There are some perennial fascinations that the public have about the process. I get asked a lot about how I remember "all those lines". The simple answer to that is that if it's a theatre show there are four weeks of rehearsals so you practise your lines a lot and they get drummed into your skull. If it's a television or film part you nail your lines down in advance, make some prompt decisions on character, commit a little at a time to celluloid and then move on. Having said that, it's not for everyone. For instance, I have no aptitude for carpentry but equally most of the carpenters I know are rubbish actors.

Each to his own.

Showbusiness is a mad way of life though. And an unreliable method of making a living most of the time. You wait around for someone else to offer you a job, then the choice is yes or no. Simple enough. Theatre wages are bad, generally. An Arts Council survey the year before last estimated that the average wage for an actor was 7,000 per year.

Not a lot, I think you'll agree. And yet most of those surveyed said they wouldn't swap their job for any other. Mind you, most of them also had other means of supplementing their meagre fees. They had to. No one could survive on that money.

So what is the attraction of theatre for a performer? That's something I am well qualified to answer now as I am treading the boards at the Olympia again in Dandelions. There is nothing more magical than a live show. Each night it is subtly different. This is because there is an interaction between cast and audience. No two nights could possibly be exactly the same because there is a different group of people watching and reacting. From my own experience at the Olympia there is nothing more special than hearing 1,400 people laugh and gasp and revel in a night out.

Each performance is a never to be repeated experience, though the ingredients each night are practically the same. And because it's not recorded each exists only in the moment it occurs and thereafter in the memories of those who were there. It enters a kind of myth that's personal to those who made it: cast, crew and audience.

Actually until the run of Dandelions last year I might have ventured that I knew a thing or two about acting. I had predicted several audience reactions in rehearsals. I was wrong on so many of them that I now admit to knowing nothing. It's a better way to be. I had forgotten the basic tenet that there is nothing funnier than another person's misery. Nothing is more hilarious than a little tragedy. And so it is that all of the moments when I thought the audience would have lumps in throats are in fact the ones that crack them up completely.

Actors have to portray many different kinds of people, sympathetic and not, throughout a career, but for all their sensitivity, they are tough cookies. They have to be. You put yourself out there in the firing line every night, exposing yourself, risking ridicule. A sense of humour or a love of the ridiculous goes a long way (particularly with those wages). It occurred to me recently that we do exactly what doctors tell us to avoid.

Actors live on their nerves. They are stressed six nights a week and twice on a Saturday when there's a matinee.

Same goes for comedians. Today I'm at the Cat Laughs in Kilkenny and delighted to watch others work while I enjoy. The McLynns need a laugh this year. We are one down on our merry band as my Dad died suddenly last August. We'll be testing if laughter is the best medicine. What I suspect is that it's very good medicine, so between the festival and Dandelions I'm sorted for now.