"When people tell you stories in pubs, you don't want to hear anecdotes about lovely holidays, but tales of disasters," says Moran. "Everybody loves spectating on disaster - that's where Channel 5 gets all its ratings. We love to watch people suffer and think 'it's great, it's not us'. Other people's pain is a salve to our own. It's much easier to laugh at other people than ourselves. It requires no self-knowledge whatsoever to laugh at granny falling downstairs."

Featuring such a difficult, dishevelled and downright dislikable central character, Black Books is a very healthy antidote to the irrepressible cheeriness of more mainstream three-piece-suite-coms. "It's a reaction against the perfectness of things like Friends," Moran confirms. "I have a very low tolerance for enthusiasm generally. Television should reflect how we live. I get depressed by how good-looking everyone is on television. You never get the sense that they smell or are at all crusty. We wanted to avoid the airbrushed slickness of most things. I want viewers to feel that these characters find clumps of pubic hair in the most unexpected places around the house."

With the relatively complex plot of Black Books, Moran was also keen to get away from the schematic simplicity of most TV comedy. "Usually, everything is over-explained, and the audience is encouraged to be like a duck that's going to be made into paté and not do any work. It's not even patronising - it's cretinising. A lot of the time you're supposed to care about a character who is late. I'd care more if he was late - and had a lot of blood dripping from his neck."

The dark and dingy Black Books may well be the brightest sitcom prospect to hit our screens since Linehan's most famous offering, Father Ted. Moran has certainly relished performing it. "Acting is a tremendously pointless activity - and I'd love to do more of it. It's such a ridiculous non-job. You just waft around and get paid for it. You don't have to think at all. You turn up, people give you bits of paper and you have to say what's on the paper."

He can foresee a second series, but no more than that. "I always admire people who get in and get out while they're ahead of the game. My ideal would be to see Bernard die at the end of series two," he says cheerily.

For the moment, however, Moran is returning to his stand-up roots with a national live tour. "The purpose of it is to verify that all the English place-names that make me laugh actually exist," he explains. "Crawley, Morecambe, Tring."

But in one crucial respect the tour will be no different from Black Books. "Misery will be the watchword for the tour," Moran concludes. "I was thinking of calling it 'The Non-Stop Death Roadshow', but there is a slight tang of uncommerciality about that, isn't there?"

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