No more Mr Nice Guy

Alan Davies is in a bad mood; or at least I hope he is. If he's this irritable every day, then it can't be much fun being him. Today at any rate, he displays a mild misanthropy that verges on entertaining bitchiness - the list of people Davies actively dislikes this morning (and journalists are pretty high up) would fill several columns all by themselves - but occasionally blossoms into real vitriol. Possibly, I think later, this is a conscious tactic designed to outwit me, since I had, of course, imagined him the nicest, cuddliest, Jonathan Creek-iest man on earth. Well, scrub that.

I start by asking him, boringly I admit, how he got the part in the new, compellingly subtle ITV drama Bob and Rose, in which he plays Bob, a gay man who falls in love with a woman. "I read the script," he replies, and then adds: "The agent I had at the time was an idiot so I didn't listen to anything she said."

We talk for a while about the ways in which people might misinterpret the premise of Bob and Rose according to their own sexual prejudices, or fears. The fact that a gay man - not a bisexual man - might fall for a woman sexually "blurs the lines", he says. "Straight people who are scared of gays don't like that because it means that they might be blurrable too; it's amazing how many people want to get the rules down when they talk to me about this." He looks me straight in the eye and for a second I think he's accusing me of - Jesus - homophobia, or gross naivety, or something equally offensive. We agree that "sexuality isn't that easy to define".

Before filming Bob and Rose, Davies spent 10 months "sitting on my arse", waiting for something decent to land through the letter box. At the time he had "no motivation" for the stand-up act that first made him famous (though he's been in Edinburgh this summer to pretty good reviews) and got bored to the point of depression.

I get the feeling he's a perfectionist about his writing but also pretty difficult to work with, when he wants to be. He has enormous respect for the writers of both Jonathan Creek and Bob and Rose, David Renwick and Russell T Davies (the man behind Queer As Folk) respectively, since he's tried to write a sitcom for telly himself and found it infuriatingly, exhaustingly difficult. As a counter-weight to this, he professes zero respect for the TV executives who, it seems to him, frustrate and bully the talent responsible for the actual making of programmes. He reserves some of his deepest dislike for BBC suits in particular and thinks that, since the huge success of Jonathan Creek, he's been treated to some extent like a BBC commodity.

He tells me about his half-written sitcom. He knew it wasn't ready to film, the director John Lloyd - who directs him in those Abbey National ads - knew it wasn't ready to film, yet "the head of entertainment and the head of comedy and the producer were saying it was hilarious, and they wanted me to make it right then, in three weeks' time. They said, if you don't make it in three weeks' time, you'll never work for the BBC again."

"It was intolerable pressure," Davies continues, "and it upset me because I'd always associated the BBC with the best in sitcom, growing up. I had this feeling that ... oh, I don't know."

That you were a biddable product?

"I was going to say unloved but that makes me sound a bit self-pitying. I didn't feel nurtured. I thought you'd be helped and nurtured and the best brought out of you, but in fact you were bullied and shouted at." Davies laughs wearily. "I felt like saying: I don't want to be on television that much, don't you understand? I don't have to work because - guess what? - I do adverts for a bank. I've sold my soul so I don't have to work; you're trying to persuade Dr Faustus to write a sitcom, and he's not interested."

Ouch. And this is by no means the rudest thing he says about the BBC execs, whom he also blames for "idiotic scheduling" of two Davies vehicles, the romantic comedy A Many Splintered Thing and the excellent documentary Stand-Up with Alan Davies, both broadcast back-to-back a year ago, thus provoking "idiots in the Press" to write articles accusing him of Carol Vorderman-style ubiquity. There are quite a lot of idiots out there, according to Davies.

Then again, the BBC should know an asset when they see one. In Jonathan Creek, Davies has an on-screen charisma matched by few leading men; they've already lost Caroline Quentin to ITV - she's written out of this year's Christmas Special - and desperately need Davies to maintain his links with the show, or risk losing it and a favourite actor altogether.

Davies was born in Chingford 35 years ago, and brought up in Loughton, Essex. As a kid, he thought it was cooler to say he came from London, so blurred the boundaries a little. It's well documented that his mum died of leukaemia when he was six. His dad, an accountant who remarried 10 years later, provided a suburban middle-class childhood that ended in "perfectly normal parental terror" when Davies announced his decision to study drama at university, rather than something sensible resulting in a job.

"It was the Eighties, so the drama department was madly politically correct. Ironically given the part I've just done (in Bob and Rose), people assumed I was a homophobe because I liked football."

In fact the drama course was rubbish, he says, and the drama society pretty hopeless, too, so Davies went off and did his own thing. A stand-up career was born, largely in the small, atmospheric comedy clubs that now provoke nostalgic yearning among the comics who learned their trade in them. These were the days before Jongleurs judged comedians according to their ability to placate the beered-up masses ("people on the bill there spend as little time in the building as they can"), pre-West End runs, a golden age that produced a dozen unique comedy stars, among them: Jo Brand, Steve Coogan, Eddie Izzard, Harry Hill, Bill Bailey, Alan Davies.

Jonathan Creek was the big break, of course, the show that earned him a nomination as Most Popular Actor on TV (John Thaw won that year) and the over-excited attention of the loathsome national Press. Newspaper stories got horribly personal about his girlfriends for a while, and left him battered and suspicious. Any mention of the tabloids now elicits a howl of indignation and a couple of tales that reflect poorly on the journalists concerned, though Davies willingly slags off one of those girlfriends to me in terms that border on the venomous. He's single right now.

I guess I just got Davies on a bad day. As soon as we talk about football, and his beloved Arsenal, he's a changed man. Maybe he's thin-skinned as a result of past problems with the Press. But look, I didn't once ask him about his damn hair: he really didn't have to be so cross.

Bob and Rose is to be shown on ITV this autumn.