Ardal O'Hanlon

“If I was a very stable person, I would not have to do comedy. Nobody would have to listen to me.”

“Tony Currie was another great favourite, even if he only played for a short time at Leeds. His wife told me once that she was a big fan of 'My Hero'.”

“To be honest I would like to do more movies, I've been a victim of my own success in that sense, as if you have a TV character that really endures, it's really hard to get into film.”

“The beauty of stand-up is that it's very flexible, it's very malleable and immediate. Whatever is in your head that day you can verbalise in some way that night. It's the medium that suits me best.”

“While I loved my family, I would always have this association with my father. I would always be coming up against that conservatism. It was just liberating to be in London.”

“I'm as crippled with doubt as the next actor.”

“When I was growing up, you never knew whether people were being serious or not. There was a lot of nodding and winking.”

“I spent five years in Dublin as a stand-up, living on pea sandwiches. But at times I quite enjoyed the bohemian penniless existence.”

“There is something restless and curious about the Irish. Like everybody else, we want to make money and make our way in the world but it's not the be all and end all. We also want to have fun, we want to make friends, make connections, share stories.”

“Despite the apparent trappings of modest success in television and so on, I have always been an uneasy person. I can't change that. I can't change that part of my psychological makeup.”

“As a comic, you are trying to please people in some way - to make them laugh.”

“I was able to tour successfully and attract a fairly wide audience, but it was hard to assert myself as a stand-up because people were more familiar with me as a TV character.”

“My father was driven, active and always busy. We didn't see that much of him, although he never went far away or stayed overnight anywhere.”

“We didn't have an awful lot of space. There were six of us born within the space of seven or eight years - I was third. I remember sharing a room with one or other of my brothers - at one point we had three single beds in one room.”

“Getting up in front of the toughest crowds, you know, playing pubs in South Armagh - where people didn't necessarily even know what stand-up comedy was - you had to force yourself to do it. It went against every instinct in your body, but you did it anyway.”

“When you grow up in a border area of Ireland, people are very wary and cagy and keep their head down at all times. Don't speak unless it's absolutely essential, and don't give anything away.”

“I was a terribly quiet, shy child. The comedy thing came when I was at university and I started doing stand-up, which I think was a belated compensation for all that time I spent hiding behind the couch.”

“I'm an ardent tennis player. I'm like an overenthusiastic child out there and I've damaged my back. It's not that it's crippling pain, more mental anguish.”

“They were always my favourite scenes working with Don Warrington. He's such a brilliant actor, he has such a presence, you don't have to act with him you just react you know he's so good.”

“We thought 'Father Ted' was destined to be obscure late-night Channel 4 fodder and then it works and you don't really know why.”