At least two people live under Paul McDermott’s pale skin. Everyone says so. Good News Week Executive Producer, Ted Robinson, who has also worked with McDermott on the likes of The Big Gig and DAAS Kapital, says "there’s almost a mask there - a professional Paul McDermott, who is the performer - and that’s a long way from the other guy who’d rather sit alone all day and do his miniature paintings. There’s a paradox between Paul the performer and Paul the private person, and the private person is intensely private."

My first acquaintance with Paul McDermott is in an Oxford Street bar. He and his girlfriend are drinking lethal cocktails with mutual friends. We are introduced. He shakes my hand. His hand is cold. In the instant our eyes meet, less trusting souls might suspect he is assessing whether they warrant his further attention. If that is the case, I don’t pass muster. Apart from his friend, the filmmaker and writer Tony Ayres, none of our group does. He joins us for dinner but sits, mostly silent and brooding, staring darkly out through a row of glass doors to the sea.

Paul McDermott claims he doesn’t suffer from depression. Ted Robinson begs to differ. "I think there’s a certain brooding that produces a lot of the comedy he comes up with and that brooding comes out of a depression. It’s not a morose or self-defeating depression. His depression precipitates an anger which makes him want to get out there and say something. It’s productive depression."

My second meeting with Paul McDermott takes place on the set of Good News Weekend at the ABC’s studios at Gore Hill. I’m here to observe the comic in his natural habitat and - while I’m about it, the show’s producer wonders - would I mind sitting in on the panel for Amanda Keller at rehearsal?

I sit beside a subdued McDermott who runs through the show’s scripted component quickly and professionally, polishing jokes with senior scriptwriter, Ian Simmons, discussing timing with floor manager, Hilary Firth. He stops neither to introduce himself nor acknowledge the Amanda Keller impersonator on the shamefaced losing team. (Well, you try recognising a hummed rendition of Slade’s "Come On Feel The Noise."

When he is displeased, McDermott’s eye sockets retreat inward and upward until they are very nearly eclipsed by his arched brunette brows. This, he admits, is not an unusual occurrence.

"I don’t get depressed," he insists. "I’ve seen people get clinically depressed and I don’t get depressed like that. I get annoyed with things rather than depressed by them. I have a lot of nicknames and one of them’s Mr Grumpy. On a bad day, anything can set me off. If the tea’s not hot, I can seethe for quite some time. Absolutely inconsequential, meaningless things make me incredibly angry. I get irritated and grumpy and talk about it for hours."

During this particular run through, he asks for tea which is thankfully freshly brewed and steaming. The crew is, however, preparing a pilot for the new weekend show’s first airing, rehearsal is running half an hour late and nervous tension on the set is palpable.

This is just the style of situation in which, Robinson believes, McDermott’s finer qualities come to the fore.

"He can get very precious and uptight about small things," he admits, "but, in the final analysis, when there’s work to be done, he’s indefatigable. For all his wanting to appear a hedonist, I’ve seldom met other people with such a strong work ethic. Nothing will stop him. He just ploughs through."

McDermott does indeed plough through the rehearsal, before disappearing silently to a dressing room. An hour later, the studio audience has filed in, the set is lit up like a Christmas tree and quite another Paul McDermott paces the stage, delivering comic jousts with faultless timing, flirting simultaneously with an elderly woman in the second row and a shy troupe of schoolboys up the back, seducing the crowd with an affable mix of bravado and self-deprecating humour.

Does he turn Paul-McDermott-funnyman on for television?

"It’s a conscious decision to do that sometimes," he’ll later grin. "I have different personae which are fairly obvious to people who know me. It just seems like that’s the job. That’s what you do."

Paul McDermott’s earliest memory is of horses.

"Horses in a field. Horses running over a sand dune. A large expanse of blue sky and horses coming over this dune. I saw them through the window, standing up in my crib. That’s my earliest memory. It was in Adelaide, at West Beach. I think I was one."

