My goodness: there it is. Perched on the top shelf of Dom Joly's office, the infamous three-foot mobile phone. It's rather battered and scratched, having been hauled around London for the last two years; the numbers on the giant keypad are almost illegible. Joly, slumped in an armchair, gestures at it half-heartedly.
"It came from a display outside a mobile phone shop. We nicked it, actually. I'd quite like to get rid of it, though. It's a bit annoying that it's become so popular. Everybody, even if they don't watch Trigger Happy TV, knows about it. `Hello!' has become my catchphrase."
The phone is, however, an appropriate gimmick for Joly, a man who has earned his fame by, as he puts it, "being able to bullshit on demand". The first series of Trigger Happy TV last year, a candid camera for the MTV generation, was one of Channel 4's biggest hits. Now Joly's creations - the obnoxious mobile man, dogs beating the crap out of each other in the street, the officious park keeper accusing pensioners of playing football where they shouldn't - have even greater recognition.
Trigger Happy TV, Joly is at pains to point out, is hard work to make; it took him and his sidekick, Sam Cadman, a year to shoot each series. "It looks like it's made by two drunk students in a week. But for the first series we shot two hours of footage for every minute we used. That's more than they did on Apocalypse Now. We got that down to an hour for the second series. But by the end we're emotionally knackered - and we don't make any money because we've used so much pop music on the soundtrack."
Quite what has motivated Joly to spend two years of his life churning out this stuff isn't immediately clear from his background. He was born in Switzerland, spent his childhood in Lebanon and was educated in Britain and America. He became a runner for MTV before landing an internship as a trainee diplomat ("It taught me how to lie in a suit"). After a year in Prague, a coincidental witness to the Velvet Revolution, he changed tack and became a political producer for ITN, the UK commercial television news service, before moving to the Paramount comedy channel to make short Trigger Happystyle fillers between programmes. Channel 4 spotted him and offered him the first series of the show that made his name.
Joly has a businesslike, even serious, manner, perhaps a legacy of his "proper" jobs. He certainly doesn't have the demeanour of some tiresome office prankster. But does he worry that - aged 33 and married with a daughter - he makes his living this way? Surely at times, for example, when he was sitting in Zermatt prison dressed as a yeti, he must have wondered whether this was a job for a grown man? He shrugs. "It clearly isn't," he admits. "But unfortunately they don't let children do it. The fact is, it's more enjoyable than any job I've ever done, so in fact it's rather a weird paradox."
HE IS reluctant to try to explain the show's appeal. "Trigger Happy is like the salty beef spread Marmite - you either hate it or love it. All we're trying to do is chuck a few surreal moments into people's lives, to have them going home saying: `What was all that about?' If people get angry, we're doing it wrong. The new series is, I think, better than the first. Slightly darker. But people are always coming up with all kinds of theories. Somebody decided that the bits with us fighting in the dog costumes were our take on Pinochet's Chile."
In fact, Trigger Happy's bizarre attacks on society's conventions are only the latest in the long tradition of the surrealist movement. Its real roots arguably lie in the Dadaists' attempts to bring surrealism to public attention. For his part, Joly acknowledges his debt to the Belgian surrealist, Noel Godin, better known as "l'entarteur" ("he who pies") and famous for launching custard pies into celebrities' faces (his most famous hit was Bill Gates in 1998). Joly says he sees some truth in Godin's philosophy that a man only reveals his true character when he has a custard pie in his face. And this shows through in Trigger Happy; the pleasure comes as much from watching bystanders reacting to Joly's antics as the stunts themselves.
More tellingly - a legacy of his childhood in a French colony - he admits to being a fan of Jacques Tati's amiable buffoon, Monsieur Hulot. And there is more than a hint of Hulot in Joly's bungling spies, forever trying to foist unlikely code words and manilla envelopes on passers-by.
That perhaps best explains why Trigger Happy's whimsy is so appealing: it exists in its own childish world where violence is always cartoonish, and is leavened with enough surrealism to negate any sense of threat.
SOME have suggested that practical jokers must have a misanthropic streak. It doesn't show with Joly, although he certainly has an anarchic bent and even a rather caustic streak. He is constantly tossing off remarks which could be hurtful if not tempered with a disarming quick-wittedness. He also admits to lying in interviews.
"They're so boring. People keep asking the same questions: what's your mobile phone ring tone? How long do you think Trigger Happy will last? I've told people I've worked as a tour guide on a river bus and that I was a junior gardener at Kew Gardens [in London]. Somebody once said to me: I see from the Internet that your daughter's called Missy Missy Jamon Jamon. I thought, didn't you realise that might have been a joke?" he says.
But he says that his view of human nature - especially that of the British - has altered in the light of shooting the show. "What's weird about British people is that they don't react. In New York and Belgium, people would just say: `Go away. You're annoying me.' But in Britain, people just do what they're told. I think it shows that we don't live in a cynical and hard-bitten country."
He's also refreshingly down-to-earth about his "c-list" celebrity status ("c-plus on a good day"). "It's partly because all this happened to me when I was 31," he says. "If this had happened when I was 23, I'd be a nightmare. I'd be snorting cocaine off dwarves' heads. In a sense, my status is quite uncomfortable. I've turned myself into a kind of leper. If go into a shop, everybody dives down, thinking I'm going to pull out a phone. Even if I go to the gym, everybody thinks I've got a camera in the showers. People assume I'm pulling pranks 24 hours a day and that I'm really wacky. I'm so far from wacky. "
He says that, apart from any one-off specials, this second series is the last. He'd rather end it before people tire of it.
He's currently preparing a series of pilots for Channel 4, including a subversive fly-on-the-wall documentary, using all the invites to things like the openings of provincial nightclubs he gets sent.
At the end of the interview, I can't resist asking for a go on the mobile phone. He grabs a camera and takes a picture. "I'll send it to you," he says, as he escorts me to the lifts. But he can't resist a Trigger Happyesque parting shot as he walks away: "If you stitch me up, I'll draw a moustache on it first."
Trigger Happy TV is on Channel 4 at 9.30 p.m. on Fridays
