The television host and journalist on an Irish comedy legend

MY hero is the comedian Spike Milligan, because as far as I'm concerned, he was the godfather of British comedy, and the fact that he was Irish was an added attraction. I first came across him when I was 13, and found one of his books. I started reading it, and his humour spoke to me immediately . . . it just clicked with me instantly. I loved the way he had that really goofy kind of humour, and when I found out that he was Irish, it was an added attraction for me. I started to find out more about him and everything he'd done, and the more I found out, the more I liked him.

I started buying everything I could get my hands on that Spike had done, including Puckoon and some BBC cassettes of The Goon Show. His fellow Goons were Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, and Michael Bentine, and it was absolutely brilliant, classic groundbreaking comedy that nobody had really done before. I discovered that he had written one show a week for five years, which is amazing. He's up there with the best of the comedy writers, as far as I'm concerned, and I think he directly influenced much of the alternative comedy that came after him, including Monty Python.

Spike's dad was from Sligo, and while he was born in India in 1918, he carried an Irish passport. He was very proud of his Irish heritage, and wore it as a badge, because he never really fitted in with the British class system. He refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Queen, which was required for him to get a British passport. If he went to Twickenham to see Ireland play England in the rugby, he'd always wear an Irish jersey. He had a very irreverent attitude as well, and once in the 1960s when he was at a match on St Patrick's Day, a BBC reporter came over, and said, "Spike Milligan, famously Irish.

Do you have a message for our viewers?"

To which Spike replied, "Yes. F**k the English."

Spike was a very passionate guy, and a noted humanitarian, and he supported all sorts of causes. There's a great book called The Spike Milligan Letters, and in it there's some letters of protest that he wrote. He was anti-whaling to a huge extent, and would write letters to the Canadian ambassador at the time, saying "What are you going to say to your grandchildren when there are no whales left, and you're the person responsible?"

and I think he actually did help to change minds.

Prince Charles was a huge fan of Spike; there was that famous incident when he sent a congratulatory message to him after he won a Lifetime Achievement Award at the British Comedy Awards in 1994. Spike's response was to call him a "little grovelling b***ard on live TV, and then he faxed him afterwards, and said, "I suppose a knighthood is out of the question." He always had a very antiauthoritarian attitude, which I think was a bit of his Irishness coming out in him, and may also have been due to his war experiences. He joined the British army as a conscript at the beginning of the second world war, and got a bit too close to an exploding shell and ended up being hospitalised with shell-shock. His time in the army made him very anti-war and anti-authority.

I identify with Spike because I've a very goofy sense of humour too, and his comedy really appeals to me, especially his silly lines, like, "I'm very tall for my height." He wrote his own obituary, and all it repeatedly said was, "He wrote The Goon Show and died." He wanted the line, "I told you I was ill, " put on his headstone, but his local diocese objected, so it was put on in Irish: "Duirt me leat go raibh me breoite." And when Harry Secombe passed away, he said, "I'm glad he died before me, because I didn't want him to sing at my funeral."

Spike suffered with manic-depression throughout his life, and he had several nervous breakdowns, which must have been very hard for him to deal with. He was married twice, and although he loved his six kids, he got on terribly with his wives. He chose to home-school his children, because he wanted to protect them from the world. He bought a big house in the country with a swimming pool, and all the toys they wanted, but he wanted to keep them shut away from the world because he thought it was a terrible place.

Spike worked with the great Peter Sellers, who was as mad as a bag of badgers, but he was the only one that could really keep him grounded. It was when Sellers left him that things really started to go wrong for him. He died of kidney failure in 2002, at the age of 83, and while it was very sad, at least he'd had a good innings. He had been kind of forgotten in the 1980s, but I think people really started appreciating his comedy again in the 10 years before he died, which was great. I think it would have been terrible if he died in obscurity, like Benny Hill, for example.

Apart from his humour, it was the humanity of the man that appealed to me.

He used to sign his letters, "Love, light and peace, Spike Milligan, " words that are also on his headstone, and I actually did that too for a long time. I think his legacy to the world was fantastic humour, providing the inspiration to a lot of comedians that came after him.

Seoige and O'Shea, RTE One, weekdays 4.30pm