You want the good news? - Who weekly 1996 - By Di Webster

For an alternative world view, ex-Doug Anthony Allstar Paul Mc Dermott is your man. In an episode of the Doug Anthony Allstars' anarchic televised comedy show, D.A.A.S Kapital, Tim Ferguson asked Doug-Mate Paul Mc Dermott to describe his life. "My Life" wailed Mc Dermott, "Is a cumulus cloud that rains misery over the flooded fields of my tragic memory My life is like a young virgin girl, unsoiled, trying to find a youth hostel in Marakech but accidentally stumbling into a Turkish bordello, bathhouse and opium den. I hate my life! I hate my life!" The audience thought he was joking.

"I never feel really too stable," confesses Mc Dermott, 33, comedian, singer, painter, writer, and razor sharp compere of Good News Week ABC TV's newest satire, in which two competing teams of celebrities attempt to wittily deconstruct the week's news. "I always feel agitated, permanently agitated."

It's a state that has worked for him, both during his eight-year stint with the Allstars and since they disbanded at the end of 1994. In the past six months he has written and starred in Mosh, a frenetic mix of dance, song and acerbic Mc Dermott monologues set against a rave party and based, he says, on "My drug-addled observations when I've been abusing substances". Mosh has just finished its run at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and may tour nationally later in the year. Critiques of the show have ranged from "Often Hilarious" to "an ugly grubby, cheap piece of undergraduate cabaret".

Mc Dermott is also painting a series of small landscapes in oils for an exhibition and working on a film script and an album of his own compositions. "I always feel I've got to rid myself of something," He says "I don't know what it is but I hate having it stored inside me. I hate having ideas or thoughts crusting up my skull."

Mc Dermott is sitting uncharacteristically still on the end of a futon bed in the loft of his Melbourne warehouse home. Amid the clutter on a desk at one end of the room is a box of assorted glass eyes he brought in India, a cross-sectioned plastic medical torso and a container of paintbrushes. A display of antique wooden skulls, also from India, sits on a chest. Though Mc Dermott spends most of his time in Sydney these days where Good News Week is taped, this room is him: artistic, macabre, witty and, on good days, bathed in sunlight. Good Days? "I'm getting to be a grumpy old man," he smirks "I can't do anything lately without complaining about it. I'm not sure if that's mellowing or just a different outlet for the bitterness."

The second eldest - Paul is one minute younger than his twin Sharon - of John, a retired senior public servant, and housewife Betty's six children, he traces his angst back to stifling school days at Canberra's Marist College. The School's Priority, he says, was "to make a good football team so that you could impress other Catholic schools in the area with your brute strength and machismo". His interest in art, he says, "might as well have been witchcraft". Every year at school "felt like a step deeper and deeper into a limbo or abyss".

After completing Year 12 and spending two years abroad, Mc Dermott enrolled in a Canberra art school and hit his stride. "That was the first time in my life I actually felt like I was alive." He says. In '85, while performing street theatre with a group of art students called Gigantic Fly, Mc Dermott met Tim Ferguson (The first Doug to turn TV frontman now hosting the Nine Network game show Don't Forget Your Toothbrush) and Richard Fidler who, with Robert Piper, were doing comedy routines around Canberra as the Doug Anthony Allstars, allegedly named after the former Country Party leader. Piper left to live overseas, the Allstars asked Mc Dermott to Join and one of Australia's most successful comedy exports - Eight international festivals including hit seasons at the Edinburgh Festival - was born. "The primary reason for joining the Allstars was monetary," says Mc Dermott "I'd been stealing canvas from the bins around the art school."

"In the early stages we used to rely more on song parodies," recalls Richard Fidler, 31, who became the willing fall guy for much of the group's subsequent cruel humour. What did Mc Dermott bring to the group? "The Voice of an angel" says Fidler, "and a personal hygiene problem." For Fidler, who now lives in Sydney and produces entertainment CD-ROMs, a highlight of MOSH "was to see that Paul has finally got himself a costume without sleeves in it"

"There definitely is a 'Paul Smell' but you come to love it when you know him pretty well," laughs comedian Wendy Harmer, 40, who shared a house with Mc Dermott in Melbourne (with few fights over the shower, it seems.) in the mid-'80's. Harmer describes Mc Dermott, whose MOSH monologue includes references to bestiality, masturbation, social diseases, cancer and drugs, as "incredibly sweet natured. He always makes beautiful home-made birthday cards with his drawings on them and writes you poetry and sends lovely letters when he's away."

Ted Robinson, who as the former head of ABC-TV comedy invited the Allstars to appear on 1989's The Big Gig, has smelled the smell and seen the complexity. "He's paranoid, he's a fascist, but he's also capable of being warm and generous." Adds Robinson, "if he's not being suicidal. There's an intensity about everything he does. No wonder he pulls the birds."

"I'm in love every 25 seconds of every day." Says the currently single Mc Dermott. Not that love takes away his edge. "There's a permanent part of myself that is reserved for being upset and depressed. I don't think I necessarily take that out on the people I'm with."

He's occasionally tried to block those shadows. "Drugs are good forms of escape but they have their own agitations," says the comic, "whether it's stomach cramps or a sudden concern that your respiratory system is failing or your kidneys have fallen out your back.

"Sleeping is good," he adds, "But even then I have bad dreams." Woody Allen-esque angst aside, "He was always the one who would say 'I love your hair' or 'that's a great frock'" says Harmer "What more do you want from a fella?"