Yorkshire sounds honest. Everyone calls him honest Iago. He couldn’t do what he did if people didn’t find him honest.” Of all the accents West has nailed, Yorkshire must have been the easiest.

“Yes, because that was the accent with which I used to speak. It also has its dangers, because it comes too easily to me.” What was extraordinary about the pitch-perfect Baltimore accent he adopted for The Wire was that people there had no idea he was an Englishman, though West says he found it a very hard accent to pull off. As part of his research for that role, he spent weeks shadowing real Baltimore cops as they patrolled the ghettos. Must have been an eye opener, that. “I remember my first day standing next to this guy who had been shot eight times and was still alive and his family were standing around him and I was hoping to God they wouldn’t ask me a question. I felt quite uncomfortable, because I was an actor from London. An impostor. Generally when things got exciting, I was excluded – I couldn’t go on drugs raids, for example – but I think it was just as important to learn about the boring stuff, because that is the main part of a cop’s working life.”

Can his friend David Cameron learn any lessons from The Wire about tackling the drug problem here? “Legalise it, you mean? Legalising it was one of the radical ideas we explored in The Wire, as a way of dealing with all the health issues. If you want a radical solution, that’s the way to do it, but it hasn’t been tried yet in real-life Baltimore. I think the writers thought the drug war was a waste of money and lives and that the drug dealers should be run out of town.”

Here’s a name drop, I say. I was round at Ian McEwan’s house not long ago, and I noticed there was no television. Did our Greatest Living Novelist disapprove, I asked? He did have one, he said, but he only used it like a cinema, for watching DVDs. And what was he watching at the moment? The Wire. “Was he?” says West. “That’s great. I think a lot of people did that because when they watched the box set it was quite novelistic, each episode like a chapter. Had it not been for the box set, I don’t think it would have been watched much at all.” What does he make of the fanaticism of the fans? “I do get the feeling from the people who come up to me that they feel like they are members of a secret club. The initiation to this club was sitting through 17 hours of quite impenetrable material. The harder they had to work, the bigger the pay off.”

West was most adept at acting drunk in Butley. And in The Wire too, possibly because he sometimes enjoyed the odd Scotch during filming. And, such is his conscientiousness, his “research” seems to have carried over into Iago – offstage, at least. “With Iago, I would come offstage and go on drinking,” he tells me. What, even when he had a performance the next night? “Yes. Of course. We’d go crazy. You don’t get hangovers because you’re running around so much and sweating so much. Physically, it was demanding for a 42-year-old git like me.” He’s known to like a drink, but now his run has finished I guess it doesn’t matter if he lets his hair down. “I’m in the first week of my holiday and adoring it,” he says. “But by the third week, I’ll be getting a bit antsy. We’re going to Spain tomorrow, then I’m going paragliding with my friends, and then I’m hoping to see the Dalai Lama, because I’ve been doing some work with Free Tibet. We’re flying into Dharamsala from Bir.”

I tell him my pet theory about 42 being the age at which people are reaching their creative peak at the moment: the scriptwriter Abi Morgan? 42. Professor Brian Cox? 42. Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters? 42. “I’m part of this group, you mean? Well, it would be nice to think so. If you spoke to my wife, she would say the success can be dated to me going out with her! But yes, certainly over the past five years. I suppose you get to a time in life where your peers are the people in charge, they are the people about whom books are written and TV documentaries made. They are ‘your time’.” Especially in his case, having been at school with Boris Johnson and David Cameron. “Well, yes, they were older than me, but not by much, so we were near contemporaries. I knew Boris’s brothers well.”

Any memories of Dave he’d like to share? “I wasn’t aware of him at school much, would see him around a bit, but it was Sam I knew better. My good friend Nick was deeply in love with her and resented her going out with this guy Dave. That was really how I got to know him.” Is it true she’s a secret Labour voter? “Really? Why do you say that?” Ed Vaizey MP said she voted Labour in 1997. “That’s hilarious. I can imagine she might because she doesn’t want her husband to be prime minister, though I’m sure she’s delighted he became it. I imagine she would rather have her life back. But I don’t know if she’s a Labour supporter. I doubt it, somehow. He’s very convincing in his arguments.” He chews his cheek. “I think this coalition suits Cameron well because he doesn’t have to pander to his right wing, the Lib Dems keep that in check. He can occupy the middle ground.” West has two sons. Would he consider sending them to Eton, given that in the past he has said he was miserable there? “Yes, I would. It’s an extraordinary place. When I first went there I was desperate not to become what I thought an Etonian was: a soft southerner. It was very much a north-south thing. But it did very quickly nurture my acting. It has the facilities and the excellence of teaching and it will find what you’re good at and nurture it.”

I imagine he, like David Cameron, would rather not carry the label around with him. “I don’t think it will have won Dave any votes. It certainly hasn’t won me any parts. The other day, Newsnight Review was talking about Othello and it came up in five seconds. I thought, ‘Eton is more than half my lifetime ago’. So yes, there is a stigma, and not a benign one. But I do think everyone has to overcome other people’s perceptions of them. Clarke [Peters, who played Othello and was West’s co-star in The Wire] says he gets it with ‘black actor’ but I think there is a political will not to do that now. Old Etonian is attached to my name at every opportunity to explain what? I don’t know. Why I am such an a——-?” The booming laugh again. He doesn’t really think he is one, and I’m inclined to agree.