Ross, Norton, outside now! Alan Carr, the most sought-after host on television

Alan Carr, Channel 4’s BAFTA-winning chat-show czar, is sitting waiting. I am early but he was earlier. He blinks at me myopically through specs. He doesn’t appear to radiate power but, in television terms, he has proper muscle.

He recently signed a £4 million deal with Channel 4 to stay on board with Chatty Man and its accompanying three million viewers until 2015, having turned down a potentially much fatter pay packet from ITV. He has a natural sweetness; a sort of void where a comedian’s malice usually sits. It takes him about 45 seconds to rev up and then the chatty man is off — jabbering away in his oddly genteel and old-fashioned Northampton accent, which makes him sound like a gossipy but benign landlady.

He seems constantly surprised by the thoughts that pop into his head and there is probably no need to point out that he is screamingly, hootingly camp. He makes his rival Graham Norton look like a marine, even though it is quietly recognised that Norton is the softie chat-show option. Jonathan Ross and Carr are just that bit edgier and pushier with their grilling. (ITV signed Ross for two more series when it couldn’t get Carr.)

Alan, 37, has been accused, by gay activists, of being too gay; of giving them a bad name; of being misrepresentative. ‘I think they have a problem with camp,’ he says. ‘I read something the other day saying that all these gays on the telly are too friendly and I thought, Ant and Dec? Davina? Jonathan Ross? Why am I supposed to be an arsehole? If you’re an arsehole, no one will come on your show. So am I meant to appease all the gays? “Oh, he’s being an arsehole — now that’s a proper gay.” Funny is funny. Nice is nice. It’s not about who you’re having sex with — isn’t that what they all bang on about?’

He has always been mincy. He never needed to come out. ‘I remember being on a beach with my mum and her saying, “Don’t hold that bucket like that!” And it had somehow crept up into the crook of my arm like a handbag.’ This was particularly counterintuitive because Alan hails from proper, macho footballing stock. His grandfather was a footballer, his father Graham was a Geordie footballer who later became manager of Northampton Town and his mother Christine, ‘a Cockney’, was the daughter of Dartford Football Club’s chairman. He has one younger brother, Gary, who ‘works for a bailiff company, is straight, butch and ginger but not the most athletic’. So Graham’s hopes for a footballing dynasty were summarily dashed. Alan, who is nonetheless close to his father and brother, wonders if there had been some kind of mistake. A swap. If somewhere there might be a hairdresser’s child kicking a ball around with great skill.

Alan didn’t realise he was gay as a child — it didn’t enter the equation — but when puberty hit and ‘people started getting a bit birds and bees, then the girls who had been my friends wanted to hang around with the sexy boy on a motorbike, not the one who said, “Oooh, did you see The Golden Girls last night? Let’s skip!” And all of a sudden it was just me hanging out with the kids from computer class and the dinner ladies at lunchtime. I was bullied — it sounds really bad because no one should be bullied — but I can see why. Then I got a kind of “This is me” confidence at about 16.’ He felt like the only gay in Northampton. ‘There was no gay outlet. I ended up hanging around hairdressers to see where they went when they clocked off. Then you’d hear about a “poetry evening” so you’d head off there. It was like being in the resistance, trying to find gays.’

He read theatre studies at Middlesex University and, much as he yearned to play Hamlet, ‘I didn’t have the range. I got the shock of my life when I saw a video of myself — I didn’t realise I was that camp.’ And so he signed up for a stand-up comedy module ‘where you wrote bits and pieces and then performed in a pub in front of an audience and your tutor marked you. How scary is that?’ he says. ‘I ripped the roof off. It went great. But I vowed I was never doing it again. Too frightening. I was vomiting, I couldn’t eat, I hadn’t done a solid poo for a week. Why would I put myself through that?’ So he worked in factories and as a receptionist — ‘people would piss themselves when they heard my voice’ — and in call centres. He got depressed. He developed psoriasis that got worse and worse before disappearing when, while living in Manchester in 2001, he chucked in the grunt work because stand-up suddenly didn’t look so bad by comparison. He went to Edinburgh and won the BBC Best New Stand-up and hit the road as a jobbing comedian before co-hosting The Friday Night Project with Justin Lee Collins.

Comedians, he says, are generally ‘f***ed up. If you are any good, you work every night except Sunday going from Aberystwyth to Inverness to Cornwall to Aberdeen and it’s very isolating. My other half, Paul [Drayton], said to me, “Where are your friends? Why haven’t you got any?” Well, a rolling stone gathers no moss.’ Although he is ‘God Fairy’ to the singer Adele’s small son Angelo.

Paul, 42, and Alan have been together for five years since meeting at a birthday party. ‘I had these nice grey Prada trousers on and this lovely shirt, but then I spilt tea down the shirt so I changed, popped on a blue shirt and this grey V-neck and ran out the house,’ he says. ‘I caught sight of myself in a mirror and I was basically wearing the old Tesco uniform. Not sexy. Then Paul turned up and I just fell in love with him. He does property development and has a concierge business, and he does everything for me. He’s a doer. “Oooh, can you put those shelves up? Oooh, I need a bonsai tree.” Done, done done.’ They live in a little house in Bayswater and walk Bev and Joyce, their two red setters, in Hyde Park. ‘And I can’t see it changing,’ he says of Paul. ‘We don’t have that lifestyle where we stagger down Old Compton Street on poppers and we don’t have an open relationship. People say, “Oooh, I don’t see you at Pride.” Well, I am very proud of being a gay man but it’s just not my cup of tea. I’m too old for a whistle and a muscle vest.’

The (incredibly lucrative — now filling The O2 with no backing dancers or band to pay) touring continues to this day but the television career is clearly solid. The 100th episode of Chatty Man will be aired next month and, although only a few years ago he was Jonathan Ross’ warm-up guy, Carr seems to be edging ahead on the bookings front with everyone from Rihanna to Lady Gaga to Harry Styles sipping something on his sofa, which is supposed to be a mock-up of his front room where he can lean over to a bar and mix them a drink.

‘People don’t open up as much as they used to, do they?’ he says. ‘You don’t get those Parkinson ones any more where they say, “The man touched me here” or “I’ve got a drug problem”, so I don’t get people crying, but I might get Rihanna in hysterics or One Direction talking about chlamydia. Listen, it ain’t QI and I never said it was. But I do think we get something out of them. I mean I see the old interviews with Bette Davis or Joan Crawford; these characters who clawed their way up — what stories! But I am told, “You even mention this person’s alcoholism and they are walking off.” Where are the characters now? The last one was probably Amy Winehouse. I had dinner with her once and she was really lovely and generous. I remember her pulling this crisp roll of notes out of her cleavage. The sad thing was that she kept going to the toilet and I think it was more than coke because she was away with the fairies; more and more wired. I mean that’s no showbiz exclusive, but what a waste.’