Bremner unplugged

In some senses, Bremner is attempting to do with comedy what playwright David Hare, say, has done onstage and craft real voices in real situations to his own dramatic ends. The success of this depends to a large extent on whether you buy into Bremner's agenda - which is Left-liberal and vehemently anti-war - and whether you think the "comic documentary" works as a genre or is a hybrid too far. For Bremner himself, the move is partly a reaction against a national culture dominated by C-list celebrity. "Celebrity has become a parody of itself. When nobody takes anything seriously any more, you're left with a choice - which is either to become another wave in that tide of cynicism or find other areas to explore. Personally, I've become fascinated with the deep background of some of these major political issues." He's next planning a "com-dom" on the world's financial markets, which had better be funnier than it sounds.

When I ask him whether anything can be turned into comic material, the grim subject of Madeleine McCann naturally comes up. Bremner got into hot water last year for including a joke about Madeleine in the last series of Bremner, Bird and Fortune (that Gordon Brown, so desperate to secure election victory, would triumphantly find her on the eve of the poll). He hasn't given a "defence" of that joke until now, and his reaction to the media fuss is, at first, uncharacteristically curt: "That was complete bollocks."

How so? "Well, I read in the papers that it was a joke I'd done, which is just not true, and the whole thing got so out of hand ..." He's a bit flustered here, and as near to cross, I imagine, as he gets in public.

"Firstly, it was in a sketch that John Bird and John Fortune did, and they were in character. They were playing these particular men who were cynical about politics, so straight away that joke is in a context ... John Fortune is very brave in some of the sketches he does because he has no qualms about coming across as someone who's absolutely abhorrent, and that, again, was the context."

He stops and pauses for a second, then says, a little desperately: "But also, there is a difference between the real-life Madeleine McCann tragedy and a reference in a comedy programme to her. You know? You're not actually in Portugal abducting her. It's a reference.

"As soon as it comes out of a comedy show and gets into a newspaper, you've lost control of the story ... I even feel weird justifying it after the event, because the only way you can justify it is to tell people to watch the sketch and see it in context." He cites the Victoria Wood defence: If it's funny, it's not bad taste, and if it's bad taste, it's not funny. "And that line moves all the time." It's up to the viewer, he implies, to make a judgment on the McCann gag. Dozens, apparently, complained to C4.

Yet you can't be an impressionist and worry too much about the sensitivities of others. Heather Mills once sent him "a very stroppy email" after he adapted a joke about the Beatles "dying in the wrong order" and applied it to Labour ministers. "Robin Cook, Donald Dewar and Mo Mowlam; all now gone, leading me to believe that, as someone once said of the Beatles, Labour is dying in the wrong order."

He hoots. "She wrote saying how upset her husband would be. What surprised me was she hadn't heard that line about the Beatles before." Far more sinister was the reaction to a joke about Michael Portillo's sexuality. "I did a sketch a long time ago, about Portillo, and I was in the office late at night when I got a phone call from somebody. And it was very... well, it was the closest thing I've ever got to a threatening phone call." So who made it? "I've no idea. That's when you start to think, well, there are other forces at work ...

"The closer I get to that world - the Westminster village - the dirtier I feel, funnily enough."

If his soul needs cleansing, he does it at home in Oxfordshire. Bremner married the Scottish sculptor Tessa Campbell Fraser five years after divorcing his first wife, teacher Susie Davies. There was a period in between when he dated a number of glamorous women - GMTV newsreader Penny Smith and businesswoman Zoe Appleyard, for example - and was occasionally photographed looking desperately uncomfortable in ill-fitting dinner jackets at society parties. He went through a nervous, unhappy phase during which, oddly, he suffered a brief bout of bulimia and sought therapy (he's no longer in it). But the arrival of his two daughters - Ava, six, and four-year-old Lila - has "absolutely grounded" him. Children are very good at pricking vanity, he says.

"I'll be on TV, and they'll say, oh look, there's daddy, and they'll watch for 30 seconds before My Little Pony becomes more interesting. I have to be careful though. I was reading them Beatrix Potter the other day and realised I was turning into the BBC's Robert Peston.

"When you're in that world, with your family, you wonder how you'll ever get back to work again, because it's such a different world and it's so much more important than anything else you do in your life." He worries - and I think Bremner worries an awful lot - that he spends too long away from them when he's filming. "From about now until the beginning of July, I'm going to be away from home for 51 nights," he sighs. "That's a lot of time. Sometimes, I think, God, I should stop doing what I'm doing and just look after the children full-time."

Not much chance of that, though. Bremner has "about five" projects on the go at any one time. He is " peripherally involved" with the new ITV comedy show Headcases - billed as the new Spitting Image (though he hasn't produced or written any of the material) - and has recently signed up to appear in an episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, the BBC genealogy show in which TV personalities trace their roots. As it happens, Bremner - who was born in Edinburgh, and went to Wellington public school - doesn't know much about his ancestry. He barely knew his father, a former Army major who died of cancer when Rory was 12 - though he's not above making a joke of it. "I'll probably find out my father was a guard at Auschwitz or something terrible, and I'll be the one who cries for all the wrong reasons."

Meanwhile, he obsessively cooks ("the kitchen is actually the last refuge of the control freak") when he's not obsessing about the garden. The "mid-life crisis" is manifest, too, in a new obsession with Formula One racing (he was at the Bahrain Grand Prix last weekend). "It's a guilty pleasure," he says, worrying about carbon footprints and the conspicuous consumption of F1.

"I didn't get out very much before. I tended to work very hard but not play hard and I think part of the [mid-life] crisis is thinking, oh well, you've worked for 22 years ..." He pauses and pulls a face. "But then, of course, you don't want to let anyone down ... " He means the TV audience he has built up over two decades - but there he is again, agonising over it all.

Meanwhile, in make-up, we're back to the artifice of chins and wigs. Briefly Bremner muddles up Capello's and Brown's, and I get to see what the PM would look like with a mass of dark Italian curls (weird). "You've always got to pay the rent by making people laugh. We've got to remember that this is fundamentally a comic show." The paradox is, he's also trying to tell serious jokes. "I suppose what I'm trying to get to is engaged comedy, if you like," he says, contorting that super-malleable brow into an attitude of pure angst. "Because the alternative, really, is just graffiti."

Bremner, Bird and Fortune is on C4 from Sunday 13 April .