Lip glossing, cross dressing, fast talking...

...Story telling, free associating, wise cracking, straight acting, taboo breaking, America storming, Emmy winning Eddie Izzard

You know who the really important people are in a televised award show, when the camera pans to show nominees' faces in the audience moments before the winner of their category is announced.

You know who the really important people are in a televised award show, when the camera pans to show nominees' faces in the audience moments before the winner of their category is announced.

They are the ones who are actually missing, because they are either too important or too busy to be there. Or because they know how ridiculous the whole event is and would rather be at home with the cat watching a different channel.

Eddie Izzard, our very own bloke-in-a-dress comedian, has now joined this extremely exclusive club. Just about everyone turned up at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Sunday night for the annual Emmy Awards - the Oscars of the American television industry. Whole casts from the planet's most watched shows were there. Jack Lemmon came along in case he won, which he did. Viewers glimpsed Michael J Fox (winner), Martin Sheen (not a winner) and even Cher, looking as cadaverous as ever.

Izzard, however, did not make it to the Shrine. He was in Vienna, busy filming an espionage comedy called All the Queen's Men. This was inconsiderate, even so. The director of the three-hour Emmy jamboree, with its 30 million or so viewers, can only have been hoping that Izzard would be squeezed out in all three of the categories for which he received nominations. That was not to be, however. Izzard won two Emmys, both for a recording of his show Dress to Kill, aired by HBO in the US last year. "Eddie Izzard can't be here tonight, so we will be accepting on his behalf," the presenters had to say.

His absence was everyone's loss, probably. In one category, "Individual Variety or Musical Performance", a fellow nominee was Cher herself. The Emmys, like the Oscars, are as much about the fashion of the night as it is about televisual art. Which designer has created the sexiest, most breast-revealing dress for which fabulous star? Now a beauty competition between Cher and Eddie Izzard, an unabashed transvestite on and off the stage, would have been something to relish.

His presence would have been apt for other reasons. This Emmy night was marginally less vacuous than its previous incarnations, if only because it also took time to celebrate social diversity. Will & Grace, an NBC sitcom about two gay men and their female neighbours, won a clutch of awards, while a fellow Briton, Vanessa Redgrave, was honoured for her role as a lesbian in another HBO show, If These Walls Could Talk 2. Izzard, who describes himself as a "male lesbian" and heterosexual, would have given the programme just a little more of that edge. Assuming he would have come in his heels.

How did this man come to be snatching awards from the likes of Cher before a global audience? It has been a fabulous ascent for someone who dropped out of studying accountancy at Sheffield University and, like so many other souls - this one included - traipsed up to the Edinburgh Fringe to see if he could be funny. His show was an unmitigated flop. And yet Izzard persevered, eventually gaining recognition with a Perrier Award nomination in 1991. Thereafter he won the British Comedy Award for best stand-up comedian in 1993 and 1996.

Since then, it has either been non-stop, sell-out touring - he has done three tours of the US in three years - or taking the slightly different route of dramatic roles, whether in Hollywood films, including the awful Avengers, or on the London stage. Most notably, last year he played Lenny Bruce, with whom he has often been compared, in Sir Peter Hall's production of Lenny at the National Theatre.

Most successful performers probably remember that one tiny moment when they realise for the very first time that they have it in them to entertain. I know when it happened to Eddie, because I was there.

He and I both had the privilege, or misfortune, of attending a slightly moth-eaten public school on the English south coast. It was in my last year there that I was cast as one of the twin menservants in The Comedy of Errors. It was a big part for me. Eddie, two years my junior, snared a tiny one. He was, as I remember it, Guard with Helmet. What I have no trouble recollecting, however, was that for all my efforts and all my lines, I never came close to inspiring the kind of hilarity in the audience that Eddie did.

Without any help from the director, Eddie hit on a brilliant comedic idea. He kept the visor of his helmet shut all through his 10 minutes on stage, opening it only when the moment came for his line. To achieve this, he had attached a line of cotton thread from the visor's top, over the helmet and down his back. He could flip it open with a quick yank with his hand to reveal a broad grin on his impish face. Parents and fellow pupils rolled about. By the last performance of the play, Eddie, with no regard for Shakespeare, was opening and shutting his visor at will. The other poor fellow on stage, playing Antipholus of Ephesus and trying to deliver a rather wordy soliloquy, could only see Eddie from behind and couldn't fathom what was going on.

Antipholus - actually Tim - is now a friend of mine. Recently he met Eddie as he emerged from a show in New York. They reminisced about his performance as Guard with Helmet. "That," Eddie confessed to him, "was the beginning. I said to myself: I can do this."

There is one other school episode worth reporting, which occurred shortly after that production of Comedy of Errors. Eddie was cast by a friend to appear as Mrs Caesar, a belly-dancer, in a student-devised review called Don't Get Your Toga in a Twist. (Schoolboy humour at its purest.) At the last moment, Eddie fell ill and couldn't go on. Eddie remembered this vividly too. "You see, I've known I was a transvestite since the age of four. But this was the first time I was going to be able to dress as a woman in public and have good reason for doing so. It was so close to my dreams, I got totally overwhelmed and I came down with a psychosomatic illness."

The age four thing is good to know. My school, I assume, cannot be held responsible for what is, after all, the unusual manner of living that Eddie has adopted. The dress and the make-up have surely become pivotal to his public persona, though being a transvestite actually has little to do with his comedy in his shows. He does, however, live it out in public, walking down the streets in PVC trousers and heels, with his lips rouged up. If he panicked in school before taking part in that review, somewhere later on he found considerable courage. A couple of years ago, he was beaten up - for "dressing like a girl" - in Cambridge. He sued his attackers and won. He did it for the principle, not the money.

What I would like to know, however, is how Eddie became so goddamned erudite? He and I mostly shared the same teachers at school and, well, whatever rubbed off on him did not on me. Anyone who has gone to an Izzard show or seen one of his videos will know that his routines are a spinning carousel of scientific and historical trivia. When he first came to the United States to tour, The New York Times rather brilliantly described him as a "human search engine". He does God, he does ancient times, he does the World Wars, he does contemporary politics... He also does languages. He has already taken his show to France - in fact to an old strip joint in Pigalle - last December, and has vowed to polish up his German sufficiently well to tour Germany soon.

Eddie, of course, is not relying on what he learnt at school or university. What assured him success in the United States was his willingness to syphon up as much new material as possible about this country. He might be De Tocqueville in a frock. "I'm crazy about research, about history, and finding out what people are thinking and arguing about and fighting about wherever I play," he told the Chicago Sun-Times this summer. "When I'm here, I'll sit up at night in a hotel with a TV remote and go through 100 or 200 channels. Admittedly, there really isn't anything on any of them. But when you keep flicking them and blend them all together, it's wild!"

It is thus that Eddie over here, as in Britain and Europe, knows exactly which targets are ripe for his rambling tongue. Like the National Rifle Association. Here in New York this summer, his best jokes were about the NRA and its refrain, "Guns don't kill people; people kill people". Eddie adds: "And monkeys kill people - if you arm them with them with AK-47s."

Americans don't mind this kind of prodding at their ludicrous side. (Dame Edna did it with relentless success on Broadway all last winter.) Well - possibly some Americans would rather Eddie Izzard never set foot, or high heel, in their state. But there are enough people on this side of the water who now adore him - as those two Emmys clearly prove.