Interview: Tim Fountain

ARE YOU a good lover? I know, that's a bit forward as a first question, even for an interview, but Tim Fountain isn't an ordinary interviewee. And that's not only because he's slept with 5,000 men and his fair share of women.

I know the kind of details about Fountain that it would take most of a us a few dates, or at least a few glasses of wine, to discover. I know how many people he's had sex with, for example. I know the kind of sex that he likes, how often he does it and just who he does it with.

It's just that thousands of other people know these things too.

Fountain, playwright, director and academic, has spent much of his career talking about sex. So you see, it's not because I know him that I know what his sexual predilections are – he'll tell just about anyone who'll listen. And that includes the thousands of people who paid for a ticket to see his one-man show, Sex Addict.

Fountain performed the show at the Fringe back in 2005, but it's still having an impact on his life. When he took to the stage each night (in what he calls "an act of provocation") to talk about his sex life and to find a new sexual partner right in front of the wide-eyed audience – using the internet and a large screen so that everyone could see – some were appalled. That he would then leave the theatre, go to meet his "date", have sex with them, interview them on video and then be ready to report back to a new audience the next night – well, that pushed a few over the edge.

Quentin Letts derided him as a theatrical charlatan in the Daily Mail, while Taki in the Spectator resorted to homophobic abuse to express his disgust. Audiences seemed to like Fountain's work, though – the show sold out in Edinburgh and transferred to the Royal Court Theatre in London, before going to Berlin – but let's not allow critical or popular acclaim, nor the fact that the show involved consenting adults doing exactly what they wanted to do, get in the way of a right good media scrum.

The furore that erupted in response to Sex Addict left Fountain, and his septuagenarian parents ("they've put up with a lot"), in shock and led to the idea for his new book, Rude Britannia: One Man's Journey Around the Highways and Bi-Ways of British Sex.

The book is a tour of the sex lives of the British – have you heard about "furries" (people who like to wear animal suits and then have sex)? Do you know that East Kilbride is a UK hotspot when it comes to dogging (that's having sex in cars, usually in fairly public places so that others can watch)? Or that there's a place in Hereford – The Other Pony Club – where "pony-boys" and "pony-girls" can go to be ridden around the garden? I didn't, but Fountain does because he's spent the last couple of years on a personal odyssey to meet people who like sex that's beyond convention. He travelled the length and breadth of the land to have a peek at what people get up to, and in the process check out whether the things he gets up to are really all that unusual.

Sitting in a sun-filled bar in Glasgow, Fountain is wearing his usual leather jacket and ripped jeans. His hair is short and greying, his skin is tanned. The hair on his chest pokes through his checked shirt and his fingers are bedecked in chunky silver rings. He's sexy, and from the glances that come his way as we chat, attractive to men and women.

Fountain, the only child of older parents – his mum was 38 when he was born – grew up in Yorkshire. He had his first sexual experience in a public toilet in a Bradford bus station when he was 14. There was a man in the next cubicle, a glory hole and, well, the rest is history. It triggered what has become a lifelong fascination with casual sex – encounters with men that he meets in parks or bars, in toilets and libraries. "If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing in public," he quips.

He may have had sex with thousands of people, but Fountain doesn't believe that his "statistics" are unusual. The difference is that he likes talking about it. A lot. So is sex for him always about the breaking of taboos?

"Transgression has for me always been a part of sex because when you're transgressing the blood is pumping round your body, the adrenaline's flowing and you feel more alive," he says.

"I think it's important for everyone, though. That's the problem with maintaining a good sex life in a relationship. You lie next to the same person, you're allowed to touch that person, you've seen them taking their clothes off a million times and so all the taboos are gone. And once that's happened it becomes hard for it to maintain its eroticism."

And in that, lies the other main thread of the book, which is every bit as interesting as the sex antics of swingers in Scarborough. Fountain is questioning why he's lived the way he has and whether he wants to keep doing it. "I probably do have some sort of fear of intimacy on some level, but we'll leave that to the psychologists," he says.

"I've always been completely conflicted. On one hand, there's the casual shagger and on the other the romantic. Suddenly a cup of tea and Coronation Street sitting on the sofa with someone I know seems exotic. And it has for a while.

"I have come out of the book a different person, I think. Not entirely, but that's the question really – can a leopard change its spots? Can a man change what's in his soul? I don't know."

Fountain takes even the most outlandish sexual predilections in his stride but what's endearing is that he's not beyond embarrassment – far from it. He finds himself in situations that make him squirm, relying on Dutch courage and a deep love of the absurd to get him through.