McDermott lived in Adelaide until he was three. Another memory is of going "for drives as kids and someone would point out the house where an architect chopped up his lover and put him in the freezer. That sort of thing.?

By the time he was four, the McDermott family had settled in Canberra, where his father was the Assistant Commissioner for Taxation. Summer holidays usually meant a long family trek back to Adelaide to visit relatives and friends.

"We’d be driving across the Hay Plain. There was often a locust plague, which seemed very Biblical. Scraping locusts off the front of the old Holden. It was always around Christmas, blistering heat, ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ on the radio for 12 hours. Dad would drive on through the night. He’d never stop. Our bladders would be bursting. You just didn’t stop on the Hay Plain."

With him in the back of the car were two brothers and three sisters - one of the sisters his twin. The family also took in fluctuating combinations of budgerigars, cockatoos, goldfish, dogs, cats and tadpoles. "We kept tadpoles alive to the frog stage," he boasts.

His family was Catholic and McDermott likens his religious upbringing to circumcision. "It’s there," he says. "Once it’s done, it’s done. You look down and you’re still a Catholic. It’s been such a huge aspect of your life that you can’t get away from it. Some days, I think I’m an atheist but other days, it comes back. I think, ‘I could just say a quick prayer - even though I know it’s meaningless - and call on God or Satan to pull me out of this jam.’"

McDermott’s other childhood memory is of "this hideously deformed, ugly 12-year-old with my glasses and my very thin body." He wasn’t articulate, he persists. Nor was he particularly clever.

"I used aggressive dialogue to get out of fights because I couldn’t defend myself physically, but I was never a class anything. I was just a very quiet, introverted student. I’m sure the people I was at school with have forgotten I was there. There are other comedians who, from the earliest age, that’s what they did - they told jokes, they made people laugh, they pulled funny faces. I always found that sort of behaviour fairly offensive. I didn’t like those people. I don’t like some of them now."

The wild optimism and intrigue of the Whitlam years excepted, growing up in Canberra in the 60’s and 70’s was an eerily isolating experience.

McDermott recalls that, at the time, the national capital "had the highest incidence of incest, divorce, deaths from heroin abuse. Canberra was a very weird space. I think that was because it was a weir man-made construct. It wasn’t a natural place to put a city. The Aborigines would go to Canberra only once every seven years for the Bogong moth plague. They’d eat the moths then get out of there because, if you stayed too long, you’d all go mad. In our wisdom, of course, we decided to make it the seat of parliament. So, if you want to justify the insanity of Canberra, there’s a precedent in Aboriginal lore."

In Canberra, McDermott also encountered the same insular, European/Australian ideals that had been passed on by a land of homesick immigrants for generations. His family was not newly arrived here but he, like most of his generation, was "spoonfed images, from an early age, of the old country. At school, it was always, ‘Look at this basilica in Rome. That’s architecture. Nothing here is architecturally interesting. Look at this painting by Da Vinci. That’s beautiful. Nothing around here is beautiful. Look at the green rolling hills in this photograph. That’s what a landscape should be. None of this dry, blue-grey eucalyptus and red earth.’ All the literary references were to other countries - to America, to England, to Europe. All our story books were about twee little things - robins whistling and swallows swooping and running through fields of green. Then you’d go outside and everything would be dead and burnt. And this was about 200 years of white settlement."

So, like a great many of his peers, McDermott wasted no time, after high school, in saving all the money he could and boarding a plane for Europe. "I hated Australia," he recalls. "I hated the mateship, sporty aspect of every person I knew. I hated the crassness and the bravado and the heat." It was not until he’d seen the "old countries" first hand that he began to appreciate some of the fundamental qualities of the land in which he’d been born.

"When I first came back," he remembers, "I found I could look at a gum tree and see it as a beautiful tree, not a sickly fuckin’ fir or a pissy little Italian evergreen. There was something better about it. I came back and saw the sky above us as this immense, incredibly beautiful expanse of blue. It was paler than the European sky, but fuck ‘em, it’s our sky."

