Ardal O’Hanlon (George Sunday/Thermoman)

Ask Ardal O’Hanlon just what it was that attracted him to the role of Thermoman and he fires back a cheeky grin and says: "The lycra outfit!" It’s very clear that Ardal has no problem whatsoever in laughing at himself. "It’s not every day you get a part where you get to put on a Lycra outfit so really it was the Lycra that attracted me to the role!" he says.

Then he gets a bit more serious. "When I saw the first script I just thought it was really good and the character was very funny," he says. "It’s about a year since we did the last Father Ted and I was rearing to go again in terms of comedy and then this came up.

"Thermoman is a superhero from the planet Ultron who just happens to fall in love with a nurse from Northolt called Janet. By day he’s plain old George Sunday and runs a health food shop. He moves to England from Ireland to be closer to Janet and opens a shop. He then has to try to adapt to suburban life which isn’t that easy at the best of times. He’s from another planet and he’s not well-versed in the ways of Earth people.

"It’s not really about George being a superhero and all his amazing super powers though. They are all incidentals really. It’s really about this guy trying to figure out the ways of living in a different world and taking the things people say to him just too literally."

Ardal’s aforementioned Lycra Thermoman costume really isn’t a lot of fun. "It takes about ten minutes to get in and out of it and it can make you quite sore around the arms – and everywhere – and I have to wear a thong as well which I’m not really used to," he says. "It was a real pain in the neck on the recording nights because I had to be in and out of it about 20 times a night. I can’t see very much through the visor really. You can vaguely make out shapes but not much else .

“The funny thing is when you are wearing a superhero costume you do actually feel like a superhero. The padding on the costume helps that feeling too. It makes you feel pretty indestructible It was quite lucky I was wearing it during the filming of one episode because I went head first into a door that didn’t open because I couldn’t see where the handle was. My hand got bent back with the rest of my body going headlong into the door and I banged my head.

"Wearing the visor also makes it hard to act and play off other people because you can’t really see their faces and their reactions. Delivering funny lines is harder than usual because normally so much of that is done with facial expressions. Obviously that can’t be done with a visor on.

"I don’t mind if people take the mickey out of what I look like in my costume. Comedy is really all I’ve done over the last 10 years and to do it you have to have some sort of self-deprecating streak.

"I was never really into superheroes as a child. We weren’t allowed to watch much television in our house so I wasn’t a television or a movie buff nor were we encouraged to read comic books. My mother fed us books but it was mainly proper classic children’s literature like the CS Lewis books. Much later, as a teenager, I saw some of the sixties Batman series, but wasn’t particularly enthralled by it. My heroes tended to be footballers, the Pope and JFK."

Born in Carrickmacross, County Monaghan, in the Republic of Ireland, 34-year-old Ardal is the third of six children. His father is a doctor and politician and his mother is a teacher. They were somewhat dismayed when he told them he wanted to go into showbusiness, because they had hoped he would follow their other children into medicine and accounting. "I think they are very pleased and proud now," says Ardal. "Largely because of the success of Father Ted. They came over to recordings and really enjoyed it and they realised there was something to it. I think they are generally happy now – although I still think they’d like me to go back to university and study law!"

Ardal, who lives in Dublin with his wife, Melanie, and their two children,shot to fame as Father Dougal in the hugely successful Channel 4 comedy series Father Ted. Earlier in 2000, he made his straight acting debut in the ITV drama Big Bad World, playing a magazine journalist.

That was the result of a conscious decision he’d made to do something different after Father Ted. "I wouldn’t say I was swamped with offers of other sitcoms after Father Ted because it’s not quite that straightforward," he says. "But yes, there were a lot of enquiries and some of the approaches were firmer than others but I didn’t really see anything I really liked amongst the scripts that came my way. I was also keen to do something very different to Father Ted. I wanted to maybe do a drama if one came along. Fortunately one did,so I jumped at the chance to do Big Bad World just to make a clean break from comedy for a while." Now, refreshed and revitalised he’s back in a new comedy series.

It’s testimony to the quality of Paul Mendelson’s scripts for My Hero that Ardal has been tempted back to situation comedy. But then comedy – whether stand-up or sitcom – is his first love. "It’s important to be with real audiences," he says . "I really love that exhilarating feeling. I’m not into dangerous sports like bungee jumping or going down the Amazon in a small boat. I think you need something in your life that supplies an adrenalin rush and for me, that’s stand-up. "

Stand-up comedian,sitcom star, actor in straight drama – not forgetting novelist, whose book Talk of the Town was one of last year’s bestsellers – is there no end to the talents of the softly spoken Irishman?

"I just like doing different things," he explains."I get very impatient and very bored easily and I’m always curious to try other things. If I had an ambition in life it would be to know everything, but I guess that’s a bit unrealistic. But as long as I can breath, I hope I will continue to try and do different things.It’s about not being afraid to fail. Of course I care about that but you’ve still got to try things and that’s what I want to continue to do."