Julian Clary - oh yes it is

Half past two in the afternoon and there are hundreds of school children milling around Woking. There are so many of these children that it's quite terrifying. They are queuing for sweets and crisps and Coke and the loo and they've all come to see Cinderella, starring Julian Clary. He's playing the part of Dandini, the Prince's right-hand man. Or, as Clary would put it, the Prince's right hand man. Later, Clary tells me that, as he basically wrote the script, he beefed the part up.

"Next year I might be the Lord Chancellor," he says, "and I'd make that a more camp role with more scenes." But, at the moment, no one seems to be commenting on how such a bit part came to dominate the stage because when Clary comes on, the audience whoop and cheer and wave their fluorescent deely-boppers all over the place. Clary looks as resplendent as he usually does in over-the-top wig and tight glittering panto clothes.

Quite soon, however, it starts going slightly wrong. I'm not sure if it's that the audience, average age about 12, don't get the jokes or whether Clary's brand of camp, innuendobased humour is no longer in fashion.

Whatever it is, lines such as (to the Prince), "Ooh, you can show me the lay of the landî - boom boom! - and "do I get to steal your cherry?î fall flat. At some point Clary says, "You can laugh you know. There's a joke in every line if you listen carefully.î

The upshot is that it's a tired, slightly fed-up Clary I meet after the performance. He is sitting in his dressing room surrounded by bouquets of flowers (it's the first night) and copious bottles of Sainsbury's champagne. "They're not for me," he says dismissively. "They're for the cast. After all this is Woking." Then again, he picked the cast. "But, although we work closely together," he says, "and it's all very friendly while the run is on, we don't see each other at all afterwards." Well, he sees his sister Frankie Castro, a former Tiller Girl, cast as the good fairy for the last two years running. "She dressed me for the first year," he says, "but she makes a good fairy, doesn't she?"

The emphasis, of course, in Clary world, is on the "fairy". He looks surprisingly macho himself, though, in a white T-shirt and jeans. He has very long legs and a muscular body, and cropped dyed-blond hair, a bit like a beefed-up Gary Numan. He appears different from how I remember him, but that's because I've never seen him out of costume. He basically lives in glittery outfits. If he hasn't got a tower of flowers on his head, then he's laced into a frilly corset or some such. Very few people have seen him look "normal", he says. "That's what entertaining's about," he says. "I like to wear flowers in my hair and whatever. People expect it of me. I'm a service industry." He's at it again - him and his service industry. But he's not really on form today. His eyes look red. He says it's the make-up that irritates them. He then tells me he's feeling irritable.

"I always feel irritable when I'm tired,î he says. "A Japanese friend of mine just rang and I couldn't understand a word she was saying and that's made me annoyed.î He's also just done two hours of, "Oh, yes he did; oh, no he didn'tî. In another two hours he'll be back on stage, quipping about back passages and double-entendreing about cherries again.

It must be tremendously exhausting and surely a bit of a come-down for a man who was once considered so risquè that a) he was allowed to present the 1993 British Comedy awards which he then b) messed up completely by making a joke about performing a sex act on Norman Lamont. Clary was dropped like a hot cake from LWT even though, at the time, his dominance of the light-entertainment market seemed unassailable. "Oh, well, maybe I was tactless," he says.

But his below-the-belt humour was successful because it relit a touch paper, long rather dormant, of the English obsession with the type of ooh-missus humour perfected previously by Kenneth Williams. "Oh, I wouldn't say I started anything new," says Clary, "I think the timing was right."

But those who followed - Graham Norton and his ilk - don't seem half so risquè. "Maybe it's all changed now," says Clary. "I wanted to call the two ugly sisters Hernia and Haemorrhoidia, but I was told the last name was too rude. I said, 'It's only a medical condition'. In the end we settled for Verruca. Can't see why, though."

Then he turns away and gets on with the business of removing the copious amount of make-up he has to wear.

"It's killing my skin," he says, proffering a blemish-free cheek. He then puts lots of cold cream on, dabs his intensely blue eyes with a calming wipe and proceeds to eat some fresh strawberries. Absolutely out of nowhere he says: "There's a home for people with Alzheimer's across the road. They had their Christmas party today. I wonder why they bothered. I mean you could just tell them they'd had a Christmas party and they wouldn't know the difference."

Ah, classic Clary - close to the edge, left-field, bordering on the offensive, but also funny. It's what took him from being an ex-Goldsmiths student, camping it up on the fringe, to a mainstream TV star. He was, all those years ago, the Joan Collins Fan Club with Fanny the Wonderdog who wore pearls (the dog and Clary). The success of this act took him on to Friday Night Live, which in turn led to Sticky Moments, a television show of his own. Clary's trick was to pick out members of the public to be contestants and then humiliate them with his bitingly well-timed mock asides.

