Not as Joly as he seems

'I don't know because I've never not been depressed, so I've got nothing to compare it with,' says Joly. 'But it must come from it. I think when you watch Trigger Happy, there is clearly a melancholy there.

I'm not a depressed person, but just occasionally, every three years or so, I get what Churchill called "black dog", and that's it. I have to lie low for three months and watch telly. But I'm not a monster. I get a bit lethargic and lie around.'

He refuses to medicate his way out of his misery. 'God, no. Prozac totally blands you out. It doesn't appeal to me. I prefer to take the ups and downs. If you want to be happy, you've got to be unhappy as well.

'But it's a small price to pay: when you come out of it, you feel a lot stronger. You think, nothing's going to bother me again, because nothing's worse than that.'

Joly professes not to understand the root causes of his depression, but it seems probable that it stems from his unsettled childhood.

He was brought up in the Lebanon, the son of two Britons - John Joly, who owns Henry Heald & Co (a shipping agency operating in Beirut and started by Dom Joly's great-grandfather), and his second wife, Yvonne. During the civil war, bombs used to land in Joly's back garden and you wouldn't abandon your cocktail party for the shelter until the machine-gun fire was a street away.

'I remember a friend from school came out to visit me, and I suddenly realised I was living in a very surreal world. But it made for interesting "What I did in my holidays" essays,' he says chirpily, though it must have been terrifying.

After the civil war broke out in 1975, he was sent away to England, to board at the Dragon School, Oxford. It was an experience he describes as 'obscene'.

'That was something I'd never do to my kids. It was hideous, being sent away at seven. But I understand why my parents did it: you don't really want to go to school in Beirut.'

His loneliness was exacerbated by the realisation of how different he was. 'On my first day at prep school, I brought in my little suitcase of shrapnel that I'd collected. I flipped it open, and everyone was like, "Bloody hell.It was all a bit odd."

After the Dragon, he went to board at Haileybury in Hertfordshire, then to college at London's School of Oriental and African Studies, where he studied politics and international relations.

As his father's only son, he might have been expected to take over the family firm. He says it wasn't discussed. 'I was never interested and my sister has taken it over.'

Instead, once he left college, he slid into a series of non-jobs: pizza waiter and a post-sorter for the Royal Bank of Scotland.

He finally wound up at ITN, where, as a freelance producer on the political programme House to House, he had to line up politicians to be interviewed opposite the Houses of Parliament. But odd things happened when Joly was behind the mike, and his services were finally dispensed with after some clowns appeared in the background while he was interviewing Paddy Ashdown, and started fighting.

It was the end of one career, but the beginning of another. Realising that his future lay in comedy, Joly got a job as a researcher on Channel 4's Mark Thomas Comedy Product, then began working on a series of stunts for the Paramount Comedy Channel.

He sent strippers to William Hague's stag party, put a miniature Dome in Peter Mandelson's front garden and, in 1997, changed his name by deed poll to Edward Bear, donned a bear costume and stood for the Teddy Bear Alliance Party in Kensington and Chelsea against Alan Clark. (He came fourth.)

On the strength of these pranks, he was offered his own show. Trigger Happy TV was born to critical acclaim, and Joly was hailed as the ' funniest man on television'.

Only his family failed to be impressed. They are not close. Joly has a half-sister on his father's side, Harriet, 42, who runs the family business, and a half-sister Dominique, 40, and half-brother Marc-Henri, 42, on his mother's side. They live all over the world: Marc-Henri and Harriet in Lebanon and Dominique in Greece.

Consequently, they haven't all got together for 17 years, and Joly doesn't particularly care. 'We all lead such different lives,' he says.

His relationship with his parents is similarly distant. He has been estranged from his father for a decade, ever since his parents divorced. 'We drifted apart,' he says. The relationship was not improved when his father broke his ten-year silence - to speak to a British tabloid.

'The only thing I remember about the piece is him saying I wasn't very academic, and I thought, "I got three f***ing As at A level, how much more academic do you want?" It's insane.'

His father's lack of interest clearly upsets him. 'I'm used to it,' he says, 'but obviously there's an element of "Look at me, Daddy" in what I do. We have a very strange relationship and I don't think he's ever seen what I do. I'd find it very odd if he had. He doesn't approve of what I do, but I don't know what he would approve of, really.'

Joly attributes his father's attitude to the fact that he wanted to write but had to go into the family business instead.

'There has to be some sort of Freudian resentment that I'm doing something I want to do. It's very weird.'

So weird, indeed, that when his wife announced that she was pregnant, three years ago, he was afraid of having a son. 'I'm worried about people continuing their family traits. My dad is a very nice bloke, but there are elements of him that are difficult, and I didn't want to repeat that.'

He is fonder of his mother, though he says she, too, doesn't understand his brand of comedy. 'She's a classic mother, she says it's all a bit fast and loud, and I'm rude. I wouldn't say there was massive family support for what I do.'

Oddly, he chose a wife who can't see the funny side, either. He calls Stacey MacDougall, an art director from Canada, whom he met at dinner at Bertorelli's through mutual friends and married two years ago, 'the most humourless woman I know. She's always saying, "Why don't you get a proper job?"

But comedy aside, he says they see eye to eye on everything. They now have a daughter, Parker, two, named after the satirist Dorothy.

Joly would like more children and is a doting dad. It was one of his recurring nightmares, after Trigger Happy's sketch of a baby that floated out of its pram attached to a balloon, that some fan would drive over Parker's pushchair shouting, 'Dom Joly, you don't fool me!'

In the absence of a close relationship with his own parents, he has mined them for comic potential.

One of the funniest sketches on This Is Dom Joly is a mockumentary, in which Joly introduces us to his monstrous relations: a bored Bosnian wife, a psychotic servant and a gaga, kleptomaniac father.

'We filmed a scene where me and my dad are having lunch and he's never heard of Trigger Happy, and cricket is the only thing he's interested in. That was taken verbatim from conversation I had with my own father.'

This Is Dom Joly sprang from his amusement at the exaggerated reports of the golden handshake that lured him from Channel 4 to the BBC.

He decided to play on the idea by creating a vanity vehicle for himself. 'Most people who make that move - I'm not going to name anyone, Johnny Vaughan - get to the stage where they want to do a Letterman-type show and interview people.'

Joly proves to be television's most inept interviewer since Alan Partridge. His props include an absurdly grand set and a list of grindingly dull questions, as well as a troupe of opinionated dancing bears.

Right now, he is busy filming a second series of This Is Dom Joly, which comes out in September. There's another project, Dom Joly International Rescue (in which he goes to trouble spots around the world to 'sort them out'), in the works. He also has a deal to write a film for Pathé (but, as yet, no script) and is thinking about writing a book. And, on top of all this, he has also been persuaded to produce a new series of Trigger Happy TV for the American market.

No wonder he's decided to bow out of his hectic London life for a few months. While his Notting Hill house is being completely gutted and rebuilt to his own specifications, he has moved with his family to Gloucestershire, where he is renting Anne Robinson's old home - 'the one she had before she got rich'.

To his own surprise, he finds he loves living in the country. 'I wander around with my dog in my Hunter wellies, looking at rivers,' he says. 'It's a healthier way of living. I'm not that interested in coming back; I really do feel part of village life.'

He's even thinking of joining the Pony Club. About the only part of rural life he can't see himself embracing is hunting, he says. Dom Joly, urban terrorist turned country squire? Now, that really would be funny.

This Is Dom Joly starts on 9 February on BBC3