IGNORE the awful American police TV drama of the same name, if you want to see The Mentalist in action, then catch one of Ross Noble's gigs while he's on tour. Even better, why not pick up the surreal comedy king's latest DVD - ‘Ross Noble's Australian Trip' - which contains all six episodes of the TV show which chronicled his motorbike tour of Down Under, as well as masses of extra footage. BBM's Richard Gadsby got the chance to chat to the Geordie japester ahead of the DVD release...

Hi Ross, how are you?
Yeah, I'm pretty good thanks. I'm in Canberra at the moment.

So the new DVD, have you watched it back all the way through?
Well I was kind of hands-on with the whole editing process so I pretty much know every inch of it now. God knows it was hard work. Out of all the DVDs, this was by far and away the most work. With the live stuff, it's pretty much just recorded and slapped onto a CD but this show took five months to film. You've got all the footage of me traveling as well as all the live material so we had something like a hundred hours of stuff at one point and we had to trim it down to like 20 hours.

Obviously Australia is a massive country but you don't really see all those hours on the road. How grueling was the trip itself?
Yeah I know. There'll be a journey that takes about 10 hours but the show makes it look like I just hopped on my bike and I'm there in five minutes. It was really full on, but that was the whole purpose. It was all just a big excuse for me to go riding my bike around. It was brilliant. But yeah, I could ride for hours and not see anything at all.

Did you see much Aussie wildlife while you were on the road?
Mainly dead stuff. A lot of dead stuff. In fact, I'm not sure if Australia actually has any animals that are alive.