Ardal makes his stand again

One of the things he's on the fence about is fame: he doesn't know whether he wants it or not. It's for this reason that we find ourselves conducting the interview in two places in Dublin that reflect the split in his world view. He has proposed a faceless quayside hotel, presumably because he too is faceless there.

The hotel receptionist has never heard of him. 'Ah, good. That's great. That's music to my ears,' O'Hanlon says when I tell him. But I'm not sure, and nor is he. 'My thoughts veer between absolute anonymity and global domination,' he explains.

I suggest that we go somewhere that is more personal to him. We repair to the Winding Stair caf? above a second-hand bookshop. A mural of Yeats, Wilde and Joyce glistens on the wall behind him as we sit overlooking the Liffey. ('I always think of toilet water and ladies with flabby arms when I think of Yeats.')

The only problem is that after ten minutes the place fills up and, embarrassed at the sound of itself, his voice gets softer and softer until we have to give in and trudge back to the hotel. As we're leaving he reveals that it was at this table that he and the two mates with whom he set up Dublin's first comedy club, the Comedy Cellar, held their meetings.

'We went into a bar and said, "We're lads, we have sketches, please can we go on?" And they said "OK".' That was the optimist at work. The stand-up persona he developed has stood him in good stead, evolving into Father Dougal, and to a lesser extent Thermoman in My Hero. They are studies in cluelessness.

'I see loads of influences and references in Father Dougal now. Dogs play a major part in that but also kids, and some members of my own family and some priests I knew, and then the entire history of comedy on top of that. I was almost ashamed when I thought how I could be accused of apeing Stan Laurel.'

He was never rumbled, though a similarity to Terry Wogan has been noticed, and I can't say I disagree. Mark the way his sentences cave in with a dying fall, as if his voice is fading disbelievingly out on his own aper?us. Pure Wogan. It's a voice that is up to asking the questions, but leaves it to others to deliver the answers. At one point he even says to me, 'What's the answer? Tell me the answer and I'll tell you the question.'

Now the nihilist in him has decided to call time on the whimsy, aged 35. 'The way I see my future going, I want to write, that's really what I want to do. I'm taking my stand-up very seriously and I'm going to tour again. The weekend that's just gone by I spent in Kilkenny. I did two nights there, secret and unannounced, just to try out stuff. But hopefully after this year I will get the stand-up thing completely out of my system. I can't describe the joy of doing it, but I don't see myself flaunting myself in public like that for much longer.'

In short, it sounds as if O'Hanlon is preparing to bury the befuddled comic persona that got him where he is today. Maybe we can blame all this on Dave Lee Travis. They were once guests together on Shooting Stars.

DLT warned O'Hanlon, 'One day you'll be on the way down.' 'It was an amazing thing to say. Either amazingly self-aware or amazingly naive. The lifespan of people in the media and the public eye isn't always that long. Are you prepared for the inevitable decline in your fortunes?'

You wonder whether there is as much mileage in the Beckettian gloom as in the Woganesque charm. But it turns out that that was the masterplan all along. O'Hanlon is the third child of six, growing up a few miles north of Dublin. With that many siblings, 'you learnt to be self-sufficient'.

Ardal's self-sufficiency took the form of not wanting to go into the professions, like most of his siblings and their father, a health minister under Charles Haughey. He attended smart Blackrock College, alma mater of Bob Geldof and sundry green-jerseyed three-quarters, and discovered through the debating soc that he loved making people laugh. It also killed off his shyness.

'I was always quite reticent as a kid. I never put myself forward in any way. It could be something to do with where I came in the pecking order in the family. But you don't know. It could be to do with the furniture we had in the house. Who knows why anyone does anything? My parents dispute this completely. They say I was very outgoing as a kid, and very personable.'

O'Hanlon did 'an arse degree' in communication studies with a faint view to becoming a novelist. It involved 'deconstructing Westerns on a Monday morning and then spending the rest of the day kicking a ball around'. Even if he'd wanted a proper job when he graduated, there weren't any. The Celtic tiger had yet to roar.

Luckily, he knew from the age of 16 that he didn't. 'I was quite precocious as a teenager, and felt that I wanted to write. I didn't really know how to go about that. I didn't have any sort of discipline or any deep knowledge of literature. So stand-up was a thing that was happening and I thought, this is a way into the bohemian twilight.'

He co-founded the Comedy Cellar. As a Wednesday- night venue, its reputation grew over the years, but the most he ever performed to was 50 people. He took any gig going, including prisons.

'My attitude when I started was I am going to be shitting it anyway wherever I'm playing. And so I was never going to turn down any gig, no matter how awful it sounded. Some do-gooder asked me to play to prisoners on one or two occasions, and I did willingly. There were two. The first was to murderers and regular thugs and they were really into it. The next one was to segregated prisoners, very, very bad people. Worse than the murderers. They appeared to me to be a bunch of unrepentant bastards. I was very glad to get out of there. You think, well, maybe if I can help in any way towards the rehabilitation of these people then I will. But now I wouldn't do it, certainly not now that I've got kids myself. The rage is blinding.'

Eventually he had to board the gravy train. 'I knew from the day I started that I had to go to London. I was enjoying stand-up but there was nowhere to play, you couldn't make a living doing it.'

He got to London at 28, and his life took immediate shape. He won the Hackney Empire newcomers award within a month. He proposed to his girlfriend, Melanie, whom he'd known since childhood. And, most significantly for his career, he landed the role in Father Ted when its two writers Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan, who had seen him in Dublin, came good on a promise to cast him.

'As far as I was concerned, they were struggling young writers in Dublin. I was familiar with their stuff, but I never took any of that seriously, and I still wouldn't. "We've got a part for you." "Yeah, show us it." But Father Ted opened a lot of doors. I'd never imagined being on TV or doing anything else for that matter. I had a list of maybe 100 clubs to play and my ambition was to play them all. Once you've played the Comedy Store and Jongleurs you think, that's it now, I might as well go home.'

Now he has gone home: he has reverse-migrated back to Dublin. 'My wife wanted to move back. It's just more comfortable here. It's what I know. It's also friendlier and much more down to earth. Dublin, for all its faults, is still a small town, whereas London can be a bit overwhelming.'

He says he is slowly turning into a hermit. It's as if some invisible angel fired him out of a catapult, but a devil attached elastic to him, and now he is coming back to what he always wanted to be - a writer in a lonely room.

Or perhaps it was the devil who fired and the angel has dragged him back.