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Paul McDermott has been described as "a Renaissance man" by Bulletin magazine and "a posturing show pony" by Paul Lyneham. However you perceive Paul McDermott, you cannot deny the fact that the man has talent. An accomplished comedian, artist and musician, it would seem that there is nothing that he cannot do.

Paul is the younger of non-identical twins, in a family of six children. He was born in Adelaide on the 13th of May, 1962, to parents John and Betty. He was educated at a private Catholic boy's school in Canberra, where he developed strong skills in both drawing and writing. These talents lead him to art school.

Early in the 1980s, struggling to find the money to buy the canvases for his last year of school he joined the performance group 'Gigantic Fly'. Here he became acquainted with Richard Fidler. Richard was a member of a singing group alongside Tim Ferguson and Robert Piper. One night Richard asked Paul to fill in for Robert and Paul eventually took over Robert's place in the band. When he finished school, he was approached about doing an exhibition, but the lure of fame alongside Richard and Tim was too much and the Doug Anthony All Stars were formed.

When the Allstars broke up in 1995, Paul wrote and starred in a stage production, Mosh, which he performed with six dancers at the Adelaide Fringe Festival and the Melbourne Comedy Festival. He went straight from this into Good News Week, a satirical current affairs game show on the ABC.

In 1996, Paul began making semi-regular guest appearances on Angela Catterns' afternoon radio show on Triple J, and in September, when Mikey Robins asked him to join the JJJ breakfast show, Paul took him up on the offer. Paul co-hosted the show alongside Mikey and Steven 'the Sandman' Abbott, until 1998, when he left the show to concentrate on television. Paul still visits the show every Friday morning at 8 o'clock to take part in the Brekkie show's long running, and extremely bad, but funny, serial "Captain Pants", in which he plays Cabin Boy Twinkle.

Paul is multi-talented and he is well known for his amazing singing voice, but Paul's talents for writing are still widely unknown. Paul wrote most of the songs that the Allstars performed and although most of them were humorous, he did come up with the occasional 'nice' song. He seems reluctant to pursue his singing/song writing career at the moment, but he has hinted that when he is older he would love to do more singing. In late 1997, he began writing a weekly column for the Sydney Morning Herald supplement "Sunday Life", and in 1999 he moved to the Weekend Australian and continued with a bi-weekly column. In late 2000, a book of some of these pieces was published, entitled "The Forgetting Of Wisdom".

As a member of the Doug Anthony Allstars Paul had ample opportunity to exercise his artistic talents designing merchandise, painting backdrops and writing comics and books, but most people don't realise how talented he really is in this area. Paul has a lot of his work, including handmade books of his sketches and paintings on display in art galleries around Australia. He specialises in drawing skulls, flowers and semi-classical landscapes.

You can contact Paul c/o Suite 2, 162 King St Newtown 2042 Australia (www.accessentertainment.com.au).