Back in Canberra, under that big blue sky, he decided to forsake academia for a stint at art school, not because he’d been inspired by the European masters or because he wanted to capture some aspect of his native landscape - "there was no longer motivation to it" - but because he simply "liked the physical aspect of drawing and painting. I enjoyed doing it."

His parents were, at least temporarily, disappointed. McDermott suspects they had hoped their son would "take a far more disciplined course in life." He guesses they had their sights set on university and perhaps a career in law.

Their son, conversely, "never had any long-term plans about how pursuing art would achieve a monetary reality in my life. There would be no fiscal return from it that I could see. It was just what I wanted to do. So when I went to art school I was aware that it wasn’t a very good career choice. I’ve never made very good career choices, I suspect, and that irritated my parents for a long time."

The irritation was, however, temporary and today McDermott says that, despite the flack they get from friends who disapprove of one aspect or another of his performance, they’re always quick to defend him. "They’re supportive," he says, "thought it hasn’t always been that way."

Nothing brings fiscal realities to the forefront of a young artist’s mind like leaving home and it was the pressure to survive on a student allowance that first brought comedy into McDermott’s life. While he was struggling to make ends meet in a government flat, an early incarnation of the Doug Anthony Allstars was taking it’s first fledgling steps on Canberra street corners. A chance meeting at a local cabaret club (where McDermott was moonlighting with a troupe called Gigantic Fly) led to an invitation to work with the band.

"I saw them as a means to an end," he recalls. "They were making 30 bucks in cold, hard cash busking and I thought, if I could get my hands on that sort of money, I could actually buy some canvas. I’d always stolen my canvas from the repertory society. After they finished shows, they’d tear down the sets and I’d take the canvases home. I had friends who were putting themselves through art school by working but I was too lazy to do that. Like water, I always find the easiest route through life. So that was my rationale when the Allstars asked me to come and do some stuff with them. Then, once I was there, I thought, "This group has incredible potential. It just needs to do some original work."

Despite protestations to the contrary, this proved his first smart career move. Before long, there were international tours and sold-out performances in London, New York and at the Edinburgh Fringe.

"We enjoyed ourselves. We made money overseas by telling jokes and swearing at people and punching people. It was a good way to make a living."

Ted Robinson stumbled upon the group at the Prince Patrick Hotel in Melbourne slightly before they reached their zenith. He went out, that night, with the vague idea that he might find an act to be part of the regular team on ABC TV’s The Big Gig. He found what he was looking for.

Robinson’s first impressions of McDermott were that he was "clearly extraordinarily talented but, in those days, a bit of a prat. I thought he was too clever by half and a bit too middle class and wanting to be a post-punk sort of person. That was where his attitude came from but, at the same time, he was obviously cleverer than that."

The Allstars’ line in comedy was fast-paced, spontaneous, razor’s edge and often at each other’ or at the audience’s expense. It was occasionally even physically risky but, McDermott insists, their fans were complicit. Even when the front rows at gigs found it necessary to bring umbrellas (and unfurl them) as a line of defence, "they were there," he says, "because they enjoyed that. If they hadn’t enjoyed it, they’d have gone home. They knew what we were doing and we understood what they were doing and pushing the limits was what was important."

Like the time they led 1,000 Canadians through the streets of Montreal chanting, "fuck the police." Or the time the band lit a bonfire at the end of their first Edinburgh Festival.

"It was a way of celebrating loss, passing on, regrowth," McDermott recalls, "and having a bit of a joke. We invited everyone to throw their credit cards and other possessions into the fire. Then I put a plank across and decided to run through the bonfire. The flames were about six feet high and licking up the side of the plank but you could easily run across, which I did the first time and everyone just went wild. Then I got a bit full of myself. The ego took control and I ran back through the fire but, this time, the winkle pickers I was wearing, slipped and I slid into the flames and everyone screamed."

