WCXX

Always a natty dresser on screen, Barrymore was hardly ever a style icon. "I know what everyone will be thinking," he says, "he thinks he's a bleeding designer now. It'll be one rail with a few shirts that a few mates put together in Peckham, and Aunt Cath's knitted him some Aran jumpers. Then he'll run around the room screaming 'Awright, awright, awright…'"

Today he's dressed head-to-foot in Made By Dave – white shirt, grey tweed trousers, smart belt – which is, he says, a fashion label "for people who don't like labels … what City lads would wear at the weekends". When Barrymore wears it, there is something crumpled about him. He also sounds like a man who hasn't slept, occasionally slurring his words and repeatedly losing his thread.

So how did his range of entirely British-made jackets, chinos, Oxford brogues and merino knitwear get its name? "About three years ago, it was the first time I'd been on my own – married for 18 years, [male] partner for 10 years, now living in an apartment in west London, getting used to being on my own. A mate said, 'Are you going to keep talking about getting a dog, or are you actually going to get one?' So I found one on a farm in Dorset." There were three Jack Russells. "'Have they got names?' 'No, except this one. All the other farmers say he looks like me.' 'What's your name?' He said 'Dave'."

And the said Dave features also in the logo. "As a puppy, he was always pulling at my ankles, going for my jeans. I saw a mate one night and he said, 'Are those jeans meant to be tatty like that?', and I said, 'No, they're made by Dave'. Then I was talking to someone about it in retail clothing, and he said: 'That would make a good brand'. Oh, awright."

Is he nervous that, by putting himself once more in the limelight with this fashion collection, the questions about what happened that night in March 2001 will start up again? "I've got myself to a genuinely good place," he says. "I've been through my ups and downs, which has been recorded, mostly wrongly, but not all. I've got my part in it. I've had my illness. I'm clean and sober now. I'm well, the happiest I've ever been. I don't walk around with the dreaded fear all the time."

Barrymore suggests that the still-open case concerning the death of Mr Lubbock, 31, will soon be closed legally for good. And he will clear his name? "Yes. I've had a lawyer working on it for three years now." But for now, he can't, he apologises, go any further.

After Mr Lubbock's death, amid tabloid rumours of orgies and drug use at Barrymore's house, ITV ended its association with him. He disappeared to New Zealand and Australia, tried comebacks in various unsuccessful one-man show vehicles, and ended up spending time in various rehabilitation centres for drug and alcohol problems.

His cause wasn't helped when his former wife and ex-manager, Cheryl, publicly contradicted evidence he'd given about Mr Lubbock's death and accused him of lying under oath. She died in 2005 of cancer.

"I've ended up in some dark places I didn't want to go to," he reflects. "I've been accused of God knows what, but I wouldn't change one bit of it."

Barrymore hasn't ruled out a return to television. "The TV commissioners may still have a block on me. Some of them still feel there's not been closure over certain aspects of my past, but I'm going to address that soon. The important thing is that the public never destroyed me. The difference between a star and a celebrity is that you can't touch a star. A star's up there."