BIRD BRAIN

After taking the London comedy circuit by storm in the early 1990s with his quirky slideshow routine, Kevin McAleer moved home to Co Tyrone and started campaigning for better bus services. But he never went away, you know, and now he's back again with another of his quirky comedic character creations. He talks to Brian Boyd.

ABOUT a few hundred years ago, maybe more, back even before the days of alternative comedy, when they used to call it alternative cabaret, a fresh-faced, saucer-eyed young man from Co Tyrone would turn up at shows in London with nothing but an overhead projector and a big pointing stick.

While those around him thought that a 20-minute routine would be enough to topple the Thatcher administration, Kevin McAleer would content himself with a slide show. He'd flash up pictures of, say, three owls sitting on a tree branch, indulge himself in pauses so long he made Pinter seem gregarious, and generally bring the house down with his master class in comedy minimalism.

"I've still got those slides," he says in as an enthusiastic manner as his chronic laconicism will allow. Like many others of the early Irish comics on the then nascent comedy circuit (Michael Redmond, Ian MacPherson), McAleer was to profoundly influence a new generation of British comics and you can still detect traces of his work in acts such as Simon Munnery and The Mighty Boosh. He was never to develop his slide-show abstractions though; in probably the first instance of RTÉ recognising and developing a real comic talent, he found himself a regular guest on Network 2's (or whatever they were calling it then) Nighthawks show.

His sketches on the programme - the psychedelic-tinged monologues of a post-modern seanachai - were, arguably, the funniest things ever broadcast on the national station. When he toured the character, the audience figures grew exponentially, so much so that he probably could have headlined The Point if he so desired. Soon though, he was to find himself in close acquaintance with the law of diminishing returns.

"That character was great to me," he says. "The venues were selling-out a few hours after the show was announced and I toured him all over for perhaps too long a time. But it had become a millstone around my neck. I got tired of him; I couldn't bring him anywhere new or do anything different to him. At the end, I really felt I was scraping the bottom of the barrel so I just finished him off."

Not long after, he moved back from London to Tyrone and his next career move was to become a "pillar of the community". "It started off with me getting involved in a campaign about the local bus services - which is a big deal in the part of Tyrone where I live. That led on to an involvement in various rural associations. There were night classes, meetings and I even drove the local bus for a while. It was all very different to what I had been used to. Looking at it now though, I really think there is a sit-com in there somewhere about all those rural association meetings."

When he returned to comedy, post-ceasefire Northern Ireland attracted his attention. "I had always avoided talking about the North in my material, but with the changed environment I decided to become outspoken about it," he says. "Maybe it was because I had to exorcise my feelings about the place, and living there again. I had this character who was basically a Catholic bigot. I started to talk about sectarianism just as everyone else was moving on. It was based on the principle of a comedian having to push the boundaries, and I was playing the devil's advocate to the peace process.

"And it was a very fine line I was treading. I was doing the sort of stuff that made a certain audience very uncomfortable and then, as can happen, a certain section of people took what I was saying literally and that caused problems. I found I was getting cheers where really there shouldn't have been cheers - it was all very strange."

He's now settled on a new persona - a sort of an apocalyptic conspiracy theorist - the sort of person who can be found lurking around the more bizarre Internet chatsites. "He's a totally paranoid and deluded individual," he says, "but then he has a lot to be paranoid about because, as he sees it, the media are always manipulating people. There's a slight subversive element to him."

What's beautiful about the new creation is the way McAleer twists and turns the language to comply with the rigorous paranoiac demands of his character. It's so skilfully done, it reminds you in parts of the classic Peter Cook character, E. L. Wisty - the eccentric on the park bench who was only too willing to tell you any amount of delusional facts to back up his idiosyncratic world-view.

"I read that about E.L. Wisty in a review you did of the show and I didn't know who he was so I had to go to the Internet to find out about him," he says. "What I like about this new character is that he has this constant 'You can't fool me' attitude to the world and there's so much around now you can build into that."

A rara avis among Irish comics in that his ability is superior to his ambition, McAleer never really pushed himself on the international comedy circuit. Although his material was resolutely Irish, a few little tweaks here and there and somebody of his huge talent could have and should have been a lot, lot bigger than he already is.

"I think a lot of the stuff I've done over the years would have been lost when it left the country," he says. "But you know, then again, it's never too late. It's taken me a long time to realise that maybe I haven't done enough justice to whatever I have. It's true that I've never pushed myself. But I'm self-managed now and making plans. You know, Edinburgh and all of that. . ."

Kevin McAleer plays Vicar St, Dublin on October 30th