Say it: Go you big red fire engine

Comedian Adam Hills has become so popular, he would be a house-hold name - if he had a house. The former one-legged tennis coach talks to Brian Boyd.

Aged nine, Adam Hills was on his first airplane flight. Flicking through the in-flight entertainment, he came across the Comedy Channel and a sketch by Victor Borge. "I didn't know what he was doing or how he was doing it, but I knew there and then that I wanted to be like him when I grew up" he remembers. Twenty years on and he's in the air again flicking through the comedy channel. He comes across a sketch by Adam Hills. "I couldn't belive it, it was me on the Comedy Channel. Twenty years after hearing Victor Borge and deciding to become a comic, I was listening to myself."

Hills's palbable sense of thrill in re-telling the story is symptomatic of his joyous and uplifting comedy shows. One of the few comics working today who doesn't use contempt and cynicism as building blocks, his subject matter affords him an enviable pan-generational appeal that has reviewers invariably describing his shows as "evangelical" experiences.

Only one of three comics to be nominated twice for the Perrier award at the Edinburgh Festival, Hills would be a household name, only he doesn't have a house. As an in-demand performer, Hills spends his time somewhere between Dublin, London, Adelaide and Sydney - and all stops in between.

Prior to being a comic, he was a one-legged tennis coach. Yes, you read that correctly - he was born without his right leg from below his kneecap, so given his postive mind-set, he decided to become a tennis coach for a while. "I wear a prosthetic limb, and while I found adults were always wary of mentioning it, the children I used to teach tennis to would just come over to you and shout, 'What happened your leg, mister?'. Once I explained to them they were fine with it, unlike some adults who would ask you the stupidest questions like 'Can you still have sex?'."

When he started doing stand-up, while still a tennis coach, he was advised by an agent never to mention his right leg. "As it turned out, it was the best bit of advice that I ever got. I was told I would become known as the 'one-legged comic', which didn't appeal to me at all because I don't consider myself disabled - even though, legally, I suppose I am."

He attributes his up-beat comic style to his nationality. "You know, it's very hard to be cynical in 30-degree heat. I started out in the Sydney comedy clubs, and you really can't go out and say stuff like 'this country is shit' when people have been out on Bondi Beach all day. I really believe coming from Australia shaped the way I am as a comic; had I grown up in Dublin or London, maybe I would be more like the comics you have here.

"I do this thing in my set about the first prison ships arriving from England, and the prisoners find themselves sailing into Sydney Harbour on a beautiful morning and thinking, 'We're being sent to live here as a form of imprisonment? Bring it on'."

After becoming a "medium-sized" name in Australia, he moved to Europe in 1995 to wrestle with the London circuit and the Edinburgh Fringe. "In keeping with the feel-good approach, I used loads of audience participation in my shows - once I used to create an instant boy band on stage every night - I'd get five young men out of the audience, show them the basic dance moves - which isn't that hard - and get them to dance and lip-synch to a pop song. It is, in fact, a lot easier than it looks."

The year before last, he brought a show called Go You Big Red Fire Engine to Edinburgh. "I heard the phrase being used in a motivational context once and thought it was so strange, I had to build a show around it. One of the ideas I had was that everyone who came to the show, no matter where they came from, had to bring the phrase 'Go You Big Red Fire Engine' back with them and start to use it - spread it around. It really has worked, the phrase has been used in newspapers in the US, it was used in Hong Kong, and someone told me they saw a mountain bike in New Zealand with the phrase sprayed on to it. My proudest moment, though, was when an Australian member of parliament used it at the end of a parliamentary speech. So, now 'Go You Big Red Fire Engine' is in our Hansard. I'm quite thrilled by that one."

Because he travels so much, he found that the increased airport security over the last 12 months gave him the inspiration for this year's show. "My prosthesis is made of titanium, and now, with changes in security, I get the 'bleep' going through.

"I just found the attitude of people was incredible. Once they took me aside and I explained my right leg is made out of titanium, they would get really embarrassed. I'd ask them if they wanted me to take it off so they could search it, but they'd just wave me on really quickly, it was almost like they'd prefer for the plane to blow-up rather than offend a 'spastic'. This really intrigued me, so I put together a show called Happy Feet. It was really difficult to write because I was talking, for the first time, about my right leg, and it was really personal stuff; also I didn't know what bits of material were suitable for humour and which weren't."

He thinks that, because he had become an established name who could sell-out his shows, and because he had been nominated for a Perrier for his Big Red Fire Engine Show, he was ready to talk about his "disability". "I decided, no audience participation, no fooling around, it would just be me talking about this situation. The funny thing was, a lot of people I knew who came to see the show were going, 'I never knew', and were quite surprised to find out about my leg." A beautiful treatment of a sensitive subject matter, Happy Feet finds Hills mining humour from the most unexpected places. The show was deservedly nominated again for a Perrier, but Hills lost out to the brilliant Barnsley comic Daniel Kitson.

'THE show threw up its strange moments," he says. "One night a guy in the audience shouted out, 'Is it pierced?', referring to my false leg. I didn't know what he was talking about until he took off his false ear, which he had got pierced.

"I had a lot of people who are, how shall I put it, 'missing bits' come along, and they just thought it was inspirational stuff. There is no 'message' in the show; as I said, I've never once thought of myself as 'disabled', but just because of what was happening to me in airports and the reaction I was getting, it was something I wanted to talk about. And laugh about . . . "

Adam Hills is currently on an Irish tour. He plays the Glór Irish Music Centre in Ennis tonight and The Riverbank Arts Centre in Newbridge tomorrow night. Check The Ticket on Thursday for further details of the tour