He’s a funny one, David Walliams. Chummy, a little flirty, occasionally reflective, but also elusive, mistrustful, his impassive face once or twice becoming slightly sinister, eyes sliding away and crinkling shut. I interviewed his friend and Little Britain co-star Matt Lucas recently. Lucas had been engagingly open. Walliams was much more circumspect, a man who hadn’t fully worked through what he was about, perhaps, or maybe a man with more secrets.

But then, as we both agreed, it’s a strange business, the celebrity interview. You’re supposed to chat away like old mates, or at least two people with a degree of intimacy, even though you’ve just met and will probably never meet again, and you both know that one of you is going to go away and write it all down and put it in the newspaper.

Walliams is sensitive to this situation. “You musn’t expect an interview like I did on Desert Island Discs,” he warns. Then, in February, he’d been candid because it was on the radio with no intermediary between his words and his audience. “In a magazine the person interprets you.” His tone indicates that this interpretation is not something he relishes.

His admission on Radio 4 that he suffered from the classic comedian’s self-loathing and unhappiness has become a burden. “Now everybody wants that interview again, it’s like ‘How are you feeling?’, ‘Can we make you cry?’” “My God,” I respond, seeing the stubble on his triceps, “do you shave your arms?” “Trim,” he corrects archly, sipping his green tea. “I trim the unsightly hair.” And are you very hairy? “I am.”

This flirtatious tone, as much my doing as his, resurfaces once or twice later on. He seems comfortable with it, a man who, if possible, keeps things light and jokey. “Did I bore you?” he asks at the end, but I was worried it was the other way around; he’s the kind of man who makes you feel a bit dull if you’re too serious. And yet he takes his comedy very seriously, is steeped in its history. “I’d like to meet Galton and Simpson, their writing in Hancock and Steptoe, it was edging into Beckett and Pinter territory. It’s genius, it’s about whether you want to live or die.”

We meet in a photographic studio in East London, talk on a terrace overlooking the Grand Union Canal. Narrow boats chug by. “What a charming vision of England,” says Walliams, waving to a skipper. “You think England’s gone, lost for ever, then some nice people go by on their barge.” The skipper is heavily bearded and pullovered. “Matt and I would say he’s got The Look. He looks like a character already.”

Walliams has forsaken his trademark dark lounge suit for a T-shirt (hence the visible arm stubble) and shiny black trousers. On his undeniably hirsute wrist there is a rather feminine gold watch, Longines. “My dad’s,” he says. “Mum gave it to me when dad died. I made a will recently and left it to my nephew, Eddie. He’s 3.” Walliams shows me a photograph.

Famous friends

We start with the obligatory moan about the press. Walliams has been in the papers a great deal since he became famous six or seven years ago. He’s had long enough to develop a degree of hostility to my trade. “I’ll be out with a couple of friends, get our picture taken, then they cut the boyfriend out and it’s ‘David takes romantic stroll with mystery brunette.’”

“Or I was out with Rob Brydon, a good mate, we went into Marks & Spencer for a pint of milk, paparazzi outside, and the story was ‘Walliams and Brydon thrown out of M&S for chucking toilet rolls around.’ It is problematic. I was talking to Natalie Imbruglia, who’s a mate of mine. She’s just been in Australia doing interviews, she’s got a new album out, and all she was asked about was whether she was shagging Prince Harry.”

Still, having waited many years to be a success, he knows it would be churlish to complain. “When anything bad happens I think, ‘Right, would I give it all up not to have that?’ and I think, ‘Well, no.’”

No, indeed. Walliams seems to like being famous. His friends all seem to be other famous people: Imbruglia; Brydon; Kate Beckinsale; Russell Brand; David Schwimmer; Jonathan Ross; Dale Winton; Elton John. His anecdotes feature other famous people: Roger Moore; Michael Caine; Michael Parkinson; Catherine Tate. Many of his dates/lovers are famous people: Patsy Kensit; Abi Titmuss; Denise Van Outen.

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