"They said we couldn't make the set bright colours because the lights would 'bounce' off the walls, and we couldn't just pick any old member of the audience because they were supposed to be vetted. We ignored all that and did it our way, and it was very successful, I think. If someone was boring I just told them they were and dismissed them from the stage."

Clary was always very good at that dismissal tactic. Maybe it is because there's something rather laconic and haughty about him. He's good at hiding. He's not rude, as such, just off-puttingly unforthcoming. After all, it's much easier to get people to reveal things about themselves and stay terribly private yourself than it is the other way around. He's always been funny but not necessarily truthful. "Is humour a protection?" he says.

He has an infuriating habit of answering questions with questions. So, when asked why he thinks middle England took him to their hearts (which they did. I remember some friends of my mother trooping off to see him in High Wycombe), he replies, "Why wouldn't they?"

It makes him very disconcerting. There is absolutely no safe ground with him. Ruby Wax found this out to her peril a couple of years ago when he had a panic attack on her chat show and walked out. He also fell to pieces, quite understandably, after his boyfriend, Christopher, died of Aids in 1991. In fact, he virtually disappeared.

But Clary obviously doesn't see it that way. "What do you mean by 'virtually disappeared'?" he says huffily. "I'll have it known that I was doing lots of projects." But, I point out, there is a wide chasm between being on primetime TV all the time and doing three consecutive years in panto. "If I didn't like it I wouldn't be here," he says. "I find not working boring and at least I know what I'll be doing at Christmas rather than feeling ..." He seems stuck for words. "Lonely?" I suggest. "At a loose end," he corrects.

Then again, he seems disinterested in his career. Maybe it's because he's 43 now and what seemed close to the edge 20 years ago has paled. Maybe it's because the promise of fame in the States never really worked out.

"I went to LA a while ago," he says. "They were all, 'Oh, Julian, you're the greatest thing ever. America'll just love you'. We did a pilot of a chat show and I waited and waited and I never heard from them again."

Was that depressing? "Why would it be?" he asks. He also recalls the time he just left the stage in New York when performing off Broadway. "The audience, all 18 of them, didn't get the humour and I thought I'd just leave, but I had a change of heart as I was going down the drainpipe."

He's always having changes of heart. He once tried to commit suicide - after Christopher died and a lover left him and the Lamont debacle. He booked into the Intercontinental Hotel and then got so engrossed watching the TV he forgot to take the pills. "Then, in the morning I thought how horrible it would be for a chambermaid to find me," he says. The upshot is that nothing happened. Maybe it was never going to happen.

In the same vein he said, when he turned 40, that he'd like to have a baby. A friend agreed to be artificially inseminated. But then Clary changed his mind and got a dog (poor Fanny having died, aged 19) and a cat instead.

In fact, the only constant thing about him is his relationship with his family. He spent his birthday with some friends in Majorca near where his sister and his parents have a home. He certainly seems to change boyfriends on a pretty regular basis. "I like to make up boyfriends," he says, "you know, pretend there's three of them and they're all in the Army or something." He lives alone, bar the pets, but he talks to his mother every day. "I do believe in keeping family close," he says.

He was always a mother's boy. When he was an adolescent and living in Teddington with his probation officer mother and policeman father and two sisters, he and his friend Nick used to go around wearing make-up and deliberately acting up. He was called "Clary the Fairy", but no one, including his mother, seemed to mind.

"Oh, she's always been very protective," he says. In a newspaper article, his sister Frankie said he was by far the favourite.

She also said the two siblings had the same sense of humour, but that although Clary was generally a gentle soul, his wit could be cruel sometimes. "I don't agree with that," he says. "I use my humour carefully and for professional purposes. I say things people would like to say, but don't. That isn't cruel. And how do you define cruel, anyway?"

Whatever it is, there does seem to be something absent from the very heart of Clary. He doesn't seem to laugh much any more. "I do!" he says. "I was in Taboo and I had great fun." Then, somehow, we turn to the subject of death. "I always think about death when I'm in panto," he says. "My parents are coming to see me tomorrow night and they're both 71 and I've started worrying about them.

"Why do I? All my family have a habit of being fit and healthy and then just dropping down dead. That's the best way to go. Who wants to cling on to life? But people do, don't they? For ages, even when it's so painful."

When he feels depressed he reads a book he discovered a while back. "It's called Stop Thinking, Start Living," he says, polishing off the last of the strawberries. Then he says he has to go and do his Christmas shopping.

"In Woking," he says miserably. "My friends will think I have no taste." And then it's back to "He's behind you", or "he's behind youî, as Clary puts it. "Ooh, at last I get to dress up again,î he says. "No one does it any more. It's all very dull these days, isn't it?î

Cinderella plays at Woking's New Victoria Theatre until 26 January. Box office: 01483 545900.