David Behrens talks to Patrick Marber about the switch from stand-up comic to playwright.

Growing up in south London in the early Seventies, Patrick Marber may not have known much. But he knew that he didn't want to be a stand-up comic.

He was even more sure of it when, a few years later, he became one.

"I just drifted into it," he says. "Career moves are never calculated. Not in my case, anyway."

The cabaret circuit and Marber were not, as he had correctly surmised, natural allies. It took the intervention of a friend from Oxford to put him on a more profitable path.

Armando Iannucci, then a BBC radio producer, approached him to join the team making a Radio Four comedy called On The Hour. The partnership set in train a movement which redefined British satire for the Nineties.

Marber and Iannucci took a minor character from the show and, in partnership with his creator Steve Coogan, turned him into the Edward D Wood of bad TV, Alan Partridge. Marber not only wrote the subsequent television series but also played most of the supporting characters.

"It suited my nature, that show," he says. "I didn't have to live with the characters for too long; just did them for a week and then moved on to something else."

That something else was an altogether more serious career as a playwright of huge - and, given that he's still in his early thirties, astonishing - acclaim.

His first play, Dealer's Choice, a comedy about an after-hours poker school, was named Best West End Play and Best Comedy of 1995. It is currently enjoying a highly successful revival at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

His second, Closer, was named Best Comedy of last year and also won the Olivier and Drama Critics' Circle Awards for Best Play.

It's a remarkable record of achievement for someone who, if you believe him, is fundamentally lazy.

"My output is minimal," he says. "Two plays in two-and-a-half years; that's nothing."

He acknowledges, though, that he has moved on emotionally since Knowing Me, Knowing You With Alan Partridge.

"It's a completely different thing, really. I'm not the same person now as when I was writing comedy three or four years ago. The nature of the work I'm doing in the theatre is much more personal, more heartfelt.

"And I find writing plays more difficult than I ever did writing and performing comedy. It was a major transition for me."

All the same, he doesn't object to being known as one of the men behind Alan Partridge.

"I'm very proud of that work," he says. "It's on my CV. And it was enormously useful and important to me. It opened doors and gave me opportunities I wouldn't otherwise have had."

After cutting his teeth as a director on Closer, he is now preparing to direct the first British production of David Mamet's Broadway hit, The Old Neighbourhood.

But he confesses that, cabaret aside, he misses performing. "I never want to go out and do another stand-up gig - but I'd like to do some acting again. I miss it quite a lot, in fact."

Be that as it may, he is not planning any television appearances in the near future. "I'm not chasing TV - largely because I haven't thought of any ideas," he says. "If I do, I'll call someone up and arrange a meeting. I'm not in any particular rush.

"It's not that I'm not over- 0confident - I'm just enjoying what I'm doing, and in my own small way I'm happy.

"And that's all anyone can ask, really. That and money."

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