The first time you come across Alan Carr, you notice one thing. He's screamingly camp. He couldn't be more camp. Imagine the love child of Kenneth Williams and Frankie Howerd, and you might get close. He says he's never come out – there's never been any need to. Gay activists have even accused him of being too gay; of giving homosexuals a bad name.

The funny thing is, he says, he's spent so much of his life trying to de-camp himself. He'd try to play football or deepen his voice, but there was always a little something that gave him away – the obsession with Wonder Woman, the laugh, the limp wrist, the love of Doris Day films, the attraction to Rock Hudson.

His father, Graham, had hoped Carr would be a footballer – after all, he'd been a footballer and manager, and his granddad had been a footballer, so there was a sense of inevitability. Was it a macho family? "Yeah, definitely. And that was just my mother. Heeheeheeeheee!" The comedian's got a lovely cackle.

As a young boy, he'd follow his dad to matches, kick the ball about because he was expected to, and when he got to middle school the games teacher proudly announced to the rest of his class that they were lucky enough to be in the presence of the son of the great Northampton manager Graham Carr, and that of course Alan would instantly be made team captain. He laugh-shudders as he tells the story. "I was absolute crap. Scared of the ball. Absolutely terrified." What was he like back then? "Mincey. I've always been mincey. People think I put it on, but I don't. I've always been the same. When Mr Jenkins, the PE teacher, said we'd like you to be team captain, I was, like, 'Ooh no, I'm fine, please don't, it's fine.'" Mr Jenkins ignored him, but Carr was soon found out.

It was around this time that Carr got confused with life. He'd always been a confident kid, but as he limped into puberty he became baffled by his body and his emotions. While the other boys at school started to talk with a deeper voice, his remained stubbornly squeaky. When they started going out with girls, he began to realise it was boys he fancied – or, at best, girls who looked like boys. It wasn't a happy time, he says. He withdrew, became a loner, the kind of boy who hung around dinner ladies. He'd been popular until then – always having girls back at his house, playing girly games. But suddenly nobody wanted to know. "Girls don't want to hang around boys talking about The Golden Girls. They want a boyfriend who turns up on a motorbike, don't they? They don't want me going, 'Hey, let's skip!' And boys don't want to hang around you coz you're effeminate."

By the time he was 16, he started to come out of himself. Yes, he might have stood out ("I think I was the only gay in the school"), but his sexuality hardly made him unique. He began to explore the world, find a place for himself, enjoy life again.

With Mum, Dad and brother Gary in 1985 at Northampton Town’s ground. Photograph: PA

We meet at a restaurant in Soho, where Carr tucks into his food with gusto – ham hock, then salmon and finished off with chocolate and pistachio tart. "Ooh, I love my food," he says. "Do you know I'm clinically obese?" Unlike many comedians, he's naturally funny – no shtick, no routine, not even much by way of neurosis. That's why I like his chat show – he doesn't try too hard, doesn't overwhelm his guests with his wit or cleverness, doesn't use them as pawns. His show is called Chatty Man, which is a good title for Carr. He might not be a Parkinson or Frost, but he is a good chatter, and a surprisingly good listener.

Carr studied drama at Middlesex university. He was desperate to play the great classic roles at the National, but he couldn't get on to the acting course and had to make do with drama and theatre studies. "You basically just ended up wearing a black body stocking moving furniture around when the lights went down." Teachers told him that he didn't have the range to be a successful actor, and he didn't know what they meant until he saw a video of himself in action. "I got the shock of my life when I saw myself." Like many of the great old-time comedians (Ken Dodd or Tommy Cooper, say), Carr has got a comical face; gappy teeth, big specs, scrawny hair, bewildered expression. First, there was the voice: Carr does an unforgiving impression of himself – all squeals and squeaks, and nail-on-blackboard shrillness. He didn't know what he sounded like until he watched himself perform? "No, I didn't have any idea. It was like somebody had punched me in the stomach. So that's why people are shouting 'Bender?'"

Then there was the posture. Even when he was just standing in the background, saying nothing, he was ridiculously camp – no matter the role. "I thought, right, I'm going to be straight now. But you can't. I was in Edward Bond's Saved, and I had to stone the baby and, because I can't throw, the stones kept missing the pram. I could see people moving their handbags and covering their face. It was awful. The next night they said you can't have any stones."

Was he always funny? Well, yes, he says, but not intentionally. "At school people laughed at me, not with me." He doesn't mean cruelly – just that the way things came out were, well, funny. "I'd walk into a room and be, like, 'Oh hello! I'm here for history,' and people would laugh. I never told a joke, people just found me quite comical." He decided to make the most of it, applied to do the stand-up comedy module at university, and loved it.

