Rob Brydon is sitting in a café in sleepy Teddington, close to his west London home. There’s a cycle helmet on the seat beside him. He’s just biked his seven-year-old son to a school holiday sports camp. He looks like he does on TV, but close up the brown eyes are expressive. And that voice, with its RP-hued Welshness and all-embracing bonhomie that has lent itself to adverts selling us everything from Toilet Duck to Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, is a marvel. It has so many different layers of irony: from the faintest subtle wash of it – he doesn’t mind if you catch this or not, it’s enough that he knows it’s there – to the broadest block colours for your entertainment.  We see a lot of Rob Brydon. As an actor, game-show host and panel-show regular, he’s become a fully fledged light entertainment personality. In fact, we see so much of Brydon it’s easy to forget he’s been in some of the best television comedies of the 21st century: Human Remains, Marion and Geoff and The Trip.  We’re here to talk about his latest project: Future Conditional, a new play at the Old Vic, directed by Matthew Warchus, who has just taken over as artistic director from Kevin Spacey. It’s a bold roll of the dice from Warchus: a play about the British education system, written by Royal Court director-turned-writer Tamsin Oglesby.  "I found it thought-provoking, very zeitgeisty, very now," says Brydon, who plays an English teacher. He sees a clear link between acting and teaching. "You have to hold people’s attention, fill their heads up with something. I have seen teachers who revel a little too much in that side of it, as an adult going to my own children’s schools."  He’s a family man, with two sons from his second marriage to TV producer Claire Holland (he has two daughters and a son from his first marriage – "there’s something lovely about having five, when they surround you, that’s a nice feeling, you know"). He finds it hard to understand people who don’t have children: "Some of my contemporaries don’t have children and I just think, what the hell do you do all day?"  In the play, his character is a hero to the pupil at the centre of the drama – Alia, a teenage girl from Pakistan, whose passion for education is in stark contrast to some of her British peers. In fact, Brydon’s character’s main job appears to be crowd-control.  "It wasn’t my experience at school," says Brydon. "I was never in a class as unruly as that.  "There is this thing now that it’s not cool to want to learn. I don’t know if that ties into the role models for children now being the Kardashians and the like."  This sounds almost like an opinion. Does he think it is that?  "I don’t know. I don’t have any definitive answers here."  Brydon, I should mention, is doing his level best not to give an opinion about anything. We’re doing a little dance. I’m asking. He’s politely declining.  "I would rather just raise the issue than say what I think," he’ll say, or "I’m wary of pontificating", or if really put on the spot, "I don’t know and I’m also not going to take to the pages of the Telegraph giving my feelings on that because that’s inviting trouble".  It’s just who he is, he says.  "I find it very hard to come down on any side of an argument, I’m always hovering around. I’m always going, 'yeah but you know’," he says. It infuriates people. "I had a big row with [Steve] Coogan when we were filming The Trip to Italy at this beautiful restaurant, he really got…" (he slips into Coogan’s Manchester accent and raises his voice) "'Why won’t you nail your colours to the mast… !?’"  What were they arguing about?  "Oh, I don’t know – he’ll argue about anything. It could have been the salt and pepper."  Brydon says he can’t face the flak from social media for saying the wrong thing. He’s been stung before. Prior to the Scottish referendum, he put his name to a pro-union letter. "That was one of my better decisions," he says. "Like waving a stick at a wasp’s nest."  He thinks of himself as Welsh rather than British. He grew up in South Wales, where his father was a car dealer, and his mother did lots of different jobs, including teaching. At 50, he says, he feels he’s turning into his father to a "terrifying degree, where I almost feel I don’t have my own personality". He can see the roots of his comedy in his parents, too, the sharpness from his mother and the jocularity from his father.  The family lived first in Port Talbot, where he went to private school, then later in Porthcawl, where he transferred to the local comprehensive at the age of 14.  Was he bullied when he moved to a state school? "No," he says, followed by, "you seem surprised". Is he an advocate for one over the other? He believes in having the choice, he says. "Private school was a lovely, warm, nurturing, very comfortable environment but in terms of facilities and being around a bigger mix of people then Porthcawl won hands down."  I ask him if he thinks it odd that many of today’s most prominent actors went to the same fee-paying school (Dominic West, Tom Hiddleston, Damian Lewis and Eddie Redmayne all attended Eton).  "I think their success is entirely justified," he says. "They are very good actors. Eddie I met properly for the first time just the other day. There’s a kinship with actors that you sense and I sense that with them. What do you think?"  I think it’s a little implausible, I say. He grins.  "We also appear to have some of the most successful politicians as well that went there, what are the chances of that? I’m not an authority on the world of beekeeping or the world of retail footwear – I don’t know whether the Eton crowd are making a big splash there. I suspect not."  