This is all going rather well. Steve Coogan is stretched across the sofa, relaxed, obliging, delighted to lead the conversation in the way he knows a journalist is going to lead it anyway. This is all very nice. The research, it seems, has not done him justice. There is an overwhelming temptation to start the interview off with a big, Alan Partridge-like "Ah-Ha!" He mightn't love that, but you sense that he might at least humour you by not replying with a smack.
Previous newspaper interviews suggested a different Steve Coogan, one who was truculent, given to rants, openly disdainful of journalists. That's no surprise. After apparently feasting on the trappings of fame (drugs, alcohol, women, sports cars), he was then treated to the full tabloid treatment and he reacted with suitable distrust. Those stories were based around a tabloid-appointed sex addiction and his cheating on the mother of his son. He has since settled in Brighton, near his son and away from the London pack. The tabloid tales have faded (he calls it "ancient history") while the success of his production company, Baby Cow, has allowed him to duck out of the spotlight for a time. There have been few interviews in recent years, then, but it has done him little harm, only adding an enigmatic edge.
This impression of mystery is further embellished by what has already been the first surprise of the day, that he is fairly anonymous in person. Even with the light stubble, the glasses, the greying temples, he is a fresh-faced 35 with little to suggest that if you give him a Pringle jumper, Pat Kenny's hair and the keys to a Ford Mondeo, he becomes a living legend.
He bears only a passing resemblance to the characters he has created, a gallery of grotesques minutely observed and disquietingly familiar: Alan Partridge, the desperate chat-show host with the David Coleman voice and the bloated self-esteem; Paul Calf, the lazy psychopath viewing the world through a flagon of cider; his man-eating sister, Pauline; and bottom-feeding salesman Gareth ("Grrr, you're a tiger") Cheeseman.
Maybe it's Coogan's very ordinariness, his everyman looks, that make it easier for him to inhabit these creatures, and easier for us to believe in them.
"The only time I do really intensive interview stuff like this is when it's bums on seats, and television isn't strictly bums on seats," he explains. "The last time was for a live tour. I do it willingly and happily because I want to give it the best fighting chance. I'm quite pleased with the film. The worst is when you're contracted to a film and you're obliged to something you don't believe in. Fortunately, I think they've done a decent job."
The film in question is The Parole Officer, a crime comedy in which he plays Simon Garden, a sacked parole officer robbing a bank with a gang of reformed criminals. It is written by Coogan and long-time collaborator Henry Normal, and is a fitful caper with hints of Ealing, The Italian Job, gross-out humour, parody and romantic comedy - without ever really figuring out which of these things it is.
"With this, we wanted to make a film that stood by itself, so that someone would come see it and not know who I was and not be a fan of mine but still sit down and enjoy it," says Coogan. "To do that, you have take a slightly different approach; there's a different discipline involved in doing a film. We also wanted to do something that was gentle, a more traditional Ealing-type comedy, in that it's not aggressive, it's not cynical.
"It's not really a post-modern movie. There's a kind of innocence to Simon Garden which kind of appeals to people. When we wrote early drafts we had him being very droll and cynical and witty. But we found him unsympathetic and didn't think it would sustain for 90 minutes."
As a character, Garden is certainly less engaging than those that have made Coogan famous, but Coogan says he chose him because of this difference.
"I didn't want to do a grotesque comic character and, in fact, he's not really a comic creation as such. He's more the main character, the protagonist in this inane comic narrative, with other parts being just as rounded as his character. What was important was making a character who, unlike the TV creations I've done, is more real, more subtle and more of an everyman.
"He's not an unusual person. It's very fashionable to be apathetic, but he's somebody who's idealistic, who society has kind of passed by, that life's kind of passed by. Even if he's slightly misguided, he has a good heart. And that kind of character is much more difficult to create than one who's just grotesque, horrible and annoying. It's easy to be horrible."
Horrible, though, has had its advantages. Alan Partridge didn't stop at being a great comedy creation; the name became a byword for a certain style of television presentation. He drew the character with such clarity, and cruelty, that it arguably precipitated the demise of the genre of cheesy light chat and ultimately brought back Parkinson.
"There was certainly pressure at the beginning to do an Alan Partridge film," he admits. "That would have been an obvious thing. And I think that had I wanted to do that I could have got the backing. I wasn't too keen, though, and the guys who write Partridge weren't totally behind it. As a first film, there would have been very little to gain from it apart from money. I could equally have done anything I had done on telly, but there was nothing artistically to be gained and possibly a lot to lose if I get it wrong."
There are Partridge-like moments in the movie, though, not least during the opening when his attempt to explain his way out of accidentally seeing up a lady's skirt only leads to explosive embarrassment. "The facets of this character that echo in my other characters are purely, well, not accidental. But in creating characters, there's going to be an overlap because I'm the one who's creating them, so there's going to be bits of me in it."