But when he left university, there was nothing out there for him in drama or comedy. So his dad helped him find jobs in call centres and factories that made shampoo and pressed CDs. "I preferred factory work. At least you could disappear with your broom to sweep up the CD scraps. There was one job where I had to wipe grease off car parts with meths. I tell you what, by afternoon I was dancing along to the radio. Giggling. Then I'd leave work and have this blinding headache."

The places he worked were rough and, often, homophobic. He tried to man up, but failed miserably. "It was so macho. This man came in and said, 'My fucking wife's having an affair, this fucking cunt who owns this pub, I want to smash it up, are you in guys?' And everyone went, 'Yeah!' And I went [he squeals uncertainly], 'Yeah!' I didn't turn up. They all went and smashed up the pub with baseball bats. I couldn't do it. It's not in my nature."

In his early 20s Carr moved to Manchester and focused on stand-up. By 2001 he had won the BBC New Comedy Award, and by 2005 he was co-hosting The Friday Night Project with Justin Lee Collins on C4. He says it was so exciting early on, travelling around from city to city, getting paid to make people laugh – a great way of being young. Were there loads of groupies? "Oh yeah, the male ones." He corrects himself. "No, not the male ones, the heterosexual ones – you get gag hags, women who shag comedians. Gay men don't really go to comedy clubs."

‘Oh look, there’s me as the Queen. I think I look like Liz Taylor.’ Photographs: Jay Brooks

Isn't the world of comedy fantastically competitive? He grins. "'D'you find that funny? D'you think I'm funny? Was that funny?' They're like that all the time. I know comedians who will say something to you, and then they'll be like, 'What was funny about what I just said? Was it because I said this word?' There's one I know who brings out a tape recorder."

"It's Jimmy Carr, isn't it?" I say, total guess. He bursts out laughing. "It is. It is Jimmy Carr. I'm not bad-mouthing Jimmy, but he's always on tour. I find it so lonely, but he loves it. Just as he finishes another tour, he's off again." Touring can be amazing, he says – you go on stage, feeling a bit down, and are lifted by a great audience. But it can also work the other way. You come off stage at 10.30pm, and you don't physically come down – adrenaline until about 2am. "And you're sitting there, in Bolton or Cardiff or Barrow-in-Furness, and you're there by yourself, and it's just the weirdest thing. You can see why some of these old school comedians like Tommy Cooper just used to sit there and drink. It killed him in the end. I like a drink, but not to excess."

When he started out, he had this vision of driving round in a van with a bunch of comedians, all of them laughing themselves silly. And it was like that for a while, but it soon changed. "It was so intense. Have you ever been to the Comedy Store? Oh my God, everybody's watching it on the screen [backstage] – 'Well, that's died a death, hasn't it?' and 'Oh my God! That material's awful. It's so hack.' And then they come back and people say, 'Hi! That was really good!' And you know you're going on next ..."

Did he ever take part in that mega bitching? "No, but I can see it happening if it all goes tits up! Some of the older comedians, whose time has passed, they can be a little bit bitter."

Who's the most screwed up comedian he's ever met? "Oh shut up, I'm not saying that." But he does anyway. "I supported Roseanne Barr in Leicester. I went to meet her and the man whispered to me, 'Miss Barr does not do hands.' I mean, fuck off! And she had her whole act on the autocue. 'Hello-Leicester-I-Am-Roseanne Barr.' It was, like, loosen up."

The thing is, he says, all these dysfunctional comedians have such fascinating lives. "I was thinking the other day about me. It's a bit frustrating that I don't have these inner demons, because it would be my dream to have someone act out my life on BBC4 in about 20 years – like they have done with Hattie Jacques or Frankie Howerd or Kenneth Williams – but it would be just somebody walking a red setter round a park going, 'Ooh, that's nice!'"

Ah, you poor thing, I say, perhaps you're just too shallow for demons. "You know, I never saw it like that. It's true, I don't let things get to me. Heeeheeeheeeheee! Oh, that's awful. I'm 'too shallow for demons.'"

At 35, he says he's got the perfect balance – the TV show, touring when he wants, and a long-term relationship with his partner Paul. They live together in west London with their two dogs. "I've become such a gay stereotype," he says. "They're both red setters. At least they're big dogs. You'd expect a chihuahua to poke out of a cerise bum bag. 'Come on, Judy and Lisa!'"

They're not really called Judy and Lisa? "They're actually called Bev and Joyce. Bev coz she looks a bit like Beverley Callard from Coronation Street."

The other day, he says, he was in the park with Bev and Joyce when fellow comic and TV chat show host Graham Norton walked in from the opposite end with his two dogs. "His dog 'ggrrrrrs' at Bev, and Bev goes 'ggggrrraaah' If there was a pap, they'd have taken a picture: it was like celebrity gay dog fight! I was holding him back. But actually I know Graham and he's lovely."

