Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, Grand Opera House, York, May 24

LET globe-trotting comic adventurer Dave Gorman take you on a guided tour of googlewhacking.

His adventures bring him to the Grand Opera House in York on Monday, when he will recall how he received a strange e-mail from a stranger in Australia informing him that he was a googlewhack.

"Good day, Dave, it said, did you know you're a googlewhack, and I just thought it could only be something rude. I didn't know what a googlewhack was. Now I do," he says.

"A googlewhack is what happens when two words are entered in to the Google search engine and it comes back with one and only one hit. So when the stranger told me that I was a googlewhack, what he really meant was that I was responsible for one."

Googlewhacking was to take over Dave's life. "At the age of 31 I decided to give up my stupid ways, grow a beard and write a novel. I guess this show is the story of my failure to do two of those things," he says.

"All sorts of unpleasantness could have been avoided if other people had told me not to do it. Instead, they took me seriously. Meetings were set up, deals were done and a novel was commissioned. To make matters worse, a publisher even gave me a chunk of money as an advance on the project. This was an exceedingly stupid thing to do. Needless to say, the novel doesn't exist and I've spent the money. What on? On a googlewhack adventure."

In the vein of his show on all manner of men called Dave Gorman, Gorman's Googlewhack adventure spread and spread.

"I tried to resist it but things happened. Lots of things. Googlewhacking has taken me around the world. Three times. I've played table tennis with a nine-year-old boy in Boston, and I've been way too familiar with some snakes in LA. I've met mini-drivers in North Wales and hippies in Memphis," he says.

The Dave Gorman name exercise ended up with a television series; his googlewhack adventure has ended up in print (ironically rather than the anticipated novel).

As ever, his research has made a stage show too, and this time he chose to test-drive it in Australia, before transferring to the Edinburgh Fringe and onwards to an autumn British tour.

Why start in Australia, Dave?

"You can get to the point over here where you have a reputation and people want to come and see you because of your reputation and not for the show," he says.

"The one way to really test a show is to do it where no one knows you. In Australia I hadn't done any TV and my British TV shows hadn't played out there. I'd been out there performing two years earlier and it can be like doing the Edinburgh Fringe in your early days. If you succeed, then you know you're doing the right thing."

The show did "ridiculously well" in Oz.

"It sold out in Melbourne on a four-week run. The last two weeks were just rammed, and then it's the most amazing phone call to give your mum, telling her you are to play the Sydney Opera House. I still feel embarrassed at the thought," Dave says.

"It was the most amazing walk to work ever. No matter what ambitions you have, it is beyond all realistic ambitions to say you're going to play the Sydney Opera House, and so I would walk to work with a smile on my face, just giggling."

He walked the Sydney walk and he talked the talk.

"You play where you play. I love touring; I don't have to do it but I do it 'cos I like it," he says.

Dave may enjoy his books and his television series but still nothing rivals performing live.

"I love the immediacy of it. There's that thing in America where comedians get into live comedy to get out of it as it's seen as a step to sitcom or whatever. There's this phrase they to have describe what they do as their 'development set', but that is less true of comedians over here. I got into live comedy because I love live comedy," Dave says. "The things I love about my job are firstly, performing; secondly, writing; and quite a distant third is TV, where the reaction happens months after you have said something and you're not there to see the reaction - and it all has to go through the hands of a lawyer first."

No such requirement afflicts the live Gorman googlewhack experience. "You certainly don't need to know what a googlewhack is to come to the show," he says

Dave remains grateful for that strange Aussie e-mail.

"I didn't so much come up with a concept for a new show as write about things that happened to me after I received that e-mail. There'd been a three-year gap between live shows, where I'd waited for something worthwhile to talk about... and then it happened," he says.

The googlewhack bug continues to grip him. "Once you find out what a googlewhack is, when you're on the computer you have to find one. As you know, I was meant to be writing a novel, but like every journalist and writer you do anything but writing," he says.

"It's known as displacement activity. If my house is tidy, it's a sign that I'm supposed to be writing instead, and googlewhacking is the perfect displacement activity."

Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, Grand Opera House, York, May 24, 7.30pm. Tickets: £16.50 on 0870 606 3595.

Updated: 08:52 Friday, May 21, 2004