Dylan Moran has a plook slap-bang between his eyes and I find myself drawn to it many times during our hour of nervy banter in a bar in Edinburgh. These are the moments when the Irish comedian decides he doesn’t want to play the interview game and just sits there, scrunching up his shaggy hair some more and, once or twice, looking like he might be about to burst into tears.
But he did give me this world exclusive: there’s a 50 per cent chance his father is fond of wearing women’s clothes. Straight up: that’s what he told me. "What the feck does it matter," he said, "whether my dad’s a rear-admiral or a transvestite?" Frankly, I don’t know why he doesn’t open up more often; sounds like he’s got a lot of wacky stuff going down which would make great copy. And don’t worry, Dylan, you’re old man secret’s safe with me.

We meet in Rick’s, the very newest see-and-be-seen swank-joint in the city the 28-year-old Moran now calls home. He unhooks himself from his personal stereo and immediately looks round for a waitress. If he doesn’t get a drink soon, he says, he’s going to hit someone. The time elapsed since he walked through the door is less than ten seconds. Finally, after a wait of, oh, another five seconds, a girl approaches our table and he orders himself a glass of Pinot Grigot, a large one, and a packet of Marlboros. Booze and fags are ever-present in the stand-up act which, in 1993, won Moran the So You Think You’re Funny? showcase at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, then the Perrier Award three years later, and I’m hoping that today they’ll calm him down and loosen him up.

But ... no. He’s happy enough to tell me he’s Catholic and was born in Navan, an industrial town with a "high boredom factor", and ... that’s about it, really. He doesn’t think it helpful to disclose any more information about his background, childhood or upbringing. I say it’s interesting to know where he’s come from, and I don’t mean geographically, and how he got from there to here, and I don’t mean mode of transport.
Reluctantly, he reveals he was a spoiled, only child - "the essential ingredients for a gigantic ego". He wouldn’t be in comedy if he didn’t have an ego, he says. And he’s doing comedy because he can’t do anything else. "Laughter breaks everything up, it takes you out of yourself."

But he’s not laughing now. So glum. Pick five words to describe yourself. "What, and then I can go?" No. "OK, how about three ... I am alive." He gazes out of the window: sun is shining. Ah, but it won’t be for long, he says. "It’s the s-a-d factor. You can hear it click. It’s like the shutters come down and suddenly you begin to feel very Swedish."

Moran moved to Edinburgh from London two years ago and, winter-time apart, likes it here. So, more specifically, what does he like? Long pause ... (does he think this is a trick question?) ... "I don’t really know what you mean. My wife is from Edinburgh, but I don’t want to go into that. I don’t talk about my family. Never."
He doesn’t understand newspapers, he says. All that jarring juxtaposition of tragedy on a grand scale and celebrities droning on about what nice people they are. "I’m not a nice person. I’m like anybody in that respect." He should be a more discerning reader, I say. "Maybe you’re right, but I think it’s a bad thing that people in the public eye talk about their personal lives because they’re always going to be lying.

"How many times do you hear an actor or a politician answer a perfectly innocent question about their families like this: ‘Well, my son’s got MS and it’s quite tough sometimes and my wife isn’t speaking to me at the moment because I had an affair last week’? It just doesn’t happen."
There’s this chasm, he says. And it’s bigger than the one between the comedian and the journalist today. It’s the chasm between us, the lumpen masses shuffling about on the newsagents’ floor, and the stellar types way, way up there on the magazine racks. "It’s some kind of paradise," he says. "All these beautiful people with airbrushed faces and perfect lives. They’re in love, or they’re getting divorced and marrying somebody better. They’re doing great and we’re doing shit. That’s the point of celebrity interviews: to emphasise and accentuate that chasm.

"And do you know the worst kind of celebrity interview? It’s when the celebrity is pontificating about something big and important. Who cares what some schlub from a soap opera has to say about the rainforest? I don’t listen to my opinions about anything, so why should anybody else?"

OK, I admit it. Moran can be an entertainingly evasive, divertingly diversionary. He’s not the first to throw his toys out of the cot and declare he’s not playing the fame game, and his reasons for this are the ones which are always given on such occasions. But he has the gift of the gab. Must be something to do with the accent. Just don’t push it, mate.
Celebrity interviews have another point, too. They enable the celeb to promote his latest thingy, be it film, book or hairstyle. This service is free, unless you count the psychological torture caused by the odd probing inquiry about the really interesting stuff, the personal bits, which of course haven’t been forthcoming this time. Suitably unscarred, Moran is ready to talk about his new sitcom Black Books.
It’s set in a bookshop and he plays Bernard Black, the proprietor. Moran relies on some of the bedhead charm he utilised in his previous sitcom How Do You Want Me?, but Black Books is more grungy, more Channel 4, in fact. He wrote it with Graham Linehan, fellow Irishman and Father Ted creator.

"We probably wanted it to be more urbane than it’s turned out," he says. "It’s very slapstick and stupid, but that’s cool. As far as I’m concerned, the more pointless, the better."

It will be sandwiched between Friends and Frasier and, in that slick company, it will in a comedy sense resemble a curled-up slice of ham with a hair stuck to one end. Moran doesn’t mind this. "People say American sitcoms are superior to ours and in many ways they are. They’ve got 14 writers working on them; they’re much bigger machines. America has got Ferraris, we’ve got Hillman Hunters - but that’s cool. It’s boring riding around in a Ferrari all the time."

This might suggest Moran is a sophisticated watcher of television, selecting only the bits he likes. But he isn’t. "I just turn into this drooling goon when I sit down in front of the TV," he says. "It’s a stew, a bath, there’s too much of it, and I get really annoyed with myself when I look at my watch and realise I’ve been watching the blasted thing for eight hours. I seem to get mesmerised by all the lights and colours. It must be because I’m from the country."

Is Moran for real? Apparently so. Sloth comes naturally to him, he says. "I’ve never done a proper day’s work in my life." On the stand-up stage, he always looks like he’s just got up, even when the gig is a late-night one. Because he’s Irish, and smokes and drinks during his act, he is lazily compared to Dave Allen. Respect, he says. Occasionally, he’s performed while under the influence. "These gigs can either be great or complete burn-outs. Your hands are very loosely on the flight deck. You’ve just passed over Chile and you think: ‘How the feck did I get here?’"
So television, and media in general, fazes him. He claims he’s happier, and safer, mooching around the secondhand bookshops which inspired his sitcom and also, in a roundabout way, gave him his movie debut, as the shoplifter apprehended by Hugh Grant in Notting Hill.

"They’re terrific places," he says, looking at his watch. "They all seem to be run by two men, the owner and a lieutenant." One of his favourites is in Edinburgh - there’s a loo next to the front door - and it’s provided him with at least one of the gags in his show. His last JR Hartleyesque quest was for a pop psychology book; after five long years, it turned up the other day for just 50p.

"They’re the kind of businesses which attract people who are no good at business," he adds, looking at his watch again. "You just can’t imagine a fiercely-competitive secondhand bookshop. They’re also among the last places in the so-called civilised world which are havens, where there’s no background music, and where you can get completely lost."

Now it’s time for Moran to get completely lost. The bar is filling up with the power-lunch crowd and one or two of them are starting to stare at him, as if he’s someone famous. All right, Spotty, clear off. But before he goes, he shows me how to steal a book without ever getting caught. For that, he gets his plug.

Black Books starts on Channel 4 on 29 September at 9:30pm