Martin Clunes: ‘If you said today that Kylie had buttocks like a racehorse you’d be hearing from her lawyers’

For 18 years, Martin Clunes was the face of British television’s most popular drama series. Clunes played Doc Martin, the eponymous grouchy, haemophobic GP whose light-hearted encounters with the often eccentric residents of Portwenn in Cornwall represented a very particular sort of TV idyll.

Now, he’s back on our screen presenting a different side of rural life. In Out There, Clunes plays Nathan Williams, a Monmouthshire farmer whose son Johnny (played by Louis Ashbourne Serkis, son of Lord of the Rings star Andy Serkis and Sherwood’s Lorraine Ashbourne) is caught up with a county lines drug-dealing gang from nearby Newport. When Nathan confronts them, father and son find themselves in a terrifying situation. The 63-year-old actor explains the crux of the drama.

“There’s having a bit of a puff at a party and then there’s this industrialised, monetised system, the nitty-gritty of how it got to that party – that’s kind of overlooked. Maybe we’re showing that in a way that a headline doesn’t.”

Clunes, who lives with his wife, the producer Philippa Braithwaite on a farm near Beaminster in Dorset, is all too aware of this insidious piece of urban life which has made its way to the country.

“It’s not a million miles away, you hear about it,” he says. “I was listening to a radio programme recently which was talking to a lot of the families whose children were involved, one saying how they lost their son whilst he was still alive. You know, they’ve just gone. They’re a disposable workforce, like the Third Reich. There’s always someone to fill another rank. There’s no compassion there. Such ruthlessness.”

If Out There appears to be a very different role for Clunes, it also marks a change in terms of depictions of British country life, which often borders on the twee, or feels like a metropolitan take on life outside the M25.

“It’s good to see drama in a rural setting for a change,” he says. “I’m not a countryside campaigner or anything, but I think in the cities there is quite widespread disinterest about what goes on in the country. People are quite happy with being ignorant about it.”

Dressed in a pale blue sweater over a checked red shirt, beige chinos and trainers, his six-foot two frame draped over a rather-too-small chair, Clunes is an odd mix of boyish enthusiasm and weary charm. He tells me his latest role was a “no-brainer” because of his farm background. He has a handful of cattle on his own which supplies hay and haylage to the local equestrian community.

“The farm is really expensive to run,” he says. “I can’t afford to retire.” Farming, he says, “is topical now because of the Budget. Farmers didn’t used to be on anyone’s radar.”

Rachel Reeves’s Autumn Budget, of course, created a lot of unease and anger among Britain’s farming community, particularly regarding the new inheritance tax which will have a devastating effect on family-run farms due to Reeves’s decision to limit Agricultural Property Relief (APR).

“I don’t know what I think about it, because it doesn’t really affect me,” says Clunes. “But I can see that there’s a lot of upset around it. If you look at this family that we’re representing in Out There, they’d be absolutely clobbered.”

If this sounds like a celebrity not wanting to speak out on a contentious issue, that’s uncharacteristic for Clunes. When he tells me he is deeply upset by the impact that the National Insurance rise will have on charities, there erupts a flow of various frustrations.

“I am involved with, among others, a children’s hospice, Julia’s House in Dorset, which now has to pay a quarter of a million pounds. They can spend that money better. Dicking around with the institutions that fill the gaps in the fabric of our society is a mistake. And now we’ve got this assisted dying bill where, I’ve got to say, they’re just slagging off palliative care. Let’s save money by having everybody just f— off and die. And at your own expense. Oh, and by the way, you can’t pass your farm on.”

Clunes was born in Wimbledon in 1961. His father Alec, who died when he was eight, was an actor and his grandparents were music hall entertainers. Was it always his intention to act? “My mother was really stage-struck and was desperate for me to do it,” he says. “But she never pushed me in the way of it – or she said she never did. I never pushed either way, but I found I ended up there.”

Success came quickly, with Clunes securing his first major role, in the BBC’s suburban sitcom No Place Like Home (1983-1987), aged 22. While heavyweight theatre followed (Chekhov, Brecht and Stoppard at Bristol Old Vic, much later Molière’s Tartuffe at the National), he tends to be associated with comedy. Of course, this has much to do with the success of the era-defining Men Behaving Badly (1992-1998), in which he played Gary alongside Neil Morrissey as Tony, as laddish, priapic flatmates in pursuit of neighbours Leslie Ash and Caroline Quentin.

Clunes won a Bafta in 1995 for top comedy performance, but what does he think of the show in these censorious times? “Oh, we’d be cancelled today,” he says ruefully. “If you said Kylie Minogue had buttocks like a racehorse, you’d be hearing from her lawyers. All the fun’s gone out of being inappropriate. I still think inappropriate is quite funny. Who gets away with it now? Ricky Gervais, Clarkson… Maybe I’m too cowardly.”

In fact, this year he’ll reunite with Morrissey for a new travelogue on the channel U&Gold. It’s the first TV job they’ll have done together in nearly 30 years. Would he want to revive Men Behaving Badly?

“We’ve been asked non-stop over the years, but not seriously enough. There was talk of a film and we asked to read the script, and they said, ‘We won’t write it until you say you’ll do it’. As Caroline used to say, it would be awful if it was awful. And you know, Neil and I are in our sixties now so it would be a bit seedy, rather than hapless fun.”

For now, Clunes seems content being on the farm with Braithwaite. They have a daughter, Emily, who is 25 and training to be an equine vet nurse (“Bloody useful! We phone her up all the time.”). As far as his professional life goes, Clunes says it’s a case of “whatever comes along, what chimes with me really. Now that Doc Martin’s ended, it’s quite strange not having a five-month gig every other year. But it’s fine. It’s just like, okay, better say yes to some more things!”

So why shut the door on the Doc? “It wasn’t just my decision, but it was time,” he says carefully. “We did nearly 80 episodes. It’s enough. No one was unhappy about it. God knows, we spun the will they/won’t they love story [between Doc Martin and Caroline Catz’s Louisa Glasson] out long enough, and I’m knocking on the door of retirement age for a GP anyway. But I’m very proud of it.”

Clunes tells me he has rarely had much of a career plan, which seems odd given his success. Still, his relationship with acting does seem, at times, tangential. “Since I moved out of London, I don’t consider myself to live in the industry anymore, which helped me identify what I like most about it, which is just the business of filming. The rest is propaganda.”

Out There is on ITVX on January 19

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