Julian Barnes: I may not like it much. But I still live here

Julian Barnes has just splashed out on a satellite system that brings French television to his north London home. Each evening he can sit down at 7 o'clock and instead of tuning into Channel 4 News he can watch the bulletins broadcast by TF1 or TF2 and imagine that he is no longer sitting in Tufnell Park but has been transported to one of his favourite parts of France – the Charolais region of southern Burgundy, perhaps.

For this most francophile of British writers the chance to experience a daily slice of France almost at first hand is surely as it should be. And now he has added another French-accented line to his CV – as an actor in a series of radio dramatisations of the Inspector Maigret stories created by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon, the centenary of whose birth falls next year.

Barnes might choose not to live in France – and perhaps surprisingly he is not one of the tens of thousands of Britons who own a home there – but he is there in his head. Since long before he wrote Flaubert's Parrot – the 1984 novel that won him a big following in France – to this year's collection of French-themed essays, Something to Declare, French life and ways have never failed to inspire him. "It's still my other country," he says.

There's more to the acquisition of French TV than mere escapism, though. A one-time renowned television critic, Barnes has come to the conclusion that British TV news simply doesn't do the job any longer.

"I do find our news more parochial than France's, that it has less depth," he says. "It seems to me to be more and more like an official state news service rather than something that stands at a slight angle to the state. You could say that the French are not standing at much of an angle to the state, but at least it's a different state."

Beyond current affairs and sport, Barnes says that the only television programme he does watch regularly is Sex and the City (something went wrong with the video when he attempted to record episode one of Daniel Deronda). If this amounts to full-scale disillusionment with the medium he started interpreting so wittily in the pages of the New Statesman 25 years ago then maybe somebody at BBC Radio heard about it.

The call to Barnes was to ask him not if he would play Maigret – raised eyebrows at the union Equity might have followed – but that of Simenon himself, whose role as Maigret's wry interlocutor provides an extra dramatic layer to the tales.

Barnes doesn't have many lines, but he delivers them with the surest of bedside-manner touches and an expressiveness that more than qualifies him to share microphones with the professional actor playing Maigret, Nicholas Le Prevost. It's a step up from the non-speaking role he had in the film Bridget Jones's Diary (playing himself), but he doesn't expect it to lead much further.

Barnes's eyes were opened to frustrations he does not have to put up with as a writer. "I could write a sentence that I might think is as good a sentence as I could write, and if a motorbike goes past outside it doesn't affect it. But I'd be sitting next to Nick and he would do this long speech absolutely superbly as Maigret and then someone in the studio says, oh, got a bit of a rumble there, might have been a Tube train, and then he has to do it all over again."

The Maigret series provided Barnes with another opportunity to immerse himself in France, and while he maintains that neither that country nor his own is justified in feeling morally or culturally superior to the other, it doesn't take much for him to point out how Britain falls short in comparison. Take the world of films, for example. "We make films rather than having a film industry," Barnes explains. "We think it's perfectly OK that 50 per cent of our cinema outlets are US owned. What a surprise then that we're making so many British movies that can't be shown. Just saying that the free market rules is a nonsense and a stupidity and in the long term is self-defeating. The French can see that."

Britain, says Barnes, likes to think that the relationships it has with America and the rest of Europe give it the best of both worlds, but in fact it's the opposite. "We're taken as a poodle ally by America but we're not taken seriously as a European country by the Europeans. How many times have we heard – first from Major and now from Blair – that we are at the heart of Europe, when we don't even have the euro. It doesn't make sense." He adds, though, that "just because one is critical of one's own country doesn't mean I don't like living here". Not when you can have French TV beamed straight into your study.

Radio 4's series of Maigret adaptations begins on Tuesday at 2.15pm

1947 Born, Leicester. Educated in London and Oxford.

1980 First novel, Metroland

1984 Third novel, Flaubert's Parrot, establishes him in France

1988 France makes him a Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres

1990 Begins stint as London correspondent of The New Yorker

2002 Publishes collection of French-themed essays, Something To Declare; makes debut as radio actor