Why does he think so many chat-show hosts are gay? "I think TV in general is camp. X Factor is camp, Strictly Come Dancing is camp. Basically, an orange man comes down some stairs and waves at the camera. People are drawn to that."

He flicks through the pictures on his phone, looking for the photo that was taken of him for this shoot. "Oh look, there's me as the Queen." He giggles, approvingly. "I think I look like Liz Taylor."

A while ago Carr said that many gay men can't stand him. What did he mean by that? "I was in a bad mood. They slagged me off a bit. I made a mistake because I mistook militant gays for the normal gays. It's just militant gays I can't stand." OK, he says, he'll give me an example. "I saw something in a magazine the other day that said, 'Is Alan Carr too gay?' I felt a bit like Frankenstein's monster. What have we created?" Critics say he's a throwback to an age when homosexuals on TV had to be caricatures, and that he's unrepresentative of most contemporary gay men. The trouble is, Carr says, that's what he's like – and he can't do anything about it.

Now I'm flicking through his phone. I come across a photograph of Paul, with whom he has been for four years. "He used to work in catering, but he doesn't need to now. He's a kept man." Does he remind him all the time? "Yeah, I'm a real bitch, and I say basically he's like a 'manny' for my two red setters. And he's 40. So basically I'm not only the bread winner, I'm also the toy boy. He's a cradle snatcher!" He bursts out laughing.

Actually, Paul looks in better nick than him. I tell Carr that when I last saw him on television, I thought he'd had a makeover – a posh new set of teeth, a new head of hair. "Give over!" he squeals. "My hair done? Have you seen it? Look at it. You know what, it breaks my heart when I watch the video of the Tooth Fairy Live in 2007. What happened to me? I'm just a husk of a man. My hair's thinning, I've got fatter." And the teeth? "I do have a polish, but in the world of entertainment having a bit of scale and polish is nothing."

At last year’s Latitude festival (top); with Justin Lee Collins on the Friday Night Project and with partner Paul at this year’s National Television awards. Photograph: Getty Images(2); John Wright/Channel 4

All in all, he says, he's a pretty poor specimen of a man. He's got a dodgy knee, and there's worse. "I went to this physiotherapist and he says I've got gluteal amnesia, whereby my arse has forgotten how to work because my thighs are so strong they do all the work." I look at him disbelievingly. "You look it up! Gluteal amnesia." So your bottom has got no memory? "Yeah, it walks into rooms and goes, 'Why did I come in here?' Heeheeeheeehee!"

But the militant gays and thinning hair and gluteal amnesia are small gripes. "I wouldn't change myself for the world," he says. "It's made me a lot of money, being this camp."

I'm still flicking through his pictures. All his life seems to be documented in this phone. There's his mum, and his lovely little niece, and the red setters in the park. He starts to panic. "Don't touch it because there's quite an embarrassing photo." Too late. Just as he warns me, I'm confronted by a transsexual with a huge penis. "Someone sent me a photo of a tranny," he says, sheepishly.

Wow! I say. Is that genuine?

"I don't know. Heeheheeheeee! There's a better one. See what you think of this other one." As we're examining the picture of his prodigious tranny, the waitress appears with our dessert. "Stop it, you naughty little man." And now he's in hysterics. "Don't put that in the interview... They'll think I'm a pervert."

We put the phone down and change the subject. Has his father forgiven him for not being any good at football? "Ah, he's so proud of me now. So proud. He came to see me at Birmingham NEC and it was just this massive stadium with a stage. At the end he went white as a ghost and said, 'I didn't know it was this big.' He's mellowed out now, and he loves my Paul and everything."

Carr says his life has changed since he became successful, and this has to be reflected in his act. Already, he says, writing is tougher now that he doesn't have factories and call centres to draw on. "I don't want to be one of those comedians who lie to their audience and go, 'Oh God, don't you bloody hate it when you can't pay your council tax?' because I can pay it and I have a lovely life now. I don't want to patronise my audience. I have a good life, but you just delve in other places." These days he's more likely to talk about moving close to Hyde Park to give Joyce and Bev a better start in life.

He assumes that one day he will once again be consigned to obscurity; at best, occasionally recognised as the man who used to be Alan Carr. Does he think about it? "All the time... And Paul says, 'Oh Alan, just chill out', and I'm like, 'It's going to end, it's going to end.'" Does it scare him? "Only from a financial point of view. I don't want to go back to working in a call centre. When you've had six years of shit jobs, this is a blessing, this is a dream. I love it, I genuinely do. And when it's over, it's over. I'm just going to go away. I don't want to be on the telly just for the sake of it. I don't want it that much." He pauses, and grins. "Cut to me in the jungle in a few weeks eating a crocodile cock. Heeeheeheehee!"

• A new series of Chatty Man starts on Friday 27 April on Channel 4.