Martin Clunes: ‘I’m your payback for sending us Rolf Harris!’

“I’ll tell you why you need a Brit actor to tell you about your own islands – it's payback for Rolf Harris! All those years [we had to put up with him]!

“But what’s with the 'need' thing though? That's the needle isn’t it. ‘Why do we neeeed ya, mate?’ Ah, you don't [laughs].”

It’s not often you go into an interview with, yes, a star and he quotes you the opening sentence from the last time you interviewed him.

Clunes is impressive. Erudite, affable, no fool, and extremely successful – and this success he takes effortlessly in his stride. His string of documentaries – the current Islands of Australia included – is based on his ability to be “real”, uncluttered with a star’s ego to present a stage-managed image of himself.

In for a penny, time for another impertinent question (well, we’ve come this far):

I warned him and he laughed.

OK, you were behaving badly early in your career [Men Behaving Badly, 1992-2014] and then you did it again for the Aussie follow-up [Men Down Under]. Now as Doc Martin you're still behaving badly. And even in Islands of Australia you're not exactly, um, intrepid – you’re not well-disposed to shimmying up a kentia palm [Clunes laughs] or dealing with flappy fish. Yeah, I'm the antidote to [British adventurer] Bear Grylls. He's always tough, I do these things as me [smiles].

Being vulnerable is clearly part of your appeal. I don't know about that but, yeah, stop me if I've said this in our previous interviews but I don’t have the expertise to face a camera and say this is stuff I know, like David Attenborough. All I have to offer is ignorance and I go and make the discovery. What I do have is interest. I hope the audience will share that interest and with a camera over my shoulder learn what I learn as I learn it.

I’m not a professional presenter, it’s not my day job, so I wouldn't feel happy presenting on a subject I wasn’t interested in. I’ve read that I have an infectious enthusiasm, certainly around animals, that's my thing, so maybe that’s why I get these gigs [smiles].

You had that wonderful sequence with a whale shark – what were you thinking just before you jumped into the water? Nervous, really nervous. But you get this thing when you're with a crew, “nothing will happen to me”. “Get into the water, Martin.” “OK.” Plus I was with a very seasoned marine biologist and a team who do this because it's a thing you can do on the Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia. It's a visitor attraction which on paper I thought was a bit off-putting, like a canned hunt or something, but actually it's not.

The shark was massive, massive, and they're so not bothered with visitors. I guess they don't have any predators. She wasn’t at all defensive. There was an underwater camerawoman getting cover [shots] of me and they were covering from the boat and there was a drone so they just said “Stick as close as you can to the whale shark”.

You sort of go on your side to keep looking at her and she wasn't going fast and I was just watching how her body worked, her musculature, almost horse-like as they ride the waves and gently, gently feeding, just elegant and graceful. Yeah, a real buzz, a real privilege.

You know, it was a treat to work with the Australian crew. And it’s a really classy production.

You covered 16 islands out of 8200 – any talk of doing another 16? It's all performance-related, isn’t it. If people like this one then maybe. Never say never. I’d come back like a shot. As far as feedback goes, people are always kind to your face but actually this is one country where they say what they mean! "I didn't like that, mate.”

While we were making it, there's an authorship that belongs to the director, so when you see it all put together, one bit next to another bit, you see it as something else and every time I saw an edit I was genuinely really interested. Not just, you know, Popular Actor Goes Places. There are so many stories to tell. And we met some great people, all very, very different but having that island life in common.

We stayed with this lovely family, the Grundys of Mundoo Island at Goolwa, down near Adelaide, and their family farm is an island. What's that big river?

The Murray, where my mum lived, and where my family live now. Right. So Mundoo is in the estuary of the Murray [in the Coorong, home of Storm Boy] and they had this terrible problem damming the fresh water inland. Saltwater was being dragged in and their cows were dying before their eyes in a horrible way 'cos they were drinking the saltwater. A terrible problem. I don't think they knew that was going to happen.

