Gervais: I've never been driven by money

Comedy, says Ricky Gervais, Britain's finest and most successful contemporary comic, is "easy". It's like falling off a log to him; he could write something funny right here. "If someone ran in and said: 'Oh my God, we need a sketch for three people and it's got to be about this', I could do it. I could do it as I spoke, it would rattle off my tongue. It's easy."

We are sitting in a particularly uninspiring back-stage dressing room at Birmingham's National Indor Arena, whose stage Gervais will take later tonight on the Fame stand-up tour. He is dressed like a roadie in jeans and black Tshirt, and isn't nearly as plump as he appears on TV, though, at five foot eight, he's definitely as short. Clothes aren't a priority. Once, as he walked the red carpet on his way to an awards ceremony, he was asked by a TV reporter to name the designer who'd made his suit. "I said I really didn't know. So she said, don't you like getting dressed up? And I said, 'No I f***ing hate it. I'd be here in my pyjamas if I could.'" Afterwards, he worried that he was rude, but it was a pretty daft question. "I'll talk about comedy until the cows come home, but I don't want to talk about the shampoo I use."

And, sure, he's funny - in a rather prickly, clearly instinctive way, like the witty, acerbic bloke in the pub or, yes, in the office. He does the odd gag ("Ooooh, he's just asked me to pop my top off!" to a bemused security guard , a s he's photographed), and otherwise spatters his answers with that heavy irony, that glance to the complicit camera, that has become a kind of trademark.

But at 45 Gervais is by no means an unserious person. He is at times an outrageous comedy and TV snob, and at others surprisingly vehement in his loathing, say, of the C-list celebrity culture. Yet you could easily argue, paradoxically, that his huge success is largely the result of the intense seriousness with which he views both comedy in general, and his career in particular.

His great facility for writing great comedy - his stand-up, the record-breaking podcasts; The Office and Extras - and now his role in the box-office hit A Night at the Museum with Ben Stiller have clearly made him very famous and very, very rich. (He owns a place in Bloomsbury and a £2.5 million mansion in Hampstead, intowhich he and his long-term partner TV producer Jane Fallon will move this summer, once the builders are finished and is said to be looking for a £3 million home in New York at which to entertain his Hollywood "mates".) Yet Gervais claims to be truly comfortable with neither stardom nor wealth. "I can categorically say that having money is better than not having money," he says. "But how much money do you need, you know?"

In the first few years, he says, when the money started rolling in from The Office - the syndication, the DVDs - he found that "it ruined it all a bit for me". I ask him what on earth he means. Millions of pounds? He didn't want them? "No, really, for the first couple of years, I'd get a cheque through the post and I'd go, oh ..." he mimes glancing at it, and then putting it down unhappily. "I thought it was distasteful. I suppose I felt guilty for making such a lot of money for doing something that is such good fun, but also, I'm not fighting in the trenches, I'm not a nurse doing an 18-hour day ... I want people to know that the money has never been a driving force in what I do."

It's a key insight, I think - if you believe him. Throughout our interview, Gervais returns to the touchstone of his career as a writer and comedian: his refusal to compromise the "vision" he and co-creator Stephen Merchant first had when they dreamt up The Office, and his refusal to concede any artistic control ever since. "I wouldn't have changed a single word [of The Office] even if it had meant an extra million viewers," he says. And later: "If the BBC had said, you can't play David Brent because we're giving that to, I dunno, Bill Treacher, I'd have said, no. And I'd have taken it somewhere else, or maybe it wouldn't have got made."

What really matters to him, he insists, isn't money or the recognition or the cabinet full of awards (though he does go on about the awards) but the "integrity" of the "product". This is the central conceit around which he and Merchant built the second series of Extras. The misery of sitcom writer Andy Millman, who does compromise, is at the heart of every gag.

Not that Gervais was always this highminded. In the late Nineties, he kicked around a number of low-rent sketch and chat shows before teaming up with Merchant, whom he met at radio station Xfm. Merchant was in his early twenties; a media studies graduate who wanted to be a stand-up comic. "I'd muck around a lot and make him laugh," says Gervais. He had a character called Seedy Boss, "which I was going to do nothing with" but who was David Brent. Merchant went on a BBC training course, and as an exercise in production techniques, filmed Gervais's Seedy Boss. This mini-fake-documentary fell into the hands of suits at BBC2, who commissioned a pilot.

Gervais was 40 when The Office reached the screen and though Merchant had a galvanising influence, I wonder why it took him so long to exploit his talent. "I never tried. I never bothered," he says. Brought up on a council estate in Reading, Gervais was the fourth child in a family that valued the work ethic. His dad, born in Quebec, was a labourer and his mum a housewife. "The most important thing growing up was get a decent job, live a normal life and have a laugh. As long as you didn't miss a day's work, you were allowed to have a laugh." Yet: "I was incredibly lazy. I never sat around thinking: 'One day I'll do it.' Like most creative people, I had ideas for six novels that I never got round to starting and 12 films that didn't get past the credits. Then I took redundancy from Xfm and thought, this is the chance. They gave me about £10,000 and I thought: I can live on that for a year."