The Allstars scored a recording deal, a publishing contract and prime-time television spots. In the UK, particularly, their punk ethic met with a clamorous response. But, by the early 90’s, tensions had begun to emerge within the band.

McDermott claims the problems were, for the most part, "just common, everyday things. They weren’t grand philosophical dilemmas about the direction of the group. It was who’s using whose toothbrush in the end."

Fellow Allstar, Richard Fidler, expresses similar sentiments to The Good Weekend’s Jane Wheatley.

"When we were touring," he said, "we’d spend months on end sharing a Tarago, stinking of Big Macs and beer and personal body odour. We were living like a triple-headed hydra, confined in our roles both on and off stage. There were so many rows and periods when we couldn’t talk to each other."

Robinson suspects the same tensions would arise in any band composed of three similarly strong personalities.

"There are lot of benefits to working in a group like that," he explains. "It’s an incredibly strong position to be performing from and you’re always safeguarded by having someone watching your back but, at the same time, you’re dealing with three egos which are all pulling in different directions and they all have their own attitudes. There clearly were tensions but, by and large, they were healthy and creative tensions."

Which is not to say that the Allstars was an entirely democratic outfit.

"Paul was the engine room," Robinson recalls. "Paul seemed to drive the group and that’s where a lot of the ideas came from but the others gave him a fantastic context in which to work."

"He is a bully, yes," Fidler told Wheatley. "He accuses people of his own worst sins. He could be bullying because he needed to show leadership in a situation where we were letting things slide. Other times it would be just his need to maintain authority and often to insist on his artistic prerogative. In retrospect, that was reasonable, because he was the main artistic engine of the group."

Tensions came to a head in ’94 while the band was in London. Channel Four had approached them to create their own television series but "at about this stage," McDermott remembers, third member Tim Ferguson, "decided that he and his family couldn’t live in Britain any more. Tim wanted to come home, which was fair enough, but Richard and I didn’t want to come back to Australia to go to a commercial station which, I believe, would have gelded us."

The Doug Anthony Allstars’ split was acrimonious but all three went on to forge successful solo careers.

Someone has cracked a couple of bottles of red backstage in the ABC TV green room. McDermott and his partner in crime, Mikey Robins bound in like a pair of school boys, all bluff and bluster and unambiguous joy after a resoundingly successful performance. They don’t know it yet but their first episode of Good News Weekend has just gone to air with a rating of number one in Sydney and Perth and a confident second in other national capitals.

McDermott is all charm and smart one-liners. He and Robins reminisce about their days together on morning radio. McDermott knew it was time to stop when he found himself sitting at home, tired, emotional and sobbing at an ad for soup on TV. "In that moment," he relates, "I really did believe that Rosella knew and Rosella cared."

"Paul has two modes of being," says Fidler. "Very gregarious or painfully shy. He’s a very good dancer and, if he’s poured a few drinks down his ridiculous neck and lost his head, he can actually be quite pleasant."

McDermott has other fine qualities. Both Fidler and Robinson express admiration for his loyalty. "He is a loyal friend," says Robinson, ‘and he’s talented and intelligent and he’s a good person to work with in that he’s not as ego driven as most performers - at least, not overly."

The gawky teenager has also grown physically attractive and women in studio audiences do swoon when he sings, though he abhors the sex symbol tag.

"Anyone under media scrutiny will be classified as a sex symbol," he complains. "For God’s sake, the paper came out the other day and said Pauline Hanson was a sex symbol, but it would want to be a fuckin’ powerful aphrodisiac for the libido to conquer the mind in that instance."

He is also very, very funny.

"If we knew why he was so funny," says Robinson, "we could bottle it and sell it and all make a fortune. I think it’s partly his intellectual stance. He thinks about things and has an attitude and an opinion. He has his own idiosyncratic twist to it all and somehow that makes it funny. You know where he’s coming from. Even though, by and large, he’s an amoral person, he has a moral perspective. You understand that he cares about certain things and gets angry about them and has a point of view."

