Zaltzman began comedy as a favour to a friend of his who was organising a comedy night at his University. "And then the headline act didn't turn up - he was being sick at Reading station." That was Dylan Moran. "So I just got very drunk and talked bullshit for a few minutes to try and fill in a bit of the gap that was left, quite enjoyed it and thought about doing it properly." He followed this up with some open spots in Edinburgh during the 1997 Festival, and, he says "did so badly that I gave up comedy altogether for eighteen months." Thanks to Natalie Haynes persuading him to face his fears one last time, he did an open spot at the Comedy Café in London. "I thought having watched the evening that I couldn't do any worse than all of the acts that I had seen. If that first gig at the café that I did had gone badly then I probably would have given up altogether."

Luckily, the gig went sufficiently well for Zaltzman to give comedy another chance, and he has been going from strength to strength ever since. Last year, he appeared alongside Karen Taylor, Spencer Brown and Danny Bhoy in the Comedy Zone at the Pleasance, which is recognised as a major showcase for the big comedy names of the future. He stood out from the rest due to his political content of a lot of his material, something that is rarely seen on the comedy circuit today. "I've always been interested by political comedy. It's quite challenging and quite exciting. Good political comedy is really immediate, dealing with actual things that are happening in the world at the moment, which gives material a bit of an edge." He says he is a big fan of performers like Rob Newman, Stewart Lee and Chris Morris, but tries not to be too influenced by other performers. "I'm trying to be as independent as possible. There are a lot of people that I like, but I try and do my own things as much as possible."

His Edinburgh show this year certainly had a unique angle - each evening, Zaltzman would engage in a battle of wits with his arch rival, and enemy of the world, The Dog of Doom, who threatens the world with chaos and destruction. Not surprisingly, the origins of the show came from a "very late night conversation. when I was trying to think for a title for my Edinburgh show it came back to me. It was originally going to be called The Last Walkies of the Dog of Doom. But then the more I thought about how to do it, and the Dog of Doom's character became more rounded and integral to the show, I thought a direct contest between me and the dog would be the way forward. It was a fierce opponent." With the future of the world at stake, the competition was a ferocious one, and came down to a "sudden death joke off on the last Monday", with Zaltzman finally saving the world from certain doom by thirteen shows to twelve.

Topics covered in the show ranged from politics and religion to genetic engineering and the politics of the environment. At the end of each topic, the audience gets to vote for who they think has delivered the most persuasive argument with the Ready Steady Cook style laminated voting cards they were handed as they walked into the venue. One side bears the image of Andy Zaltzman, the other an artist impression of the Dog of Doom. The idea of the cards, he says, was "to kind of keep the crowd involved and try to make a genuinely democratic vote, I suppose. Although the votes were quite heavily weighted one way or the other. I guess it was to keep people's interests. If they're not laughing very much, at least they get something to do. If you're sat for an hour just listening it can get quite draining, particularly in a scaldingly hot Edinburgh."

The show earned him a well deserved nomination for the Perrier Best Newcomer award, something which came as a bit of a surprise on the night. " I tend to think that I don't win that sort of thing. I knew I would be in the running, but I tend to instinctively think that I won't get them. I didn't have a clue until I heard my name read out."

If he wasn't doing comedy, Zaltzman admits he has "no idea" what else he would do. Having read Classics at Oxford, ("which is obviously very useful in a number of jobs"), he admits that he always wanted to be a sports journalist, "but I was showing no signs of actually doing that. I was in business journalism before, which was unspeakably tedious." His parents are very understanding about his particular career choice. "My father is a sculpter so he has always done his own thing. He can't really turn round to me and say why don't you get a proper job when he's spent the last 25 years in a studio making sculptures."

At the moment, Zaltzman is appearing as part of the FHM Edinburgh and Beyond Tour, alongside other Avalon stalwarts Jenny Eclair, Lee Mack and John Maloney. "I've got my picture in the current issue of FHM, which puts me pretty much in the status of a sex symbol. That's obviously what my career is geared for, getting my picture in a lads magazine." The tour, he says, makes a nice change from the Comedy Network gigs he has been doing since 1999. "Students are getting younger and younger, there's a bigger gap between me and them, and it's starting to show in how the gigs are going." Doing political comedy to any audience obviously presents certain challenges, but he asserts that "audiences are a lot more receptive to that sort of thing than people commonly assume. I don't think people want to be preached at, but I think if you can do stuff about quite general, broad political issues, then people are interested. They will go with it."

His unique style, blending as his does topical humour with some quite surreal observational style comedy, means that he manages to cover some very thorny issues in what are very densely packed routines. However, the humour never suffers as a result, and overall the success rate for jokes is surprisingly high. An indication of how well he has managed to carry his material to a more mainstream audience came this during the Festival this year, when he performed at the notorious Late N Live. "I had a really good one, which was really exciting because it was quite wild. it always felt like it was going to turn, but it didn't." That gig is particularly notorious for hecklers, but he says he often welcomes heckles during his performances, as long as they abide by his rules. "I don't like hecklers who, having lost the heckle exchange, don't shut up. I think they need to accept defeat. There needs to be rules. There should be an independent monitor at all gigs deciding when the heckler has finished his heckle and must now shut up."

Looking to the future, Zaltzman says that he just wants to do "the best comedy I can. I hope I'm as successful as I deserve. Although I don't know how successful that would be."