‘I wish they’d just shut down all the zoos’
As his new BBC sitcom launches, animallover Martin Clunes talks to Chris Harvey about Brexit, farming and Basil Fawlty
Martin Clunes would make a brilliant Bond villain. The Doc Martin star is impeccably dressed in a grey suit when we meet, and has that soft voice that sounds so gentle, yet there’s the tiniest undercurrent to it, just a hint of a jagged edge. It’s not hard to imagine him ordering the execution of Mr Bond. The softer his voice gets, the more deadly it sounds. There’s no need for an undercurrent for his latest character, though. He plays a curmudgeonly driving instructor who is forced to move from his home in the south of England up to Preston when his wife’s father falls ill in a new comedy, Warren, on BBC One. Think a less lovable Victor Meldrew.
Warren is a grump – is Clunes? “I can get cross, yeah,” the 57-year-old says. “More than cross, I get OCD about things being lined up… I’m harmless, by and large, but now my daughter drives, we have a yard at our farm where we park cars and I’ve never been bossy or painted lines but there’s a way [to park] and when they aren’t looking, I repark their cars.”
Warren is a finger-pointing, mansplaining type. In an era where there is less respect for age, and traditional masculine behaviours are under scrutiny, does he represent the embattled middle-aged British male? Clunes sighs, wearily: “You can try and give it social relevance if you want, but we’re just trying to be funny. It’s a sitcom – nobody asked if Basil Fawlty was a reaction against something.”
I press on – is Warren an everyman figure then, like his boozy Gary Strang in Men Behaving Badly? “Was Gary an everyman?” he says. “That’s a terrible indictment of men. If you’d said that about women, you’d be in a tribunal.” He laughs. He’s been trying to avoid journalists fishing for headlines for a long time, he says. “We got it all the time with Men Behaving Badly – do you think you’re the zeitgeist of this and the lad culture blah…”
Clunes has come a long way since the hit Nineties sitcom. In fact, he’s going through a fantastic mid-period of his career, which has shown him to be an actor of genuine range. He gave an acclaimed performance earlier this year in ITV’S Manhunt, playing real-life detective Colin Sutton, who caught serial killer Levi Bellfield. Playing Sutton hadn’t been on the cards originally, he says, even though it was executive produced by his wife of 22 years, Philippa Braithwaite. “I’d always said I didn’t want to play a cop,” he admits, “because I don’t enjoy the returning copper genre. [Those dramas] just bore the a--- off me. I’d rather have fun fiction, and now everything has to be ‘dark’ to earn its stripes, which usually means watching a woman being abused. I don’t want to watch it. When did ‘it’s dark’ come to mean ‘it’s clever’ or ‘it’s really good’?”
For the past decade, alongside Doc Martin, he has been making travel and nature documentaries (he can be seen at the moment in Martin Clunes: Islands of America on ITV). As an animal lover, his biggest fear is that the word won’t spread about how we treat animals. “You do get some surprises. I would say New Zealand is really backwards with its zoos – awful places for such a modern country.” He moves his focus wider. “I wish they’d just shut the bloody zoos, let those animals die, the ones that can’t be rehoused.”
Clunes and Braithwaite live with their daughter, Emily, 20, on their Dorset farm. I ask him if Brexit will have any impact on his farming practices? “Yeah, it’s already starting to,” he says. “It’s gonna be s--- for farmers. It’s gonna be s--- for
‘I never had a mission. This is what I do to pay for everything – this was my choice of job’
everyone. It’s gonna be chaos.” Is there a fear in the community? “No, just confusion because a lot of them voted for it based on a fear of people on boats in the Mediterranean. And there was some talk about how fisheries and fishing would be improved, but I don’t see that happening.”
He rejects the idea that he and Braithwaite are a “power couple” –“Doc Martin is our thing, but Philippa’s always had other interests”. He recognises that developing dramas in which Clunes stars is how they “took control of our destiny”. Does it take away the fear of waiting for an agent to send him scripts, then having to audition? “Well, yeah, and then replaces it with another pressure, of Doc Martin not being called tired old s---, you know.”
Does he ever feel his career got diverted by mainstream success? “Diverted?” he says, a little testily, the voice getting softer. “I never had a mission. This is what I do to pay for everything, this was my choice of job. I just have to keep busy.”
I’m trying to get at whether he ever felt that he had to live up to the career of his father, Alec Clunes, a respected classical actor who has been described as a matinee idol of the theatre.
“I think he’d be proud that I’ve earnt a good living doing this job,” he says, and mentions that his father bought the house in Wimbledon that he and his sister grew up in when he took over from Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady in the West End. Someone at the BFI sent him some public information films his father had made during the war. “He was a conscientious objector and also an agnostic so he had to go through all these tribunals, which made it hard. He drove an ambulance through the Blitz.”
Clunes spoke movingly on Desert Island Discs in 2011 about how his father had left his mother shortly before he died. He wasn’t expressing resentment, he says now. “I don’t know what his plans were. All I said was, I’m not that guy – for me to leave my family, I don’t know how I would get to that. They’re everything to me.”