FOR the past few years, writer and comedian Dave Gorman has been setting himself incredible tasks.

His first, Are You Dave Gorman?, resulted in a Perrier Award nomination at the Edinburgh Festival in 2000 and a widely-acclaimed book of the same name.

It came about after a drunken wager with fellow comedian and friend Danny Wallace. Gorman realised the East Fife football team manager had the same name as him, and reckoned there were "loads" of other Dave Gormans out there.

Wallace disagreed, so, together, they set off on a quest to find and meet 54 - one for each card in a deck of cards, including jokers.

He also partook in the Important Astrology Experiment, in which he tried to establish whether astrology worked or not. After that, he embarked on perhaps his most successful crazy caper, the GoogleWhack Adventure.

A GoogleWhack is a two-word phrase which only returns one result when typed into the Google internet search engine. Dave travelled thousands of miles to meet the people who had come up with phrases such as 'Francophile namesakes', 'dork turnspit', 'unconstructive superegos' and 'bibliophilic sandwiched'. It's probably worth noting that since Dave's extremely popular adventure, the aforementioned phrases now return hundreds of results.

His latest documentary, Dave Gorman In America Unchained, (More4, 10pm tonight), came about as a result of the GoogleWhack one-man show.

"Unchained was born when I was on tour in America for four months," he says. "I was doing eight shows a week, so I didn't have a great deal of free time.

"Instead of seeing another country, what I actually saw was airports, breakfast radio shows, theatres and chain motels."

The trip around the States was enough to make him fall out of love with the country he'd dreamed of visiting while growing up.

Despite no longer loving America as he once did, put off by endless Holiday Inns, seas of Starbucks and glowing McDonald's logos around every corner, he remained convinced the US he'd imagined as a boy was still there. He just had to look for it.

"After getting back to the UK, I realised I can't have just invented the great images in my head, and neither can all the TV shows and movies," he explains.

This prompted Dave to embark on a dream trip, driving from the west coast of America to the east to explore the backwaters of a great nation. While doing so, he wouldn't give any money to "The Man" - a.k.a. large corporations or multi-national companies.

Film

"I told a few people I work with, and they said I should do a film about it," he says.

The trip started with buying a car, a 1970 Ford Torino station wagon, which acted as a symbol of simpler times Dave was aiming to hark back to. Petrol, however, was a big problem. On one occasion, he and Steph, the director who accompanied Dave on his journey, were rescued by a tow-truck after running out of gas and were given fuel bought from a chain.

It was a small concession, and essential as they'd broken down miles from anywhere, but it wasn't the only one.

Partway in to Dave's 44-day escapade, Steph left due to a painful bad back, which left the trip in serious doubt.

This compounded Dave's misery, and sparked a spiral of self-loathing which saw him, a veteran vegetarian, eat burgers bought from McDonald's.

"I had a little... what you might call, episode," he says with typical honesty. "I was in a really self-destructive mood, which went back to being persuaded to make a film. If I'd done it my own, there would have been no problem, so I hated myself for agreeing to do the film.

"There were a few horrible moments. But they don't deserve time in the film because those moments are not representative of our time there. For example, absolutely everyone we met in Kansas went out of their way to help us.

"The nostalgic America I was looking for - which wasn't a specific time, just post-war America, I guess - does exist, if you look for it. A lot of America doesn't even know these small towns are there.

"Americans are maligned for some of their global politics, and in my view, with good reason, but you can't carry that on to the individual.

"I found kind-hearted, industrious, family-minded, nice folk. You couldn't find a more generous people. I absolutely love the place."

For all the latest news from the world of television, check out Ian Wylie's blog, The Life of Wylie .