Life's one big good hair day - Justin Lee Collins interview

Justin Lee Collins just can't seem to believe his luck, whether talking about his television work or his wife and kids. Aidan Smith meets the modest funnyman with the luscious locks who would never want to forget his roots

IF I HAD a pound for every time a celebrity – asked where they want to be in 10 years' time – has answered in a mock-humble manner about their only desire being the opportunity to do "good work", then I would be quite rich. All right, not absolutely loaded, but I could certainly afford a high-performance water pistol so they could be lined up against a wall and shot.

It's refreshing, therefore, to meet Justin Lee Collins, one of TV's hottest properties right now, who would appear to obsess about his career as much as he does his waistline and his hair. In other words, not at all. I say "would appear" because I do not know him, not properly, and for the past hour may have been witnessing a performance. Collins is aware of this. "You may think I'm a liar and what you think is your business," he says, "but I don't care about fame or being famous. I just don't give a f**k."

Now he's annoyed with himself. His mother doesn't like it when he swears. He's managed to get though almost the entire interview without swearing, only to slip up near the end. "Oh well," he says, "at least it emphasises my point. Where do I want to be 10 years from now? My telly career will be over, that's for sure. I'll be back in Bristol with my lovely wife and our two smashing boys, and unless the local radio station wants to give me a late-night show, which would be very nice, then I'll be retired."

TV, of course, may not let him retire. Collins is the cult presenter, with Alan Carr, of Channel 4's The Friday Night Project. He also fronts the Bring Back… series for the same channel in which he attempts to reunite Telly Heaven and Movie Gold line-ups (Grange Hill, Dallas and, next up, Star Wars). Now ITV is sizing him up for a chat show. And Sky One wants to base a series round his attempts to become a darts pro. Justin Lee Collins has his name attached to no fewer than six definite possibilities. "All the things I've wanted to do are starting to fall into place," he says. "It's very interesting." Sounds more than interesting, but on a damp day in London, and remembering how long he's taken to get this far, that's all it is.

We're in a TV production office. Everyone is T-shirted and about to fire out the door for a super-skinny lunch break. The slogan on Collins' top reads "Respect your mother". It's stretched across a physique for which Collins would seem to have a fair amount of disrespect. But looking the way he does comes at a price.

"I pay 62 quid a month to be a member of a health club. Guess how many times I go? I've never been." Every now and again during his lean years – lean as in unproductive – his agent would suggest he try losing weight. "And every few months we'd have the haircut conversation, which would inevitably lead to the beard conversation."

But Collins, who is 34, could no more change his appearance than he could his West Country accent. His appeal and his success are wrapped up in a persona that is equal parts Werewolf, Wurzel and Whitesnake (as in the hair-metal band, one of his favourites). He laughs in that endearing oo-ar fashion. "I'm trapped," he says, "but, you know, the beard is there for a reason: I have five chins. Same with the long hair – look..." A clump is pulled back to reveal a red, flaking scalp – he suffers from psoriasis. Then he pats his belly contentedly. He's not about to give up the curries any time soon.

Collins is happy to play up to his post-pub-telly image, but this hides another side to him. He's a fan of authors not usually found on celebrity reading lists (Camus, Kafka, Sartre) and there simply isn't time today to hear his views on existentialism. Once, though, time was all he had. "I went eight years without getting a break of any significance," he says. "I was a terrible stand-up comic. My routine was improvised. By that I don't mean that making up jokes on the spot was my skill. I had no material; no act. And I went out and did this non-act night after night."

So where did this urge to perform, to humiliate himself, come from? After all, there was no showbiz in the family: father Danny was a self-employed electrician, his mum Annita was a dinner lady, and as an only child there was no readymade audience at home in Bristol.

"I don't know. As a kid I loved Morecambe and Wise, Tommy Cooper and Les Dawson – all pretty old-fashioned for someone my age. At school I was the class clown. I hate that phrase and prefer 'prick'. So I left at 15 with no qualifications. We lived across the road from the school and every day my mum packed me off with the same advice: 'Be good and kind to people.' She also used to say that being a binman was an honourable profession. There was no pressure on me to succeed. Not like kids have now.

"I got a job with Marks & Spencer – a job for life, my gran said. But I hated it. I had to pluck up a lot of courage to tell my dad what I really wanted to do. He was great. He found out about theatre courses and got me on to one. Now he's proud of me to an almost embarrassing degree. The night he and my uncle saw my stand-up was when I 'died' the most. He'd be in the front row of every Friday Night Project if he could but he's banned. Mum is very proud of me but doesn't like the rudeness and so nips off early to bed."

Despite the odd four-letter word, Collins says he still tries to follow his mother's advice. The upcoming Bring Back… Star Wars is, like the previous quests, driven by his gallumphing fan-love. Rather than scoff at Mark (Luke Skywalker) Hamill's demand for a $50,000 appearance fee, he urged Channel 4 to pay it. And he has nothing but nice things to say about Mariah Carey, a recent guest host of the Project, even though she turned up with a 20-strong entourage that included her own lighting consultant. He sees everyone in the best light, even the diva's diva.

I reckon men like Collins because he's no threat and he agrees. "I'm not cool," he says with pride. But he's less keen on my theory about his appeal to women being as a hairy antidote to metrosexuality. "No, I'm very metro," he insists. "I'm touchy-feely, a big hugger. People who don't know me think I'm gay."

Sex symbols come in all shapes and sizes these days but Collins refuses to accept he is one. He cannot imagine what it might be like to be a single man with a job in TV, at large in London. For him, the best thing about the Big Smoke is the train home to Bristol. And he claims he's always been useless with women.

"I've only ever had two girlfriends and I ended up marrying the second one," he says of his wife Karen, mother to sons Archie and Harvey. They met in a video shop where Collins worked with her brother. "She knew me when I was nothing. When I couldn't get a break, she worked in a bank to pay the bills. I'm an exceptionally lucky man."

Collins uses the word "luck" a lot. There were problems with Harvey's birth and he regards himself as lucky to have two healthy sons so he and Karen probably won't try for any more children. He's lucky to belong to Bristol: classically Georgian when viewed from one angle but take a sharp turn and it becomes edgy.

"It's no accident that Banksy (the graffiti artist] and Massive Attack are Bristolians," he says. He also counts himself lucky to have known those eight years of oblivion for they put everything – fame, family life, where he's from and where he might be going – into proper perspective.

The lunchbreak is over, the thin people have returned and the brainstorming sessions are about to resume. Justin Lee Collins would make an easy target for my water pistol but when he gives me one of his metrosexual hugs and declares that he wants to do only "good work" from now on, I can't help but wish him well.

• Bring Back… Star Wars will be shown on C4 next month