Pete McCarthy, who died of cancer last week at the age of 51, was a rarity: a gifted television presenter who also wrote excellent books. He had always wanted to write, but got there via TV, having presented Channel 4’s Travelog. McCarthy published his first book only four years ago.

McCarthy’s Bar describes a “journey of discovery” in search of his Irish roots. It sold more than 1m copies, putting him up there with Bill Bryson and Tony Hawks in the premier league of travel writing, and helping to make comedy the dominant force in the genre.

In 2002 he published a bestselling sequel, The Road to McCarthy, in which he traced his clan to Morocco, Tasmania and America, writing about the Irish diaspora with the same mischievous intelligence he’d brought to the first volume. These edited extracts capture his wit and humanity.

From McCARTHY’S BAR

Hungover in a B&B near Bantry Bay

To my distress, the fry-up featured puddings, both black and white, and an unforgivable kidney. I palmed the offending items into a napkin and slipped the obscene bundle into my trouser pocket for disposal later. I paid Mrs O’Sullivan and thanked her.

“Ah,” she said, “you’re looking grand, considering. Isn’t it true that Mrs Thatcher only used to sleep three hours a night when she was in charge of you?” Perhaps so. If she went round all day feeling like this, it would explain an awful lot. I went outside into a biblical deluge, with no plan beyond having a big kip in the car.

I turned right down the lane, with the tide. My eyes felt as if I’d slept with someone else’s contact lenses in. Perhaps I had. I crouched forward over the steering wheel like Mr Magoo.

Suddenly a dog ran out of a driveway and started to run beside the car, snapping and yelping at the wheels. I waited until the barking had stopped, indicating either that I had outrun the high-spirited little dog, or squashed the bastard, and pulled into the gateway of a mist-shrouded field. I remembered the heated seat, an impressive feature in a £290 car; so I turned it on, closed my eyes and was asleep in seconds.

TWO ITALIAN motorcyclists in blue and yellow suits are staring at me, and grinning. I think they’ve come to view a stone circle and found me parked in their way. I don’t know how long they’ve been knocking on the windscreen. There’s a considerable amount of drool on my chin, but they look sensational. Doesn’t it make you sick, how Italians always look so good? In Verona, I’ve seen pensioners wearing Gucci shades and canary-yellow mohair suits. They have on- the-spot fines in Eastbourne for that sort of carry-on.

They wait patiently for me to reverse out of the quagmire.

“Iz no problem,” says the guy, who looks like a particularly handsome Serie A footballer, while his presumably cello-playing supermodel novelist girlfriend hugs his arm. The sun’s out now, and I fancy a look at the stone circle myself, but I can’t bear the thought of them seeing that I’m wearing brown shoes with black trousers; so I drive off, exhaust trumpeting stylishly — swerving to avoid an object in the road, which may or may not have been a dead dog.

From THE ROAD TO McCARTHY