As unrepentant blasphemers go, Tommy Tiernan is happy enough with his lot. But somewhere in the midst of the thousand different pairs of hands thrust towards him offering congratulations and a posse of pony-tailed designer-bespectacled television executives following him around talking into their mobiles about "projects" that are "in development", a slow creeping doubt invades his hungover head.
"I feel like Charlton", he suddenly announces, hitting his fist on the table for emphasis. Of course, you do, Tommy, everyone feels like a small English town, from time to time - now go back to your champagne like a good little Perrier winner. "No, I feel like Charlton as in the football club. I feel I've been mis-promoted to the premier league and that I'll be going straight back down again soon."
Four weeks ago Tommy Tiernan arrived in Edinburgh a bag of nerves and a bundle of insecurity after his preview show in London had gone disastrously wrong. Suddenly, all those letters he had received from Irish nuns saying that they were "praying for his soul" after his Late Late Show appearance, took on a different level of meaning.
Week One went well and settled his nerves. Week Two saw some great reviews and the full house signs going up outside his venue in the Pleasance Theatre. Week Three and he was the hottest ticket on the fringe. At the end of Week Four he had beaten off 280 other acts from all around the world to carry off the Perrier Award. "All it means is you get invited onto Richard and Judy", he says of his lump of metal fashioned into a bottle of mineral water, "and they give you some money and everyone is nice to you. Up here in Edinburgh it's the only thing people ever talk about, but I don't think there are people sitting around in pubs in Ireland saying `I wonder who's on the Perrier nomination list this year' - the best comics are remembered by the work they do and not the awards they win."
The work that Tommy Tiernan did this year cast him in the most unlikely role of defender of free speech and scourge of zealous Christians. The original sketch on which his show is fashioned - where he poked fun at the Lamb of God and the Crucifixion scene - was about as "blasphemous" as Monty Python's Life of Brian. Yet the reaction to it annoyed, bewildered and at times frightened the 29-year-old.
"I was sitting in the green room of the Late Late after doing the routine, reflecting on the expression `end of career', when a researcher came in and said I had better not leave through the front door as a bunch of angry people had congregated there and it didn't look like they were there to congratulate me on my performance," he remembers.
"The following Monday the letters started appearing in the papers calling me a blasphemer and a disgrace. Because I don't drive and was on tour in Ireland at the time I was getting around on buses and soon found myself being pointed at and stared at everywhere I went. I know this sort of thing has happened to Irish people before - like the journalist Declan Lynch - but it's still a very scary and isolating experience having people pointing you out and going: `There's the evil blasphemer'.
"And then the spectre was raised of a nine-year prison sentence for what I had said, which I never took seriously, not least because that law hasn't been invoked in 100 years. In fact I would have loved if someone had taken a prosecution, as I had a few choice words for my critics. Then the letters started to arrive, with nuns, priests and members of the general public saying they were praying for me. All I am thinking at the time is that my greatest ever hero, Lenny Bruce, went through a similar situation on a much bigger scale and his detractors got to him so much he turned into a drug addict and died of an overdose."
Was an apology ever asked for or demanded by anybody? "No and I said at the time that if I offended anyone I was I sorry for that because I am not in the business of offending anyone. But I am not sorry for doing the routine and given the same situation I'd do it again. I'm not going to be bullied by psycho-Christian freaks or by turbo-charged Catholics."
The following week on the Late Late Show Gay Byrne issued an apology for Tommy's routine. "It's not that I particularly cared at this stage but friends of mine were furious," he says. Why? "He came out and said that he realised `Little Tommy Tiernan from Navan' had offended some viewers and then went on to say that `sometimes on a live show some material comes in under the wire'.
"What I say in the show about this is that my material did not come in under the wire - it was invited and it arrived through the front door. I then go on to say how RTE should be re-named PPTV - as in Pontius Pilate television. Funnily enough I've been invited back onto the show, so we'll see what happens with that."
If it appears that Tiernan is on a freedom of expression mission with his show, remember that the material about the Late Late debacle is only 30 minutes out of an hour long show. The real highlight of his performance is a multi-coloured description of the horrors of learning Latin at school - "you haven't lived until you've heard Latin spoken in a Navan accent" - as well as some powerful material about trying to tell his father he loves him - "just to see what would happen next".
Because of his background as an actor Tiernan doesn't just slouch out on stage to splatter-gun the room with one-liners like any common or garden stand-up. Rather, he uses light and shade - one moment he is whispering confidentially to the audience, the next he is shouting with all the fervour of an anti-evangelist. He sits, crouches, leans, sways and swaggers his way through a show that contains a plethora of vivid, verbal, vignettes, such as describing his uncle as "scary" because "he sweated too much in winter time and laughed too hard at your jokes". He's a deserving winner of the Perrier if ever there was one.
Just three years in the comedy business, Tommy Tiernan first got up on stage in a Galway club called the GPO which is run by his friend, Gerry Mallon. " I was previously an actor and have done Beckett and O'Casey and all of that but it was only after getting drunk in Gerry's club one night that I first tried it on." Mere months into his career he won a talent spotting competition in Edinburgh in 1996, went out on tour with his Navan neighbour and fellow Perrier winner, Dylan Moran - "We both went to the same school, St Patrick's Classical in Navan and the night I won the Perrier Dylan and I just laughed our heads off at the whole Navan absurdity of it" - and got invited to comedy festivals in Australia and New Zealand. A starring role in the last ever episode of Father Ted, in which he played the suicidal priest, Father Kevin, helped his profile immeasurably.
Although he lives in Galway with his partner and young child, he spends most of his time either performing on the London comedy circuit or acting in films. "I love Galway and love getting back to it. It's where I write all my material and where I feel truly relaxed," he says.
Unique among successful Irish comics in that he wasn't "born and bred in Dublin's Comedy Cellar" he enjoys his outsider status almost as much as he enjoys his dizzy ascent to the top of the comedy pile.
As the prospect of Tommy Tiernan being stoned to death in Navan town square recedes, he graciously turns down the suggestion of appearing naked and snorting cocaine on Kenny Live to kick-start some more controversy. "I am getting away from all of that, I'm not Bill Hicks," he says.
"There is a lot of pressure to bring this Perrier show to Ireland but I think people are sick of it, so I may just wait until I write a brand new show." And what about the £5,000 he won? "The best thing about that is that it's £6,500 in punts. I am going to buy a second-hand car - I've had enough of little old ladies calling me the Antichrist on provincial Irish buses."
Tommy Tiernan appears with Dylan Moran at the Cork Opera House, on September 19th as part of the Red Hot Festival of comedy and music