Last year, Vic Reeves accidentally started writing a book about his childhood. "I can remember a lot of stuff from before I was five," he says, "so I thought I'd just start writing this stuff down for my own good." He took his memoirs to a publisher, who said they liked them too, and asked who he would like to ghostwrite the book for him.

"Well, it's an autobiography," Reeves replied, "so I'm going to write it." He smiles at the memory, leaning across the picnic table in his beautiful garden. "They said I was the first person they'd come across" - they meant the first celebrity, of course - "who actually wanted to write their own autobiography."

That may tell you less about Reeves than about the lazy, illiterate bunch whose life stories we are normally served up. But the comedian clearly found his year at the keyboard more of a pleasure than a chore, even if Me:Moir - a pun on his real name, Jim Moir - only covers the first 20 of his 47 years. He even illustrated the book himself.

Still more unusual among celebrity memoirs is that Reeves describes a childhood that was all but perfect. His father was a typesetter, and his mother an amateur medium, prone to announcing impromptu seances on a Friday night. They were not poor, and everyone got on well. The family moved from Leeds to Darlington when Reeves was five, but he never found himself short of friends. Though he says he was shy with girls, he seems hardly to have lacked one since he started school. "It's not a childhood filled with turmoil," he concedes. "I suppose that means it's not going to sell very well."

But it may raise a few laughs. "I was trying to create images really, to paint a nice picture," he says. "Then I found it very difficult not to put some kind of punchline in." And so everything is exaggerated into a joke. The baby Moir weighs "10 stone", for instance, and grows up to climb "500ft" trees. When he runs away from trouble, he is likely to be pursued by a flock of vultures.

"It's just a bit of frivolity," Reeves says, "a bit of lace on the end. If you think of it as a nice velvet coat, there's a bit of lace just on the bottom there, which is a flourish, and you can take or leave."

Comedy is often described as a defence mechanism, the way in which practitioners escape painful realities. That's not the case with Reeves, he insists. "I think somewhere along the line probably Tony Hancock did an interview and claimed that he was terribly depressed, and that he was hiding his depression with comedy," he says. "So then it's been used as a template for every comedian since."

Reeves certainly doesn't seem depressed, but in his book he admits to some "puffed-up boldness" that "renders any brittleness invisible". "Timidity," he writes, "has followed me throughout the years." Then, of course, comes a bit of that "lace" - "Even now, I spring out of my chair if a squirrel leaps on to my face while I'm watching television" - so the reader remains unsure whether or not Reeves has just confessed his insecurity.

Perhaps his classmates wondered the same when the boy Moir split the crotch of his new flares at a school disco. "Children gathered round and howled with laughter, mimicking my trouser-splitting movements and pointing fingers of ridicule at me," he writes. "I responded with a repeat performance and a great night was had by all." On his first day at school in Darlington, while Moir's teacher, headmaster and entire class were mocking him for his Leeds accent, did they wonder if he really found it as funny as they did? Surely he was using comedy to protect himself?

No, he won't have it. "I'm a stoic," he says. "When something goes down the pan, enjoy it. Make the best out of a bad job. I'm not the sort of person who would break down and weep if my trousers split. It is funny, and I don't really get embarrassed." He thinks for a bit. "Maybe they were the early beginnings of my entire lack of pride. I've got no fears of getting on the stage and making a tit of myself, because if it makes people laugh then I'm doing my job."

His mobile rings; his wife, Nancy, is calling from the kitchen to offer him some dinner. "Do you want a bit of pasta?" he asks. I turn down the offer. A few minutes later Nancy brings out a plate of pasta and a corn on the cob. She is heavily pregnant. (Since our interview she has given birth to twins, Elizabeth and Nell.)

Reeves tucks in gratefully. "I bet you're jealous now," he says.

It is hard not to envy him, as he sits in the sunshine outside his lovely home in the Kent countryside, which he is about to swap for an even bigger one. But Reeves has only reached this point after some very public troubles.

In 1996, after three years of marriage, his first wife Sarah, with whom he has two children, left him for a builder who had been working on their home. She returned, but left him again three years later, this time for her female personal trainer. To much tabloid excitement, Reeves then managed to cohabit amicably with Sarah, her new partner and the children.

Then, while making the comedy detective series Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Reeves met and got engaged to his co-star Emilia Fox. The relationship did not last, however, and it was shortly after this that he began seeing Nancy Sorrell, a 25-year-old lingerie model and former partner of Steve Coogan. The relationship was another gift to the gossip pages, who predicted a swift breakup and frothed with scurrilous falsehoods about Reeves' personal life.

The couple stayed together, however, and married in 2003, appearing together on I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! the following year. Reeves describes the experience as "a well-paid camping trip", which he enjoyed immensely, with just one reservation. "They wanted to see us having sex, which was never going to be an option. But as soon as we got into our bunks, the light went on and the cameras all went bzzzzzzt."