Paul McDermott is, for instance, passionate about politics, and particularly about native title and reconciliation, causes to which he has dedicated considerable time.

I think this could be a substantial battle," he says of One Nation’s rise in Australian politics. "Everyone thought of Hanson as a joke and treated her as a joke but the Queensland election result was not a joke."

McDermott is gearing up for battle but not, it must be said, with a great deal of optimism. "It would be naïve to think that, in the next ten years, human nature will change to the point where we’ll become loving and accepting of other peoples," he explains. "It hasn’t happened to this point."

It is important nonetheless, he believes. To fight the good fight, and he has thrown the weight of his comedic talent behind a number of causes, MCing fundraisers and addressing rallies.

"I’d rather sit back and be apathetic because I don’t like discussing politics," he explains, "but I think we’ve come to a point where it has to be discussed. We can’t ignore it any longer. Now there’s a little bit too much going on for people to back away - and we are a nation of backers away. ‘She’ll be right. It couldn’t happen here.’ It’s fuckin’ happening here and she won’t be right unless we are actually doing something about it."

McDermott is also concerned about the propaganda war on drugs. "Drugs are fine, kids," he grins. "They’re good for you in fact. Break those social conventions. Go out there and do some drugs. Tell them Paul sent you."

When Robinson describes Paul McDermott as amoral, this is the aspect of his mental landscape about which he’s speaking. Social taboos both fascinate and horrify him. He believes they’re "put in place to protect governments and sets of laws.’

"If you question one aspect," he insists, "the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. That the wonderful thing about it, you just have to scratch the surface of the everyday and you’ll find bizarre, fetishistic behaviour in every quarter. There’s drug use in every quarter of society from high court judges to kids at school. There’s every gamut of sexual expression. We’re brought up in a sanitised world but it’s not like that at all. It would be better if we were taught from a young age that sex is lovely between a man and a woman but you might also like to have razor blades ripped across your arse and your penis hammered into a length of four-by-two and that’s fine, as long as you’re not hurting anyone else."

He says this with a poker face and, while one assumes he’d flinch if actually confronted by a hammer-wielding seductress, he would defend with a vengeance your right to join her in the carpentry workshop.

Paul McDermott sits at a pavement table in a sunny suburban café. He is drinking Irish Breakfast Tea and, while the teapot drips (which plainly irritates him), the tea is strong and piping hot, so most things are right with his world.

He is talking about happiness, not a subject with which he appears familiar.

"I don’t know," he says, "happiness, sadness - these are extremes. I don’t get clinically depressed. I don’t get mind bogglingly happy. I just don’t sort of care."

"About what?" I ask.

"About anything," he laughs. "I’ve been aware the last couple of days that I don’t seem to care."

"A midlife crisis?" I suggest.

"No. I had that. It means I’m going to die at 36 (which is this year folks) because I had it when I was 18. I don’t think I’ve ever cared very much. I don’t care how people react to things. With this new show, everyone’s going, ‘Do people like it?’ I think, well, we’re doing good things. It doesn’t matter if it’s reflected in a wider popularity. As long I don’t feel ashamed about doing it myself, I don’t care what people think."

Of course, there are things he does care about, like native title and finding time for the odd dip in the ocean and his girlfriend, Joanna, and his painting. McDermott still paints and draws and makes books - he writes, illustrates, prints and binds them, and then "puts them in a corner."

"I find those things good for balance," he admits. "If I don’t do that stuff, I get a bit tired or angry, a bit tense. You wouldn’t like me when I’m tense. So I amuse myself with little projects."

He has just one other image of himself, he confesses, aside from the gawky 12-year-old and the kid watching horses.

"The other image I have," he says, "is of myself as a very old man. He’s sitting up in the mountains or by the beach. He has a very long beard. He’s an old man, in a shack, and he’s sitting there painting. That’s all he does."

"Is anyone there with him?" I ask.

"I don’t know," he replies slowly. "He doesn’t look around much. He has a bad neck."