"Everybody's sex life is weird to everybody else. My most terrifying form of sexual encounter is a date," he says with a shudder. "The only people who benefit from dating are the shareholders of Pizza Express as far as I'm concerned."

Fountain is a funny man. He's got a playwright's ear for speech so there are plenty of laughs in the book. There are stories about drag artists and PVC-clad fetishists and a man who pays thousands of pounds to dress as a maid and be chastised by his "employers". It's clear that he's laughing with his subjects though, even if he seldom comes close to really answering why people like the sex that they do. In a sense, he's not really all that bothered about working that out. What's interesting to him is that what people get up to in their sex lives is seldom straightforward.

It's understandable that someone who's been vilified for his sexual choices isn't quick to judge anyone else. Even the man who has four "living dolls" – kept hanging on hooks for storage or under electric blankets to give their "skin" the warmth of flesh – is treated respectfully. Fountain acknowledges that meeting him was "pretty scary" but adds with a grin: "I couldn't help thinking we'd all like a lover we could put in the cupboard while we watch the football."

Using a gag to undercut serious or troubling issues is a Fountain trademark. When things get complicated or uncomfortable, or maybe for him, just boring, he wheels out a punchline and moves on.

"The book is a personal journey, not a scientific study," he says. "There's a certain randomness to where I ended up." The gags come from the incongruousness of sex and where it happens. "The soft furnishings often interested me more than the minute details of the sex," he says. I can't help but think that only someone who's had as much sex as Fountain has could write a book about it which, in some ways, is utterly disinterested in the sexual act.

But since we're on to quantity – how often does Fountain have sex? "At least every day," he says. "It's like having a cup of tea. A day without sex isn't much of a day, is it?" So what does he think about the notion of sex addiction?

"I think there's a whole industry around pathologising everyday life. It suits the therapy industry down to the ground to phrase it in that way," he says. "At times in your life when you're having casual sex and not enjoying it, you do wonder why you're doing it. But who hasn't had sex to cheer themselves up? It's like having a drink to make yourself feel better.

"There aren't many people who go to their grave wishing that they'd had less sex, are there? I might be the first," he says with another hoot of laughter.

As with Sex Addict, the internet is integral to Rude Britannia. From finding his way to sex clubs using GPS, checking train times for his next assignation or tracking down the groups of sexual outlaws he's going to infiltrate, it all happens with the help of the world wide web. So what's Fountain's take on the relationship between the internet and sex?

"In the old days if you wanted to meet someone who was into spanking you had to put an ad in a magazine, wait three months for a reply, collect it from a PO Box then write back, then wait for the next response. It would hardly be worth it. Now you Google the word 'spanking' and if there's a spanker on your street they'll be round.

"The internet has democratised sex. In the past you had to be rich or famous or powerful, or all three, to get the kind of sex you wanted. Now everyone can do that.

"What came up time and time again when I was travelling was that it was about a sense of community. Of course people were having sex, but actually it was more about knowing that there was someone else as 'weird' as them."

Fountain didn't find any of the sex clubs he visited even remotely erotic. It's not his thing – too organised, not nearly "naughty" enough. But his affection for the suburban sexual outlaws he encounters is clear. "I remember going to the London Fetish Fair to get kitted out for my trip to Manchester (to S&M haunt Club Lash] and I thought it was going to be extreme, but when I got there it was like the Antiques Roadshow really. Some of the S&M fetishists, they're ever such nice people, but they've got more in common with trainspotters at Doncaster Station than Linda Lovelace."

He makes me think of Alan Bennett, or maybe Thora Hird. It's partly the Yorkshire accent but it's also that no-nonsense, northern deadpanning. Sometimes he overplays it, going for the easy gag, but he needn't. He's at his funniest and most perceptive when he's just being who he is: a cocky, sex-obsessed "over-sharer" with intimacy issues and a fear of getting older.

"I'm a bit of a fraud really," he says. "I've been in lots of relationships. When you say you've slept with 5,000 men, people ask 'oh, have you ever been in love?' and of course I have. Lots of times. It's just that I've always shagged other people at the same time. Then they say 'oh your lovers must hate you', but actually all of them – even the one who liquidises a banana that represents my penis as part of his stage act – are still in touch. I can't have been all bad."

And what about the answer to that first question – is he a good lover? After much deliberation, and a hilarious level of embarrassment: "I'm quite fast," he says, with a laugh. "I don't waste time." SM

• Rude Britannia: One Man's Journey Around the Highways and Bi-Ways of British Sex is published by Orion, priced 12.99.