As the frontman of Madness - which, after 30 years, he still is - Suggs would sometimes go on stage dressed in a fez, pink suit and fur coat. An admirer told him that he brought to mind Tommy Cooper, Robert De Niro and Diana Ross.

Effing hell, thought Suggs, he would never improve on that. Nor has he on this day in Sicily, where he is filming the final leg of his new Sky Arts travelogue, Suggs's Italian Job. Still, he looks pretty good in his white shirt and dark blue cotton suit.

The once-befezzed pop star, whose band, back in the late Seventies, used comedy to wedge itself between the forces of concept-album pretension and punk-rock nastiness, has turned into a legit television presenter. Last year he won a Royal Television Society presenter's award for Disappearing London on ITV.

Admittedly he spoilt things a little with an acceptance speech in which he lightly announced his immediate retirement from the profession, but television eventually forgave him when he said that he was speaking in drink and in jest. The experienced Italian Job production team tell me that they have never worked with a more professional presenter.

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The beautifully shot eight-part series is not exactly an intellectual challenge to Kenneth Clark's Civilisation. The only preexisting cultural knowledge you need is that Suggs is driving a Mini because there was once a film called The Italian Job and it featured the same make of car.

Nevertheless, it is still something of a surprise that Sky has chosen him as its face of culture. Thirteen years ago you would have known where Suggs stood on high art. “Pop,” he told an interviewer, “is the only art form over the past 20 years that has communicated to so many people. It can move you to tears or laughter. How many paintings have you actually cried at?”

“That's the great thing about being young,” the 47-year-old explains to me now. “One of the reasons pop music tends to be better when people are young is that they have blinkers on, don't they? If someone's wearing flared trousers, they're shit. You have a very pure vision of the things you like. But no, I certainly wouldn't agree with my 1995 self that the only important thing is pop music. No. Not at all.”

If Suggs has a greater credibility gap as a cultural commentator than would, say, Jools Holland or Jarvis Cocker, it may simply be that Madness were always too funny to be taken seriously. It took, he says, 20 years for a piece of serous criticism to be written about them, and five authors have started and abandoned books about them. Perhaps songs such as My Girl, Cardiac Arrest, Our House, Driving in my Car and Michael Caine simply resist analysis.

Fortified by a lunch of Heineken and risotto balls, Suggs's intellect proves in decent working order this afternoon as he is shown around the Villa Cattolica, a museum that has a collection of works by the painter Renato Guttuso. His son Fabio explains a vast painting of a market scene in terms of a cathedral: Suggs smartly identifies its Madonna.

If he is bewildered by Fabio's explanation of the history of Italian communism or how his father's career echoes Picasso's, he doesn't show it. If anything, I detect in Suggs's mind not undernourishment but impatience. As the furry boom-mike bobs above the two of them, Suggs's eyes dart and his fingers click. Between takes he smokes and chews gum. His presentational style is ironic and relaxed, but I sense tension, too.

Only after filming is complete does he relax - which is more than I do, as Suggs's Mini, now driven by an assistant producer aided by a very confused Italian sat-nav, goes the wrong way up more narrow streets than the original Italian Job Minis. We discuss the Guttusos, papà and figlio. “Nice guy, but he could have paid more attention to his dental hygiene,” says Suggs of poor Fabio.

That evening we meet again in an open-air bar in Palermo. The Peronis stand before us yet again. I suspect that the ruddiness of his face may not be simply a tan. I ask if drinking has ever been a problem for him. Only, he says, when he is very bored.

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