Mark Leckey has been handed two kinds of hangover cure the morning after winning the Turner prize - a packet of ibuprofen and an orange tube of Berocca. But the hangover doesn't show: the artist is neat as a pin in dandyish pink jeans, delicately polka-dotted shirt and a bleached-gold mane straight out of the George Michael school of haircare.  When the Turner prize is not being decried as insanely controversial, it is written off as dull and well past its sell-by date. This year's show fell into the latter category. Leckey, like many a winner before him, has discovered the hard way that a cheque for £25,000 and an instantly improved career come at the price of a public mauling. The Independent yearned for something that wasn't "about wearing your theory-stuffed brain on your sleeve". The Telegraph wrote off the entire show as "technically competent, bland, and ultimately empty".  "What I was warned to expect, but still shocked me, was how much obloquy and hatred the prize generates," he says. "I love the Stuckist conspiracy theory, that Nicholas Serota is a kind of machiavellian Skeletor who manipulates the government and the people." He will have had good advice, too: at Monday night's ceremony he was hand-in-hand with a Tate curator who has overseen previous Turner prize exhibitions; one of this year's judges, Daniel Birnbaum, is a colleague at the Frankfurt art school where he teaches. ("I know it looks ropey," he says of this last fact. "But it won't have helped me. He would have had to make a more convincing case for me, if he argued for me - and I don't know that he did.") Even so, he has been caught off guard. "I certainly wasn't expecting my work to be called boring and over-intellectualised. People wrote about me who don't know me, don't know my work, made an opinion based on one piece of work. They just steamed in."  For some artists, the payback for this "obloquy" is the experience of having 60,000 members of the public come to see their work at Tate Britain. Not for Leckey. He accepted the nomination partly "because I wanted to see what it was like outside the sometimes constricted art world. It's small and can be very self-congratulatory." But, he says, "I am not interested in my work being democratised." What he'd really like, now, is for some doors to open. In particular, he wants his own television series - a variety show, with his band, Jack Too Jack, as the house orchestra. It would have musical numbers, and a little play or sketch, and Leckey sitting in a leather armchair à la Ronnie Corbett telling an anecdote - except the chat would be "about art and ways of seeing". John Berger meets the Two Ronnies, he says. Would the BBC be remotely interested? "Well, there'd be no swearing," he says. "This would be good, old-fashioned, light entertainment."  Leckey takes me through his room in the Turner exhibition. Here is a little model of his flat, also his studio, which often appears in his films, marking the liminal space between the "real" world and the world of images in which he operates, or loses himself. Over there is Felix the Cat, spinning endlessly on a screen; there is something almost pornographic in the camera's pitiless gaze. Over here is a film that, by sleight of hand, appears to show Jeff Koons' Bunny, a metal sculpture of an inflatable rabbit, taking pride of place in Leckey's apartment. But it's all smoke and mirrors - the piece was never there.  Leckey is an admirer of Koons. "I like the idea of something that's almost inhuman in its perfection, like Bunny. It's as if it just appeared in the world, as if Koons just imagined it and it appeared. I always get too involved in the work." He also likes the notion that Warhol made his art unselfconsciously, "that he produced this work and went, 'Ah, really?' I like the idea that you let culture use you as its instrument. What gets in the way is being too clever, or worrying about how something is going to function, or where it's going to be. When you start thinking of something as art, you're fucked: you're never going to advance."  Leckey, 44, is the son of working-class parents who met while they were both working at Littlewoods. He was a "woollyback", someone from outside metropolitan Liverpool. "Ellesmere was an overspill town. I grew up with a sense of feeling inadequate, with the idea that the real action was going on over the river." He became a casual. "It was a working-class style, a genuine subculture. It was lads who adopted middle-class leisurewear - golfwear, sportswear - that you could see in magazines worn by the jetset. Ultimately, another word for casual was football hooligan. It was a kind of drag, a disguise. A means of using style to transform yourself."  This was the era of the new romantics, but "casuals were more stylish, and smarter". You could say that Leckey's early negotiations between image and substance, his early attempts at self-transformation, were a kind of preparation for life as an artist. But art was a long time in the future. At Whitby comprehensive, now Whitby high school, he dyed his hair. "Like a skunk. And I used to jump out of windows: my effort to escape. My record was two floors." He left at 16 with one O-level, in art. He can't remember what grade he got.  Then there was a period when "I was a scally. A bad lad." What kind of a scally? "I scallied around," he says, evasively. "A bit of this, a bit of that." He went on various YTS schemes. Then, at 19, "I suddenly got deeply fascinated in trying to find out when civilisation began. In Ur and Babylon. I started going to the library. I am an autodidact - that's why I use bigger words than I should. It's a classic sign." Leckey's obsession with the beginning and the end of things has stayed with him. "It's the terror of infinity. I'm not convinced about the solidity of anything. Everything seems ephemeral." Sometimes images "seem more authentic than what they represent": this is a theme of his filmed lecture, Cinema-in-the-Round, part of the Turner prize show.  Finally, Leckey says, his stepfather sat him down in the kitchen, and said: "Everything in this room has been designed and made by someone. You could do that." He took A-levels and went to art college in Newcastle, which he hated. "It was the early 1990s, when critical theory had swept the nation. The place was full of hippies from down south who were reading Mervyn Peake and Tolkien, and suddenly they were made to read Barthes and Derrida. It was like a Maoist year zero. I became very suspicious of the merits of critical theory, which is why I have been shocked at being accused of being over-academic. I've never seen myself as theoretically minded."  When Leckey collected the Turner prize cheque from Nick Cave on Monday night, he declared himself "chuffed to bits", and said that he was sounding more and more scouse. Then, surveying the room, he declared rather elliptically: "This is all good." I wonder what he meant. The prize? The party? The art world? "I was trying to say, not very well, that the art world in London, in Britain - that this is my world. It's good you can get acknowledged by your peers and that there is a sense of community. OK, that sentimentalises it, because it can be a bitter world, it can get factionalised, and lots of us can be sitting there scowling about White Cube gallery.  "When you read about the Turner prize in the press, and about the art world in general, you get the wonky idea that it's all about Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Banksy. I get riled by Damien Hirst's skull and by Banksy. It just irks me. The work is trite. And then it comes to represent culture and art, it becomes totemic. And I don't understand that."
In his first interview since winning the Turner prize, Mark Leckey talks frankly about the whole competition experience