It has always been said that the success of Have I Got News For You is largely due to a class-ridden British audience's vicarious enjoyment of Paul Merton's working-class, state-school-educated triumphs over the more Home Counties, Oxbridge-educated style of Ian Hislop. If so, where does that leave the host, Angus Deayton (proncounced "Dee-ton", by the way)? "That's the strangest thing about it. Like Ian, I am middle-class and Oxbridge educated and this very fact set back my career quite a long way. I'm not bitter and twisted about it but it was very frustrating, because when I started in showbiz in the 1980s there was a big Oxbridge backlash - that's why it took me 14 years to win a `most promising newcomer' award," he says in his typically wry manner.
Once an anonymous, behind-the-scenes comedy hack, the suave 41-year-old is now an ubiquitous frontman, with three high-profile presenting jobs over the Christmas period - a best of HIGNFY, a ridiculously popular programme called Before They Were Famous (15 million viewers and counting) and most importantly for him, he is again filling the old Clive James slot on BBC's live New Year's Eve show, The End Of Year Show.
Terribly polite and even-mannered, in a very English sort of way - although he mentions he's "half-Scottish" more then a few times - Deayton is reluctant to complain about the fame game, since he spent so many years trying to raise his profile, but his personal life has been eaten up and spat out by the tabloids and he loathes, really loathes, the rather bewildering "TV's Mr Sex" description usually appended to his name.
"Fame is a by-product of the work that I do. Anyone who's in showbiz and works as a performer has to regard fame and the problems it brings as part and parcel of the job," he says. "I came to fame late, but I think it's a shock to the system whenever it happens. It's a very odd syndrome when you suddenly have to be wary of where you are and what you're wearing, what you look like and what you say in public. "It's strange. I miss being anonymous and moving about anonymously. I don't like the feeling of being in a shop window. But it's such a tiny problem compared to most people's problems that it always seems particularly queeny to complain about being spotted in the street or having people come up and ask for an autograph."
But TV's Mr Sex? What were they thinking of? "Oh that just started as an ironic remark in London's Time Out magazine and the papers took it seriously and now everyone refers to it as if it were serious. I think you know by the time you're 17 how good-looking you are and you don't suddenly become better looking just because you're on TV. "I do get fan letters from women asking to meet me at a hotel and enclosing pictures of themselves but it goes with the territory and my girlfriend (Lise Mayer, an American writer who co-wrote The Young Ones with Ben Elton) is quite used to it. If you're on the telly, people will do it - I'm sure Michael Fish gets it as well," he says.
Where does he stand on the "suave" question? "I don't think my friends would describe me as suave - I never wear a tie off-screen, for example, and I think suave is more a description of a persona that's thrust upon me. I've always been interested in clothes and I spend more time shopping than most men would. I really like Romeo Gigli's clothes - I like the colours he uses. Recently I've started to go to Ozwald Boateng." (Haven't we all?)
Deayton started off writing comedy scripts before becoming a performer - and enjoying some successes, most notably with the spoof pop band, The HeeBeeGeeBess (a Bee Gees parody) who were quite big in Australia with songs like Mean- ingless Songs In Very High Voices. "I broke out of writing very, very gradually - it was whatever the opposite of overnight stardom is, though I still cowrite HIGNFY." He then went on to present the radio show, Radio Active, which transferred to television as KYTV. He has also acted on The Alexi Sayle Show and One Foot In The Grave. When he refers to an "Oxbridge backlash" he's talking about the time when "alternative" comedy had dismissed all the university-educated, Beyond The Fringe generation as "irrelevant" and opted for a more earthy, "polytechnic" style.
Despite his extensive CV, he's still best known for HIGNFY, although he prefers to call it "pigeon-holing" - "hopefully there's life after HIGNFY, otherwise it means I die after the end of the series. We really didn't think it would last this long - we started in 1990 and it's in its 14th series - but as long as it maintains a healthy audience we'll keep doing it."
Angus Deayton hosts Before They Were Famous II on BBC 1 on December 27th at 9 p.m. and The End Of The Year Show, also on BBC 1 on December 31st at 11 p.m.
