There are few more loveable characters on television than Alan Davies. When he played the magician-detective Jonathan Creek, his curly-wurly tendrils fringed a face of boyish innocence that helped to attract some 12 million viewers to David Renwick’s series. The Abbey National, the first of the building societies to do the dirty and demutualise, chose him as the forgiving face of its TV campaign. For many he was first choice to play the regenerated Doctor Who, and surely he would have done so had the BBC gone for cuddly rather than cool. These days he is most frequently seen on QI, BBC Two’s “quite interesting” panel game, in which, as the chairman Stephen Fry says, he “rushes headlong like a puppy into the wall of ignorance”.

“People are usually nice to me in the street,” Davies concedes.

“People love QI. People say to me, ‘Stephen Fry’s really rude to you’, and I say, ‘Oh, don’t worry. When he’s really rude to me I sulk and he comes and says sorry’.”

Women, I suggest, perhaps feel he needs mothering. “No,” he says, “I don’t need mothering. Don’t need any help.”

I doubt he does. He is good company and spontaneously funny but can be fierce. His forte is grumbling and his grumbles can be as entertaining as Tony Hancock’s, but you wouldn’t want to give him reason to grumble at you. Unfortunately, this is exactly what I do when, because of diary dyslexia, I turn up half an hour late to our rendezvous in a posh café near his home in Islington, North London.

“What happened?” he asks to my initial confusion. It is a bad start.

Under a neat new haircut, he looks prickly, if, at 40, still not fully grown up. We are here to plug The Good Housekeeping Guide, one of the comedy dramas that BBC One is trying out on Friday nights. He plays a browbeaten house-husband called Raymond who is dumped by his careerist wife. It looks as if he will have to hand his neat home to her when he discovers that one of his neighbours, played by Doon Mackichan, is a prostitute. Before the episode is out, he has set himself up as her “madame”. The film ends with you wanting more. But Davies has still not heard whether the Beeb wants to turn it into a series.

When will he hear? “Goodness knows. They’ll wait either for a focus group or audience ratings. No one knows any more whether a script is any good. From what I understand, this idea of a suburban knocking shop wasn’t thought to be what the audience would like. Actually, they’d like nothing more, especially a comedy knocking shop with a little emotional stuff thrown in, a sad divorce tale and a will-they-won’t-they love story. It ticks quite a few boxes as far as audiences are concerned.”

So I am sorry to hear him talking gloomily about it, I say, not realising that I am lighting a very short fuse. “Oh God, do I come across as gloomy again? I’ve been waiting for you for half an hour and I’d literally just paid the bill and was going to leave. I’m gloomy? I get that so much with interviews. And I find them very boring. No offence. You’re not boring.”

Why do them, then? “I have to do them. It’s my job, particularly if we want to get a series for a show and the producer says you’ve got to be helpful. And then I am told I am gloomy.”

About the chances of a series, I said. “Look, no, I don’t think it will go to series. I think if they’d wanted a series they’d have commissioned it. So I have to think of it as just being good fun at the time. I enjoyed myself making it.”

The air having thus been cleared, I ask if we are at least going to see more of The Brief, the ITV drama in which he plays a gambling-addicted barrister in personal crisis. “You will get me gloomy if you talk about The Brief! It was catastrophically managed and produced. They wanted me to do more and I quit. It was dreadful doing what they were doing with it.”

In fact, he tried to get out after the first series when ITV threatened to impose a producer he considered “a fool”. When he arrived for the shoot, scripts were still being rewritten and there was no rehearsal time. “You know it’s not going to be good when the director’s got his head in his hands on the first day.” Things got worse and reached a nadir when he read the script for the fourth episode.