The name of a saint, the singing voice of an angel, the mind of a sinner. It's not easy being Paul McDermott- but it's far less easy being Paul McDermott's audience.

A freezing midwinter's night in Sydney. In a draughty ABC-TV studio, the taping of Good News Week is getting underway. McDermott bounds onstage and surveys us through gleaming eyes, the fox loose in the hen-house. We make tasty morsels- a bouncy Clairol-ad hairstyle here, a lurid sweater there and, over in this corner, a sweet smiling adolescent boy. Paydirt. "Are you old enough to have pubic hair yet?" McDermott demands. "You don't even know what 'fucking' means." His victim makes the mistake of protesting. Our host grows silky at the prospect of forthcoming humiliation. "Oh, you do know!" he says." Stand up and tell the audience, then."

Another comic would warm up with a more soothing routine, invite people to observe the absurdities of life, perhaps. Pick on someone their own size. McDermott is not that comic. "If the audience don't like it they can go away" is how he sums up his performance philosophy. Tonight, taunting and jeering-"Tell us! Come on, you're so clever, you know everything"- he gives the impression he's not going to relent. And he doesn't, until the boy begs, "Please don't make me do it."

The warm-up didn't make it to air, but it goes a long way towards explaining the 36-year-old McDermott's steadily growing cult appeal. In a wasteland of homogenised entertainment he represents the unknown. He will say the things you were thinking five seconds before. He might not stick to the script. "Dangerous" is the word used most often when describing his style.

"He'll get right out there and risk a great deal," says Wendy Harmer, who worked with him on The Big Gig. "It's fascinating to watch, in a scary way." Similarly, comedian Mark Trevorrow [aka Bob Downe], who has been a fan of McDermott's since he first saw him perform with the Doug Anthony Allstars, admires his capacity to push the envelope. "It's such a skill," Trevorrow says," to be so rude to everybody and still have them like you." Trevorrow lauds the "true spirit of cabaret" behind McDermott's antics, saying that "the room decides what will happen". It works, Harmer muses, because, "obviously people can see the twinkle in Paul's eye. They wouldn't stand for it if he was really awful."

Audiences do seem to adore McDermott. Every arch of his eyebrow, every mocking remark is greeted with rapturous applause. Women- and plenty of men- declare him a big old sex bomb. Fifteen-year-old girls dedicate websites to him and wave placards saying, "We love U Paul".["You spelt 'you' wrong, he retorts] Advertisers want him to sell their products, directors send him film scripts to consider, other TV shows are trying to create their own version of him.

Not long ago, few observers would have predicted such a rosy future. McDermott established himself as a talent to watch in the late 1980s, but when the Allstars had their much-publicised split in 1994, it was the other two, Tim Ferguson and Richard Fidler, perceived as the 'user-friendly Dougs', who were being courted. Ted Robinson, the producer of Good News Week, recalls trying unsuccessfully to 'sell' McDermott, whom he describes as an engine-room of ideas, as a compere to commercial television management for a year or so. "Too edgy", Robinson says. "Paul has a natural bent to want to shock, and television is a conservative medium."

In the end, Robinson created Good News Week- based on a satirical current affairs show in the UK- a knowing blend of current affairs and pop culture that capitalises on McDermott's freewheeling schtick. The show made a sluggish start, then picked up steam to the point where, when the hugely popular Channel Nine Show, with Roy and HG, took a break, the GNW team was chosen to replace it with Good News Weekend, a variation on the weekly program.

McDermott casts himself as part of a group effort- Mikey Robins and Julie McCrossin complete the onstage team- but there's no doubt he is the one the audience screams loudest for. His popularity has resulted is some interesting offers recently, a major political party asked him to run for office. He turned them down. "It's stupid to build a party on personalities," he says, looking faintly embarrassed when the subject is raised. "I've done too many evil things in my past and they would come up. No way. Why would you do it? For Christ's sake....." A minute later, he has thought of a reason: "If you were a conservative politician it would make sex more interesting. Oranges up your arse, big plastic bag over your head, dangling from and electrical beam- that's living!"

McDermott's monster act is convincing. "What's Paul like?" I've been asking his friends and colleagues, with growing trepidation, the answer before we meet. Here are some of the answers: 'smart', 'thoughtful', 'sweet', 'hard to get to know', 'complex'. Most people who know him concur that he has long, dour periods and can be prickly. Wendy Harmer weighs in with this reassuring bit of advice: "He's only scary if he thinks you're bullshitting him."