But they were just a really nice family. My daughter stays in touch with their daughter on FaceTube and stuff and Sally, the mum, is a great corresponder. It's nice, It's really good.

A Doc Martin question? [Sure.] So far you've done 54 eps over seven years. [Have we?] How can you stop the show becoming so self-reverential that it ceases to be charming and innocent – which was the death of All Creatures Great & Small? I don’t think we'll ever get to that point because we always see it as slightly subversive, that's at our core, to have a main protagonist that nobody likes, and he doesn't like anybody, which is a real challenge for the writing . . .

It was the same with All Creatures – Siegfried was a bit of a bugger! Yeah, I suppose so, I can't really remember. We're trying to be funny as well, we're a comedy but we have medical stories too. We're not gonna get like that because my wife [producer Philippa Braithwaite] won't let that happen, you know. And there are enough interested parties around to stop that and there are enough places where it can get stopped. But I think trying to hang onto that slight subversion thing, that'll get us through I think. That's kinda where I live, anyway.

But the terrible thing is you start life edgy, Men Behaving Badly, as you say, and then you find yourself seen as sort of mainstream and then comedians take the piss out of you for being gentle or mild or whatever and you think, well, enjoy your journey son [laughs]. People who write about television sometimes mistake observation for value judgement, dare I say. Of course it's gentle, it's about horses, what do you want? [laughs]

When are you shooting Doc Martin series 8? Next year. We'll be there from the end of March to the end of July. We get lots of Australian visitors. And we auction off walk-on parts for charities all the time and they go quite well. Five grand somebody paid. We had Roger Taylor, the drummer from Queen, in the back of the surgery once ’cos his mate had bid for it at an auction and he liked the show so he came with him and did it. We had our picture taken with him.

On the subject of Queen, the Queen herself I believe is a fan though I assume she won't be appearing as a background extra. [laughs] I don't think she's allowed to say whether she likes the show but she named one of her horses Doc Martin. I've got a picture of the card on the stable door.

Camilla Parker-Bowles is a big fan. A couple of months ago – because she's the Duchess of Cornwall – the two of them were doing a tour and they hadn't been to Port Isaac [the setting for fictional Portwenn] before so we got the call to say could we make a presence on behalf of the show? So we went down on behalf of the show and had a handshake. Camilla, she’s such a fabulous woman, and she knew every story point. Bert Large [Ian McNeice] and Al Large [Joe Absolom] were there and Mrs Tishell [Selina Cadell] was there and Eileen [Atkins as Ruth Ellingham] came down and she was all over her.

I'd met Camilla a few times before and she’d said: “We lahv your prohgrahm!” Yeah! It’s good for Cornwall. She's not just called the Duchess of Cornwall, she really puts her shoulder into the welfare of the county and it's a very, very poor county. The north of England would have you believe they have a monopoly on poverty but there's a lot in the south.

No resistance to the town being taken over by TV? We've been doing it so long now, we've been through various shades of relationship with the town. But anyone with a business there is happy about it, they only ever used to have the summer for trading.

We had a similar show, SeaChange, huge in popular culture, and when I did a location visit it was clear much of the town loathed the production. Well, we've had bits of that. Then you get, you know, certain people in the community who feel they have a voice. We're very well aware it's not, you know, well, we're very sensitive to the fact that we are filling the place up and stopping deliveries and such but we've all got pretty good at it now.

We set up a trust for the village with a percentage of our overseas sales going towards – well, it’s up to them – but, you know, bettering the community. So they like us for that. And the co-op they have there, their supermarket, was going to shut down because it couldn't survive just on the seasonal trade but that's now expanded.

And we put a good million or so quid into their economy just out of our budget because all the crew sleep there. The set is also where everyone lives, ’cos it's all for hire, they're all holiday cottages. Each morning we have to turf our own set electricians out of their houses ’cos that’s where we're filming!