The accidental millionaire

The book, which centres on the relationship between young Griff and his socially inept, hospital consultant father, has closed the circle for him somewhat, reconciling him with the places of his childhood. "I rather like the suburbs now I have reached this age. The trees growing in the gardens, the sense of order, that John Cheever, John Updike sense that real life is lived in Ruislip and Brentwood and Epping, not in the slightly glamorous world of movie premieres," he says. "The book was about revisiting these places and discovering that in a funny way you can take the boy out of the suburbs but you can't take the suburbs out of the boy."

It could be said that this is still what's eating Griff Rhys Jones, the multimillionaire who reportedly books the cheapest flights when he goes on holiday, a sense that he has moved out of his natural place in the world. Though this he firmly denies. "I fly economy because I can't see the point of paying an extra thousand pounds for some metal cutlery. That's more meanness than anything else. There's no sense of not deserving it, and I have spent my money in all sorts of other lavish ways which suit me perfectly well, and which other people wouldn't particularly want."

But why, you wonder, when he is so wealthy, does he insist on continuing to work so hard, on so many different projects? "You might as well say that Tom Cruise doesn't need to work," he says. "I need to work more than Tom Cruise needs to work, that's for sure.

"Work is the thing that somehow validates one's existence. Most women think about work when they push babies in a pram. I'm not somebody who spends a great deal of time at the golf club, but I have other manly pursuits; and I don't look forward to the time when I can play golf all the time and retire. I'm perfectly happy to continue working because it's what I enjoy doing, but it's not the be-all and end-all.

"The reason I go on and do other things is because of greed," he claims, "not for money, which has honestly come as a byproduct, but the greed for experience, which is what the book is about.

"I've had a fantastic time really, and the only unfortunate thing is that, because I've had my fingers in so many different pies, I sometimes feel like a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. But there we are, that's just the way it worked out. And it's been tremendously successful for me: I've been able to leap from stepping stone to stepping stone without falling in the river too many times."

This life of variety, he admits, is an existence for which he is very grateful. "One of the reasons I now rush about doing lots of different things is that I spent rather too long - 11 or 12 years - labouring in the sketch show mines, which makes me now happy to be dancing freely across various different things. I mean Christ, f***ing hell, for 11 years starting out with 'man walks into shop'. It's fantastic no longer to have to plough that particular furrow."

He says he lurched into comedy "by accident". A would-be intellectual at university, he quickly fell in with the Footlights and Amateur Dramatics Club crowd, and directed plays involving students from Oxford, too. That circle included Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson, Angus Deayton, Jan Ravens and Rory McGrath.

It was, perhaps, his father's essential conservatism that made him, paradoxically, a very diligent comedian. Jones treated comedy like an office job, and after Not the Nine O'Clock News, fearing unemployment, quickly began writing material for Alas Smith and Jones, the show that was never off the air during the 1980s.

"I always feel this curious sense of responsibility," he says now. "That's why we did Smith and Jones for 15 years ... 15 years! Much more focused people than me would have found the courage to say, 'Right, let's stop it now and do something else instead.' But it was a job, and you can't just throw your job in.'"

Now he has taken the "Michael Palin route' - a comparison he slightly baulks at - and reinvented himself, in the public eye at least, as an affable, amusing TV presenter whose injection of wit and generally pleasing personality leavens mildly serious subjects that otherwise probably wouldn't get made into TV at all.

He is about to present a BBC series called Mountain, for example, in which he climbs 15 peaks across Britain, discussing along the way their geology, the people who live on them, and their wider cultural significance. You see, I'm looking forward to this - but it wouldn't have a chance without Jones (or Palin) presenting.

He has been teetotal for 23 years, not because he was ever, quite, a full-blown alcoholic, but because he definitely drank too much, and alcohol might well have wrecked his life had he carried on. "I'm somebody who is consumed by appetites. I love doing things. I liked wine, back then. I liked a lot of it, and I began at one point to think I shouldn't have as much.

"And I have found, along with Dr Johnson, that abstention is easier than restraint. I am not the sort of person who thinks, mmmm, delicious chocolate fondant, I'll just have a bit of it. But I'm also vain: I don't want to be a big, blobby fat man, which I would undoubtedly be. And a very ugly blobby fat man. So there you are, I've done my best to be beautiful."

And so he continues adding strings to his over-strung bow: he has set up another small production company, and, with his intellectual hat on, made programmes on John Betjeman, Arthur Ransome and, to particular acclaim, Rudyard Kipling.

Nowadays, watching Sacha Baron Cohen collect his various awards for Borat, Jones can't help but feel that he and his comedy mates are "past it, really". But he does not seem in the slightest bit melancholy. "I'm the happiest I've ever been in my life at the moment, in my work and the variety of it. That I've taken a step back from comedy. Lenny Henry would say I've taken the money and run, but I never saw myself as a career comedian."

Griff Rhys Jones, after all, is a jack-ofalltrades. What he'd never admit is that he's proved himself to be master of them all.

Semi-Detached: Pulling Up Roots in Suburbia is published in paperback by Penguin, price £6.99.