IT would be difficult to find many Scots these days who don't have an opinion on Scotland's funniest, hardest-working, and most benignly offensive gagsmith, Tam Cowan, Motherwell's meaty mastodon of mirthful mockery. His muscular certainty makes him impossible to ignore.

Football fans currently constitute the bulk of Tam's audience, gained over his seven-year residency alongside Stuart Cosgrove on Radio Scotland's satirical Saturday football show Off the Ball. In addition, Tam has been dishing it out hot and strong throughout the past decade in caustic weekly columns on the sports pages of sundry tabloid newspapers.

Football fans have thus come to value daredevil Tam for his inventive, fearless, and even-handed deployment of barbed put-downs, jocular slights, and pithy rejoinders. Brash? Loud? Crude? Vulgar? That's not merely a summary of Tam's taste in shirts.

A keen student of the British comedy tradition, Tam is also a dab hand at revitalising music-hall jokes that were ancient when the Queen Mum was still associated with the term ''young and hip'' rather than ''hip replacement.''

More to the point, when it comes to being politically incorrect, Tam would undoubtedly vote for the Monster Raving Bernard Manning Party. Despite only being 32, he's not a man for the right-on mores of what first emerged, back in the distant days of 1980 when Tam was a middle-aged 11-year-old, as alternative comedy. Aye, if it moves, even if only with the aid of calipers or a wheelchair, Tam will slag it. He's nothing if not fair.

In saying this I confess to prolonged and occasionally pained first-hand exposure to Tam's rapier wit, having been one of his subordinates on his recently deceased BBC Choice football fanzine Offside. Trust me and my wounded ego: you simply can't take yourself seriously when he's around. You can't take anything seriously when he's around. In truth, the big softie's all heart, and what's not all heart is sausage meat, probably. Like a sizzling fry-up, Tam's impossible to dislike.

Indeed, there can be only one riposte to any straitlaced targe who bemoans Tam's brand of comedy with that old horror-stricken chestnut: ''I've never been so insulted!'' - You should get out more, chuck.

Viewers of terrestrial TV should stay in later this summer, grabbing their first chance to be positively appalled by Tam Cowan. He'll be baring his deadpan Lanarkshire gub at them in his forthcoming six-part series, Taxi for Cowan. True to Tam's Scotophile bent, the show taxi-cabs its non-driving host to six towns: Edinburgh, St Andrews, Rothesay, Fort William, Gretna Green, and Peebles.

Director Stuart Greig, responsible for BBC Scotland's splendid documentary series Crackin' Stories, subtly amended Tam's original aim for the programme. ''I'd seen it as a vaguely alternative view of Scotland, with me travelling around with taxi-drivers, getting their thoughts, their stories, their jokes,'' Tam says.

''Now, thanks to Stuart, each show has a challenge for me to fulfil and a narrative impetus to it. We meet lots of ordinary folk and see lots of different places. But we don't mention golf at St Andrews or the Waverley when we're in Rothesay, for example.

''I'm trying to be genuinely positive about everywhere I go, but it's not your usual cheesy travelogue programme. Having done 108 editions of Offside in the past three years, it made a refreshing change to do a non-football show. In fact, there's only one football joke in Taxi for Cowan - and even that's only about Dundee United.''

Fifteen years on, Tam wincingly recalls the first one-liner that earned him money when he was still a schoolboy. ''It was for The News Huddlines. There'd been reports of an escaped kangaroo aboard an Australian plane, hence my topical gag: 'It must have been a Boing 707.' It earned me #7.50.''

Even worse gags followed for TV. ''I had Little and Large as farmers. Syd's driving a car and Eddie's saying: 'I thought I told you to drive the cows into the field.' Cut to the backseat and two blokes in pantomime cow suits. Total rubbish.''

It wasn't the classiest of starts, but it led Tam into his current career. ''I've a lot to thank my English teacher for, Tom King. He got me into the school's creative writing class when, after my Highers, I'd decided to wait a year before going to study journalism at Napier College. He was very encouraging, plus he sent my first jokes off to radio and TV producers for me.''

How did you develop your obvious affinity with a style of comedy performance that almost predates your birth?

''I've always liked folk who can tell a joke. Bernard Manning, Mike Reid, Stan Boardman, Bob Monkhouse, Chic Murray. You want something that can be re-told for your mates in the pub, not some five-minute observational routine.''

Do you worry that a few folk find you genuinely offensive?

''For me a joke is a joke, always. There were one or two complaints recently that I'd made jokes on Off the Ball about Ann Frank. They weren't jokes about Ann Frank - I'd referred to Ann Frank in order to make a joke about Rangers.

''But I'm conscious sometimes of the devil on the shoulder, being spurred on to get near to the knuckle. I'm glad the BBC have given me the free rein to appeal to fitba' fans - fitba' fans don't want nursery-rhyme humour. They don't want epigrams and rhyming couplets - whatever they are.''

Our chat concludes on an unexpected note of misty-eyed introspection. ''I know my limitations,'' confesses Tam. ''I know I couldn't get arrested south of Berwick. And I'd hate anybody seriously to think: 'He's always having a go.' If it's just nasty and not funny, it doesn't go in. I'd like people to know I'm a decent sort of a guy.

''I'm happy with my lot. I enjoy what I do. I enjoy working with the folk I work with, but in an ideal world, I'd like to find my ideal woman. If there's one thing missing from my life, that's it.''

And who would constitute your ideal woman?, I ask.

''My ideal woman,'' confides Tam softly, ''would be a cross between sultry Hollywood movie star Gina Lollobrigida and sultry STV football reporter Catriona Harvey. And she'd have to know her way about with an iron. And be able to do a good steak pie.''

Yum yum, ladies. Get your teeth into Tam Cowan.

l Taxi for Cowan will go out on BBC1 later this summer