It was at comprehensive school that he discovered his own love of drama. Fellow pupil Ruth Jones would go on to write Gavin & Stacey, in which he appeared. Brydon won the drama prize in his year and auditioned for Rada.  He did a piece from Pinter’s The Homecoming, which, he says now, he didn’t understand. "I did a song from Carousel, which I’d performed at school… [little daub of irony] to some acclaim." He didn’t get in.  Meeting Pinter many years later, he told him: "I can’t help thinking if you’d tried a little harder with the writing, it would have been a different story."  Does his Rada rejection still rankle? "Nooo. I’ve had a far more successful career than a hell of a lot of people that went to Rada. That’s a fact. But it’s also a fact of the lottery of this business. It’s a phenomenally hard business to get successful in, it’s heartbreakingly hard."  Brydon speaks from experience. He talks almost with incomprehension of Steve Coogan’s Ferrari-driving early fame, while he was still stuck on the "lowest rung of wanting to get on the radar of casting directors".  "Even now, I never get a job I’ve auditioned for. I’m so uncomfortable in that situation and resentful of the power. Everything that I’m in I’ve just been offered."  He studied at the Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff. It was there that he met Hugo Blick, the celebrated auteur director of The Honourable Woman, with whom Brydon would later collaborate on BBC Two’s comedy Marion and Geoff, with Brydon as minicab driver Keith Barrett, whose wife Marion has left him for a work colleague. Each episode, with Keith giving a monologue in his cab, directed from the back seat by Blick, was a nine-minute bolt of brilliance: distilling pain into poignant self-delusion.  Brydon believes himself far better at collaborating than he is at steering his own ship. "The proof is on the table. I think my best stuff has always been with a strong other person."  We talk about The Trip, Michael Winterbottom’s rich, sophisticated, improvised double header in which he and Steve Coogan play duelling versions of themselves, pitting their gifts for impressions – Michael Caine, Al Pacino, Michael Parkinson – against one another. It’s not the first time he’s played "Rob Brydon" ...  "Oh yeah. Here’s what I’ll say about that. My heart sinks… if you don’t like The Trip, I completely see where you’re coming from because if I see a thing where it says 'playing a version of themselves' I want to vomit.  "That’s why we didn’t want to do it. We turned him down twice."  Does it blur his sense of identity? "Not mine but it blurs it for other people undoubtedly (he slips into a conversation with himself) 'Is that your real wife in there?' 'No'. 'Are those Steve’s parents then?' 'No, of course not.' 'Did you really have a fling with that girl?' 'Well no, of course not.'"  As for his talent for voice impressions, he says: "I am more and more of the opinion that it’s some stupid trick, you know. The number of people that ask me to do the small man in the box voice and react with rapture when I do… 'That’s so clever'… No, it’s not, it’s a trick. It’s like seeing someone who can do keepie-uppies."  He says he and Coogan are much more subdued together off camera. As for the one-upmanship, Brydon (who got his big break from Coogan after he sent the embryonic Marion and Geoff to him) says, "I’m probably his biggest fan."  I mention that his collaborations with Blick, Coogan and Julia Davis in Human Remains, the comedy where he and Davis play a different (usually miserable) couple in every episode, reveal a darker side to his comedy. Does he need others to bring it out in him?  "No, I don’t think so. I’ve felt that getting older has taken me away from that. It’s a part of me, we did quite a few cancer jokes in Human Remains and I was 34, 35 when we were writing that, and I’m 50 now and there’s part of me that’s not quite so keen to make jokes about cancer because it seems far more like a possibility."  I ask him if he thinks there are areas that comedy shouldn’t go. "It really depends who’s doing it. If it’s a half-wit-not-so-talented comedian I think they should stay away. If it’s a great comedian, I think they can talk about anything. I think at its best comedy is a truth telling device."  What about Dapper Laughs? "It’s tricky. He has an audience. They’re all there laughing, so what are we saying, they’re all wrong? I wouldn’t do what he does. It’s not my thing. But I think it’s very dangerous that we’re in a culture of apologising. Sometimes I think it would be better to say, 'Were you offended by that? Oh well, there you go.'  "Known as I am as one of Britain’s most shocking comedians," he adds.  As a panel show regular, what does he make of the edict about including at least one woman comedian on every panel?  "I’m so wary of answering this…" he says. "I’m a purist," he decides eventually. "There are funny men and funny women. We’ve had plenty of funny women on Would I Lie to You, often not comedians."  But, he admits, "I’ve never liked it when anybody says, 'It’s hard for me because I’m just starting out, it’s hard for me because I’m a woman, it’s hard for me because I’m Welsh.' Bugger off. Get on with it. It’s simple. You have to have something somebody else wants."  The opinionated Rob Brydon has plenty.  Future Conditional is at the Old Vic, London from Sept 1 to Oct 3
The actor and comedian talks to Chris Harvey about having children, private education and Dapper Laughs ahead of his appearance on the Old Vic stage