His television production company, Baby Cow, marks the maturing of a new phase in his career. Striking a deal with the BBC, it has overseen the development of the outstanding series, Marion and Geoff and Human Remains.
There is an animation in development, and the company will be behind his next TV role, titled Dr Terrible's House of Horrible, a series of Hammer Horror spoofs scheduled to run on the BBC later this year. "It's written by Graham Duff, this exciting writer. He's a real horror enthusiast, and the series was really good fun to make." And the title? "We liked the kind of lack of syntax in that."
Baby Cow has given him further reason to keep his head below the parapet. "People do get sick of seeing the same face again and again. After this movie and stuff that's coming up, I think I'll sit back and let someone else get people's attention for the next year or two. I suppose for the next couple of years the production company is going to be very important to me. It gives me a great deal of satisfaction. It's very grounding; it feels like a proper job."
His next film role will be that of the Madchester music scene guru, Tony Wilson, in the upcoming 24-Hour Party People, and after that there will be the return of Alan Partridge, in what is likely to be a final series. Partridge will be in a better position than when last seen living in a motel, working the graveyard shift at Radio Norwich. He will be back on television, although probably on regional telly. For Coogan, Partridge will always be the thing people want to know about, the character journalists want to ask about, the one strangers in pubs quote to him. He makes things easy for himself by not minding any of this at all. When you mention it, you half-expect him to grit his teeth and remind you that he has done other work. Instead, when Partridge is mentioned, he gives a nod which suggests it's okay, don't be frightened.
"I don't ever want to say goodbye to my characters. I do have a pathetic sentimental attachment to them. They are like friends," he says. He shifts up on the couch, as if to give them some room.
"I feel like they're - maybe I sound like a real psycho now - but they feel like these fictitious friends who helped me earn a living, and I don't want to ever say goodbye to them. I never kill anyone off, because if I wanted to, I could go back to them at any time. I like that."
If this is a new phase in his career, it counts as the third. Coogan began as a jobbing impressionist, giving voice to John Major, Neil Kinnock and Margaret Thatcher on Spitting Image. But at the 1994 Edinburgh Festival, he watched from the wings as Frank Skinner slayed the audience while largely performing off the cuff, and he had a sort of epiphany.
"I had to sit in a box behind the stage," he said recently, "listening to Frank improvising. Being absolutely brilliant, and hear the audience completely loving him. And thinking: 'Now I'm going to go on and do Frank Spencer.' Frank Spencer got the chop.
"It was a one of those kind of pull-your-finger-out moments. And that's what I did. But I was very calculating. I developed this character show and I didn't take it anywhere near London because I didn't want anyone to see it until it was ready. I practised it by taking it to arts centres, around the regions. I wanted to get it dead right and then spring it at the Edinburgh Festival. Had I not done that, I think I'd kind of be doing what I was doing 10 years ago. Getting by doing voiceovers, maybe doing the odd part here and there."
Even the stock question about his Irish roots is answered with relish. Coogan's mother's folks are from Co Mayo. His mother was evacuated there during the second World War, and the family still has a house in Westport which he visits regularly. His father's grandfather is Irish. He has an aunt in Dublin, and a cousin, Aidan McArdle, on the London stages. He has enough Irish left in him to reel off the list without questioning why every Irish journalist wants to know the same thing.
On the weekend when we meet, he is performing an act of pop-culture contortion, presenting Top Of The Pops on the Friday, then being the subject of The South Bank Show on the Sunday. In between, there are chat shows, radio breakfast shows, magazine pieces, newspaper interviews.
He even finds himself becoming an unofficial spokesman for Chris Morris during the recent Brass Eye debacle. Asked for a comment during another round of television interviews, his defence of the man who first brought Partridge to the screen through The Day Today was replayed ad nauseum, even if he intended it as a reluctant soundbite rather than a statement on behalf of the comedy fraternity. This burst of ubiquity sits awkwardly with his reputation for shyness, and he admits that he hasn't quite found the balance in his own mind, even if he is happy to sell this movie.
"In the past I've been reticent about talking about myself. I suppose that I do have a profile I have to maintain in a certain way. I didn't mind doing The South Bank Show, but it did feel slightly odd. It felt like I should be satirising this. Have I become part of the machine I sought to subvert or destroy?" He punches home that question to acknowledge it's a clichΘ.
"It's a very odd thing when you get to this business and people are very interested in you in a way you didn't think they would be. They might be interested in my work, but why are they interested in me? But then you start to grow up very quickly in this business and realise you're dancing with the devil. I need the media to do what I do, although there are certain things I don't do. I don't parade my personal life or my family and I don't allow Hello! magazine into my house to show them my nice sofa. But having said that, I don't want to be too precious. I may in the past have rubbed some parts of the media up the wrong way."
He has obviously decided that it's easier, as well as better for business, just to play along.
The Parole Officer is showing countrywide