Reeves may have baulked at full-blown exhibitionism, but didn't just taking part in the programme undermine his occasional complaints about media intrusion? "I suppose it did that as well," he agrees at last, a little grumpily. "But I don't care."

Reeves became tabloid fodder again last March when he was caught drink-driving while nipping out for some cigarettes in his vintage Jaguar. He received a 32-month ban with 100 hours' community service and, perhaps worst of all, was dumped as the voice of the nodding dog in the Churchill car insurance ads.

"Shit happens," he says. "Go along with it. If you don't laugh at it, ignore it, and have enough self-worth to know that you're worthy of better things. I think you've got to know yourself. And I do." There is a hint of belligerence in his voice, but then he breaks into a buttery smile. "And this is good."

He would clearly prefer to talk about his corn on the cob. "Some people eat it very scrappily," he says. "But I'm going along it like a typewriter. I'm using the linear method." It's impressive, but he seems to have missed a few small tufts of kernels. "What I do is save those for later pickings," he explains. "That's the brilliance of my scheme."

When he's playing everything for laughs, it's easy to forget that he sees himself as more than a funny man. As a schoolboy he drew and painted, then formed a rock band called Trout, and followed it with a punk one called the Fashionable Five. In the early 80s he moved to London to study at Sir John Cass art college. And it was at this time, inspired by performance artists such as Joseph Beuys, that he began developing his stage act, which centred on a character he named Vic Reeves, in homage to the singers Vic Damone and Jim Reeves.

"It was what I considered to be a performance piece," he says, "but I was doing a piece of light entertainment on stage." The difference between Vic Reeves and most performance artists, however, is that he was popular. "When I started doing it, I was just going to do it for one night," he says, "but people liked it, so I did it for another night." And another and another and another.

Reeves was soon joined by Bob Mortimer, a solicitor, from Middlesbrough, who heckled so effectively from the crowd that he was asked to come up on stage. The pair have been inseparable ever since, living just a few miles apart and sharing an office in Maidstone. They say they have never fallen out over their work, which includes a great sweep of TV series, from Vic Reeves Big Night Out in 1990 to Catterick in 2004, via The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, Bang Bang It's Reeves and Mortimer, Families at War, Shooting Stars and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).

Lately, however, Reeves' TV work has been scarce, and not just because he wanted to concentrate on other things. Entertainment "is a fickle beast", he complains. "They're always on the search for something new, and if you become old you turn into a vintage car, like what I am, and you can be appreciated but not necessarily put in the car show with all the other bright new cars." He speaks as if this is something he has had to come to terms with. "It's like, 'We know what you can do, and we've had it, so unless it's something really fantastic that we've not seen before, then we're not bothered."

Does he think this has held him back recently? "Sometimes you have to go and do something different," he says. "I'll just disappear and write a couple of books, and then go back and do some TV when I've been forgotten about, and people think it's fresh. I see people who suddenly put themselves around everywhere and I think, 'You're going to last for about two years and vanish.' You've got to play the whole thing quite gently."

At least he has plenty to keep him occupied. He has no plans to write the next instalment of his memoirs, but says he is very involved with a book of short stories. In the past five years he has also shown his drawings in two exhibitions, hosted his own show on Virgin Radio, and taken Shooting Stars and Big Night Out on several national tours.

"It's all one and the same to me," says Reeves. "I write a book, I stand on stage, I do a film, I do some music [including the number one single Dizzy], I do a drawing. But it's all got to have an element of comedy in it, I think."

Why's that? "I don't know," he says, looking like he doesn't. "I've done straight drawings and paintings and things and I haven't got as much pleasure out of them as if I'd done something that would make me laugh."

Computer games are about the only art form left for him to try. "Well I might try that then," he says enthusiastically. "I'll call it The Priapic Man." Uncontrollable laughter. "He's constantly erect, and the aim is to catch as many hoops as he can from lambs that throw them from a field as he marches around the perimeter. It's a simple game. I'll do some sketches in a Greek style and send them off."

Speaking of which, would Reeves mind sketching a quick self-portrait? He grasps some pens, and is done in three minutes. "Well, there you are," he says. "The way I do the noses has just got more and more blocky over the years."

It is getting cold. Reeves has complained about journalists reminding him of things he said years before and expecting him to be accountable for them, but I want to bring up one more. "I think when you really analyse it," he told Jack magazine in 2004, "the essence of comedy is about sadness."

"It is," he agrees, explaining that he was talking about why everyone laughs at slapstick suffering. The other kind of comedy, he says, is where everyone gathers together and agrees on how right the comedian is about something they all knew.

"True wit is nature to advantage dressed," I suggest, "What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." Reeves nods in sage agreement, waits for three beats, then sighs: "Bernie Winters".

· Me:Moir is published by Virgin Books.