"Paul's something of a contradiction," says filmmaker Tony Ayres, who went to art school with him in Canberra. "He's got that confident public persona, but underneath he's an incredibly shy person who takes a long time to make friends." When he does befriend someone, however, it's a commitment. Gerald Jones, another artschool friend and Canberra resident, says that though they move in different circles, McDermott has stayed in touch and when they meet, "He's genuinely interested in what I do."

A few days after the taping, McDermott takes time out from his frantic schedule to meet me at his local, the Bondi Icebergs bar, a place where grizzled guys drink beer and play cards and nobody recognises him. Away from the cameras. lights and audience action, he appears smaller and quieter. Also a lot less matte. "On TV you've got no wrinkles," I note.

"And now, heaps wrinkles," he replies amiably. "It's amazing the amount of blusher, rouge and foundation they paint on to make you look lifelike for the cameras. That's the thing about television and performance, it's an illusion. If you didn't wear makeup it'd be pretty scary, like those mornings when you drop acid and your pupils are enlarged because you're accepting so much information[that] you see a landscape completely different from what you normally see. Very tricky for everyone at home."

He is immediately likable, lively without being overbearing and, unexpectedly for the star of the show, attentive. Almost any query will send him off on a riff which twists and turns through myriad subjects. This is highly entertaining and has the added bonus, from his point of view, of deflecting inquiries until he has worked out a way to answer them.

McDermott did not set out to be a comic. It was something he began doing as a way to put himself through art school. Being part of the cabaret theatre of the Allstars was also a way to consolidate his interests: writing, singing, dancing and drawing [he painted the backdrops for many of the gigs]. He became one of the trio almost by accident when another member left and was, for a while, the shy one. Mr Grumpy, as his Allstars character was known, developed because "nobody else wanted to be the monster, wanted to be hated in that sort of sense." He was the one who would encourage the sadistic games the trio became known for, or the one who would single out audience members for abuse. It was challenging for both audience and performers- anything could happen- but at times even he was suprised by the frenzy that erupted.

"With the Dougs, we used to have a game where we'd get everybody to slap the person next to them," he says. "You'd get this domino effect, people would forget they were at a comedy venue and their goal became to win this farcical, belittling race that achieved nothing! They'd slap their loved ones, their friends, people they didn't know, and you'd be thinking, "Why are they doing this?" and at the same time you'd be shouting, 'Come on! Faster! Harder!' It's a weird thing, a good-bad schism."

When people came up later and showed him bruises he had engineered, he would apologise only to find that they didn't mind at all. "What interested me," he says, "was the way people kept coming back for more." Where does the persona end and the person begin? McDermott will frankly concede that he can behave like a prize arsehole- he has turned friends into "demented messes" with his irrational moods and made several enemies along the way- but he stresses that the stage act is just that, a piece of theatre which exposes the hypocrisy of accepted social veneers by ripping them away. "It's like painting pictures of the devil, exploring that terrain," he offers as explanation. The skill lies in knowing when to stop and how to control it, what he calls "the magician's trick" of performance. Asking if he feels any moral compunction over upsetting people is, to him, missing the point; even on the one occasion his parents came to see the Allstars he didn't tone it down.

You could construe all this as a power trip and in a sense it is. McDermott has a way of turning things around to his advantage. But another way to see the act is as a form of rebellion, a revenge on the sort of guy he was supposed to be. McDermott, who grew up in the suburbs of Canberra, the oldest son in an Irish Catholic family, and a twin to boot- his sister, Sharon, was born a minute before him- was a misfit at the all-boys Marist Brothers high school he attended. A "backwardly quiet" student, paralysed by shyness- he recalls only losing his maths book and being too terrified to tell any one for the whole year- he was hopeless at the things that mattered, like rugby league. His teachers regarded him as an imbecile and he had few friends. There was a point where he couldn't imagine anyone ever liking him.

He relates this without self-pity, although the way he hops up from the table and busies himself with nothing in particular suggests it has left a few scars. What did he think would happen to him? "I hoped I would die young," he replies and seems only to be half joking.

To add to it, there was this growing distance from Catholicism. He rails against the "duplicitous" nature of a Church which preaches tolerance on the one hand and condemns all non-believers to burn in the eternal fires of damnation on the other. The Catholics he grew up with, he says, were "insular and hideously racist" and his early religious teaching left him with a mistrust of orthodoxy that's a constant in his work and his conversation.

