Ardal O'Hanlon has always been blessed with boyish good looks - it's part of the charm of his stand-up, and part of the angel-faced gormlessness of Father Dougal. These days it is a mellower Ardal, at the peak of his success, in the early days of fatherhood, that you meet, casually and unexceptionally dressed, in a Dublin hotel. He talks about new priorities in life, his child, doing quality work. Are you getting old Ardal? "Yes, definitely."
There is another difference - the black-rimmed glasses. "I always wore them at school to see the blackboard, when I was driving, at the cinema. But now I wear them all the time." Eyesight gone? "Not so much that. It's more to do with . . . going out in public. It's not a disguise or anything, it's just you're more anonymous."
The slight anonymity is necessary because of the high profile Father Ted gave him. Ardal O'Hanlon couldn't be more different to Father Dougal - clued in, serious, articulate, fully understanding the implications of what's going on around him, not a priest. Obviously. He thinks about what he says and how he's saying it, emphasising words, leaning over the table to stress something, obsessed with being articulate. "Inarticulacy is the key thing for me. It is why I was drawn into . . . the creative arts, for want of a better term. It was just this real desire to express yourself in some way, to make sense of your world . . . While comedy is a perfect medium for all the whimsy that's floating around inside one's head, the book is the format to do the more meaningful stuff that you have bottled up inside of you."
The Talk Of The Town, his first novel - "as far as I'm concerned it's a modest debut" - is also, in some ways about inarticulacy and lack of communication. What possessed him to write a novel? "I suppose I always wanted to write," he says, "long before I got," he pauses, "sidetracked," he grins, "into comedy. I wrote short stories as a teenager, and I wrote poems and did nothing with them. But I always fancied myself from an early age as being a writer of sorts. But more than anything else, I think it was after doing two series of Ted and after fulfilling an ambition to tour Britain and Ireland, I needed a break from performing. For a start because it's quite nerve-wracking, and adrenalin-soaked, and it's quite a wearing lifestyle. And I needed a break from the ludicrously high profile that something like Father Ted gives you.
"I wanted to work in private as opposed to in public, at my own pace, in Ireland, in an entirely different medium. For me, writing a novel was the flip side of doing comedy. Rather than reducing every idea that you ever had to a scorching one-liner, for me it was a chance to develop stuff in a more comprehensive, thoughtful way. For example, you can't be sentimental in comedy, you can't really be savage, in the kind of comedy I do anyway. Or you can't be serious, for want of a better word. You have to be funny every 10 seconds, which is all very well, but after a while I get sick of that, because I like to think I'm a slightly more well rounded person. If I hadn't done it now I don't know if I ever would have done it."
But back to the book. "Some people have the mistaken impression that comedians are just cashing in on celebrity by writing books. I'd just like to nip that one in the bud if I can," he says mischievously. "Because you actually take a huge dip in fortunes because the type of advances you get, unless you're writing romantic blockbusters or whatever, are actually quite modest." And that's not the only downside: "You take a huge gamble, you risk ridicule, you risk opprobrium, because people object to comics writing books."
Then there's the compulsion to write. "It's partially why I do comedy as well - you have this platform, even if it's only to talk about the absorbancy of sheep or whatever."
Talk Of The Town is a tale of a person gone wrong, of a horrible, unpleasant, gossipy, drink-sodden town, and a capital that is grimy and nasty, and of a reasonably ordinary soul lost in adolescence whose life goes off a violent edge. It's all rather bleak and crude, and occasionally blackly funny.
The fictional Ballycock is particularly dreary. Ardal O'Hanlon grew up in Carrickmacross, the son of TD Rory O'Hanlon. Are small towns really so bad? "I don't think so, it's just that age. I think it could be any small town anywhere in the world - there's not a hell of a lot to do. And it's at a time when there's so much hope about, but there's so much scope for despair, and you don't know which way to turn. What interested me is when you're in that zone between adolescence and adulthood, between school and the workplace, between male and female, between city and country, in this crazy spaghetti junction and you don't know where to turn. Anything could go wrong."
His own upbringing in Carrickmacross was quite a pleasant, he says, "if anything, overprotected from all of that. But we snuck out to these nightclubs and my parents didn't have a clue what was going on there, nobody did. But what's in that book is accurate, it's an accurate reflection of the type of stuff that goes on in those places." Still? "I hope kids are a bit more sussed now."
Generally, he's had a fair crack of the whip with publicity. There was the big tabloid story where someone got the wrong end of the stick and mistook irony for literalism and he was branded as encouraging Ecstasy - "It took a few days to get over it, but for that few days it's the most awful thing in the world, it's crushing. I know it's not personal, but it's very malicious. I was bewildered, on location in Clare, and it was traumatising. For me it's a lesson in how such stuff becomes front page news."
And then, more recently, there was a small story in the Sunday Independent accusing his book of being derivative of Pat McCabe's The Butcher Boy. "I believe they overstepped the mark by accusing me of plagiarism." There follows a long rant about the Irish media in general and the ethics of the Sun- day Independent in particular. "If there was any way that I could help in reducing the circulation of the Sunday Independent by 20,000 every week I would do it free of charge, because they must be stopped somehow."
He sounds pretty cool and rational about it, but "It was hurtful at the time, but not something I'm going to carry around with me because it's the one inevitability before I set out to write the book - I was convinced there would be a slight backlash because I was a comedian writing a novel,"
He has thought it through and there are things he wants to say: primarily that it was a provocative and cheap accusation. "I'd be flattered by any comparisons with The Butcher Boy, and I think in a few more serious publications it has been brought up that there are echoes at least. I think that's largely due to the shared background - I come from a small town in Co Monaghan, and so does Patrick McCabe. But I wrote the short story on which that novel is based 10 years ago, before I ever heard of Pat McCabe. I've read all his stuff, and I love it and I'm inspired by it but that's as far as it goes. It's ludicrous to say you've aped somebody, especially when you're that conscious of your influences."
He hopes to move back to Ireland full time in the next few years (he has been living in London since the early 1990s), "and I would move back there or somewhere very like it to raise my daughter in the country".
Right now he's starting to write material for a live tour in the autumn, and a stand-up show for BBC "will tie in with that - that'll keep me very busy for the autumn". But while he's looking at other possibilities you get the idea he's not keen to rush into anything.
He has ambition, but it is measured, not blind: "I don't want to be on TV, I don't want to be a millionaire. I want to be articulate. The ambition is tempered by a desire to live a really good life, to have a good quality of life and take as much time off as possible. A couple of hours a day is my limit."
The new person in his life is his daughter Emily, now nine months old. "I don't think there's any way of avoiding cliches - it completely changed my life, for the better. I now see daylight, which I didn't see before." (It's unclear whether this is literal or metaphorical or both.) "It really makes you reprioritise absolutely everything. Where in the past I would get very bogged down about my work, but now I don't at all, it's just not as important as it was. But in some ways, because I have that new attitude, I actually find it easier."
Emily arrived as he was finishing the book: "It was a race against time. And Father Ted was a completion in its own way. I had done most things I wanted to do and loads more I never dreamed of. Between the arrival of my baby daughter and the new priorities in my life and having achieved all these things, I am bereft of ambition. I can't think where I want to go next, apart from touring again, because I've done as much as I can do in television - it doesn't get any better than Father Ted."
Talk Of The Town by Ardal O'Hanlon is published by Sceptre at £10
Ardal O'Hanlon will be signing his book in Waterstones today, 12.00-1.00