Ellis - the man behind the bloke

Marc Ellis wants to be competitive in business. Picture / Dean Purcell

Marc Ellis thinks he might not have his picture taken because he's growing a beard "which might not be the sort of look to push in a business article".

He conveys this by email and throws me into a panic. Never mind the picture, it's the "business article" business that gets me going. I assume it's supposed to. He does like his little joke.

There is a business angle, something called a reverse takeover of Ellis' company, Charlie's, and I've told him, also by email, that he can explain this to me if he likes and I won't understand a word. Hence his joke.

Five years ago I went to meet Marc Ellis on the occasion of his retirement from sport and his, as I put it then, reinvention as businessman, a month out from the launch of Charlie's. There was a deal: we weren't allowed to give away the nature of the business, which is juice. Others were not so honourable and Ellis sent a very embarrassing bunch of flowers with a note saying: thanks for keeping your word.

I had no qualms, this time, in reminding him that I was, ahem, the nice journalist.

So, when we meet, I say: "Nice beard. Now, you're not under some mad illusion that this is a business article? And thanks for succumbing to my emotional blackmail."

All of which make his eyes twinkle ever more mischievously. But of the last bit he says, seriously: "Oh, no. No problem. No problem." It isn't. Because in Ellis' personal philosophy in doing business - and make no mistake, an interview is a serious transaction - and in living, if somebody has done you a good turn, you do them one in return. This is karma and both the serious business guy and the clown who co-exist harmoniously within him believe in this implicitly.

I think he was serious about the bearded picture (although who knows, really) and you can see why. As we arrive he appears in the hallway of the Saatchis building where Charlie's is based, talking on his cellphone, looking like a bum. Having decided that he would, in fact, have his picture taken, all you can think is that he has decided to take the joke to its furthest extreme. At one point he's talking about how he likes to sit on park benches watching people and I blurt out that he'd fit in pretty well "looking like that".

This appeals. "Yeah, exactly. With a paper bag with a bottle in it. Well, you see largely I think that people try to conform to what they believe other people would expect them to be like ... I don't know that there's a huge future in that."

This is pure Ellis. A serious observation followed by and delivered after a perfectly timed pause - he is a professional, if part time, comedian after all - a deadpan, blokey deprecatory pronouncement.

He does like to confound expectation. The last time we met, he was introducing himself as Marc Ellis, the businessman and he was all scrubbed up wearing a beautiful suit. This, I think now, was also a sort of prank. Because he wasn't reinventing himself at all: he had long been serious about business. The suit was just another costume change.

So, now that he is seen to be a suit, he swaps costumes for this bum get-up. He says that he's learned a lot over the past five years but "there's been some sort of consistency and overriding things which I think are consistent from your schooling. Really, people behave in very predictable ways".

People think they know Ellis. He is sometimes greeted by people he's never met who think they know him well, then realise "they don't actually know me". He is, he says, "pretty welcoming when that happens because I dare say if I saw somebody walking down the street who I'd seen around I'd say exactly the same thing". He's been "pretty bloody lucky" because nobody has ever come up to him, "and gone, 'oh, you wanker".

It is wrong to say that he has worked on his good guy image because that implies a face he only puts on in public. But he says that he decided early on that it didn't cost anything "if somebody said 'gidday' to say 'gidday' back". I think he is seen as the nicer guy of the Marc'n' Matthew pairing and he says of Matthew Ridge that "he's just as good a guy ... [but] I don't think it comes as naturally to him. There's no bullshit to him, nor is there to me but sometimes you just have to grit and bear it whereas he's not of that personality."

THEY are, by the way, great mates but not best mates. They see each other for their telly work but they don't hang out much otherwise. What they are able to do on the telly is exist in a state of suspended development. "Yeah and long may that continue." Well, the last series got a couple of less than glowing reviews. "But look at the half wit who wrote it," he says. "Who's that," I ask, knowing full well. He says: "I don't know but I dare say if you sit them down here they'd bore the tears out of you."

Later I email him to let him know that the half wit is actually my bloke. He responds: "Hahahaha Brilliant!! don't you love that ... I certainly look forward to reading the article on Saturday now."

He'll be right. For one thing, you have to admire that response and for another, Ellis is unfailingly courteous - a trait he can't hide behind the laddishness. Even when he asks to see the piece before it goes in the paper, and I say "of course not" he goes on being pleasant.

On the topic of that laddishness, I ask how old he is. He says "shit, closer to 25 than 40. Yeah I'm 33 now so that's not the greatest maths in the world is it?" Then he says: "you're as young as you feel." And "you feel 25, do you?" "I actually feel younger than that," he says. We agreed that six years old is about right.

His television character is, I suggest, based on an exaggerated form of young blokeishness and he agreed that "yeah, [the character] was pretty close to being bang on when I was at varsity, but then varsity gave me an exaggerated version of life anyway."

Yet he is, at the vast age of 33, capable of grumpy old man utterances too. He's in an astonished rage at some research which, he says, has "people who are telling us that orange juice is bad for you because 30 per cent of children are fat". He splutters away about this and the Labour Government and red tape and fat children "and I'm saying, well, tell the lazy pricks to go for a run". All of which ends with his saying, incredulously: "I mean, what's the world coming to?"

He's seen as a bit of a rebel but I think he's pretty conservative actually. And probably pretty well behaved most of the time too. He says he is "on the whole. I mean, I like to have a little bit of fun every now and again". I push this too far by saying I don't think he's much of a larrikin at all; that he probably drinks wine. He looks at me, mock aghast, and says "Oh. Don't. Be. Stupid. Speights ... I'm not a wine drinker," then, again with that comic timing, "it gives me heartburn".

What he is serious about is business, although he says it's not about money. Business is about competition, he says. "I can't go out on a rugby field any more and be competitive so I want to be competitive in business." And money, he says, "is the yardstick by which you're measured in business".

I have no idea how successful he is in business - we agreed not to talk about the proposed deal if he couldn't see the copy because he feared he'd be "****ing rapped over the knuckles; I'm green on this." But he has managed something most high profile people don't. He's a brand, really. Well, two brands. He has managed to sell "quite an intimate relationship" with both Charlie's and the telly Ellis to people who think they know him, and he is one of the most successfully private public people in the country. While what you see is that exaggerated form of himself, he's never "dialling anything up".

Well, no. We've been talking about how Ellis has maintained his privacy and Ridge has not and he says this is "because probably he's a bit bloody better looking than I am and he's probably going out with girls with bigger tits than I am". Then he says, "don't mention that for Christ's sake". I can't see why not. He's never censored himself and I'm not about to start doing it for him. Besides, it's exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to read in a business article about Mr Marc Ellis.