By channeling his alienation into performance he has made it work for him. But what's notable about McDermott is that while other comics trade on their outsider status, playing endearing eccentrics, he has inhabited a less empathetic role. As Mr Grumpy, he was the alpha male, the sexual predator, the football hooligan. The scabrous-compere drag he puts on for Good News Week is another guise; it gives him leave to hurl invective at anyone who doesn't agree with his version of the world. Like religion, and the media, which he relentlessly critiques, masculinity is a departure point and a reference: "It's the attraction-repulsion thing," he says.

When I remark that the harshness of his characters is a male prerogative, that a woman would have a harder time getting away with that, he agrees, though he thinks more should try:" It would be good to see women taking on that powerful role." For a group of "fey lads", as McDermott describes the Allstars, posturing as aggressors was cathartic, like "squeezing the cancer out of the body."

He sounds a little nostalgic as he talks about the group whose split, triggered by Tim Ferguson's decision to quit London where the Allstars were performing and return to Melbourne to be with his young family, is still the subject of speculation. Rumours that the break was acrimonious were fuelled by an article in the Good Weekend magazine earlier this year which stated that McDermott and Richard Fidler have not spoken to Ferguson since. More recently though, Ferguson appeared on Good News Week. McDermott is willing to talk on the topic, although he chooses his words with care. The break came at the wrong time, he says," We were working towards our own series with [UK's] Channel Four and they were interested. Richard and I thought coming back to perform in Australia would mean going to a commercial station, which was the next logical step, and that would have been an incredible compromise of what we did." His friends say that McDermott, who invested a lot of himself in the Allstars, was depressed for a lon g time after they split. "No, not depressed," McDermott corrects. "I was probably sullen for a while, but I'd always expected it to happen." He does remember feeling "mute" afterwards, as if all the known avenues of expression had been cut off.

Do he and Ferguson have a good relationship these days? "We have an OK relationship," he says evenly. "We send each other flowers on our birthdays."

Tim Ferguson, who is in Sydney to play Frankn'Furter in a production of the Rocky Horror Show, did not return calls, but in the Sun-Herald he was quoted as saying that he left the Allstars because they were just, "touring England, in a van, going from gig to gig, town to town, making money but never arriving anywhere in a professional sense."

Says McDermott, "He believes that because he wants to believe that. We were playing 3000-seat venues and we were on TV the whole time. But I wrote all the material so maybe it wasn't as artistically enriching an experience for Tim." With a flash of feeling he adds, "I don't feel comfortable talking about this, but it would be better to make no money and like what you did than to be in the cesspool of comedy hell."

Richard Fidler, who is currently hosting the program Race Around The World, declined to be interviewed.

If he's not being a compere, or writing songs, or hurling himself into the surf at Bondi, McDermott spends his time painting. One evening he shows me through the flat he shares with his girlfriend, Jo, an academic, and about a thousand of his paintings; miniature surrealist landscapes, grotesque cartoons in the manner of Raw comic books sketched in Texta on the backs of envelopes, tortured renderings of devils and saints. A half-finished drawing of a foot sits on an easel. Dotted about the place are books he has made- he is an obsessive paper collector- and the various other projects he's working on, among them ideas for scripts and shows.

He says he needs to produce things, that he can never just sit still. "Maybe because I'm not going to produce anything else," he cracks. Meaning? "Well, children," he says firmly; kids would be for him a way to "pass on all your insecurities". Is he a workaholic? He doesn't like the word, he prefers to say that he has a lot of things to do.

What will he do next? "That's always the dilemma, isn't it?" he responds. Comedy is a transient business. He has plans but they are not linear. "There are books I want to write or...whatever," McDermott says. "I fall into everything." For all his talent and all the productivity, he seems to still be working out a direction to go in. Ted Robinson, who gives Good News Week another year, predicts that McDermott will possibly move on to feature films. "I will say this about Paul's life," Robinson says. "I think he needs to make some choices soon about what to do."

He won't give up performing yet, he loves it too much. Talking earlier about its allure, McDermott made it sound like the activity which allowed him the most freedom while supplying him with a protective cover for the things he holds precious.

"Anything that you do- painting or writing- there's no response in the world that's going to make you happy with it if you're not happy with it," he says. "You can show a piece of it to someone and they say, 'Oh, I love that,' but that's got no value, it doesn't mean that much. Performing is the opposite; you can go out there and do something appalling and people love it."

Doesn't that make him feel like a fraud? He laughs. "Occasionally, yeah, yeah, of course I do. What's so traumatic about that?"