"How's it going horse?" says Dáithí Ó Sé, a man whose language is as raw and rugged as the wild west of his native Kerry. Voted Ireland's Sexiest TV Star, the man from the Dingle peninsula has done some wild and crazy things in his day. Some of them you may have witnessed (Celebrities Go Wild); others are filed under private and confidential. If he earns his crust as TG4's weather man and continuity announcer, Ó Sé has made his reputation as someone likely to do anything. Now he gets his kicks on a six part series that motors along the greatest road in the United States.

Route 66 stretches from the mid-west plains of Chicago to the pacific coastline of Los Angeles. In Dáithí Ar Route 66 Ó Sé rides this trail in an open-top Mustang, wearing a broad Stetson to match his grin. "Do you think I'd make a good cowboy?", he asks a couple of Texans in Tulsa. They nod, mesmerised by this apparition from the Old World. With his pointy boots and figure-hugging shirts adorned with fancy stitching and, in one instance, a brace of Confederate flags, Ó Sé looks the part. Such sartorial flourishes are not just for merely dramatic effect. Here is a home-grown playboy of the Western world who has effectively played this card on reality TV shows (Charity You're A Star), as host of TG4's country and western show, Glór Tíre and most recently went native in Celebrities Go Wild.

Route 66 was a dream. When he first pitched the idea, the plan was to travel the classic highway on a Honda 50. "I suppose the joke would have got stale after the first show," he says. "Plus my arse would have been killing me." So instead he got behind the wheel of an open-top Mustang and gunned it from the Windy City to the palm tree streets of Santa Monica. He drove all the way (no faking it for the camera) with quite a few diversions (meeting the cast of Seven Brides For Seven Brothers in Tulsa; squaring up to a 72 ounce steak in an Amarillo steakhouse). The idea is not unique, even within the Irish canon. Mike Murphy, the original of the species, was the first shamrock greenhorn to go West and in recent times we have had Hector hard-nosing the highways of taste, decency and the American way.

Ó Sé is cut from similar cloth, a jack-of-all-trades ready, willing and able to try his hand at anything. At various times he has worked as a nightclub bouncer, as a ferryman to the Blasket Islands, as a part-time teacher, as a ringmaster in a circus and as a singer/performer. America held a particular interest. The Ó Sé family lived in Chicago from the late 50s to the late '60s. His eldest brother Kevin and his sister Deirdre were born there. "Danny was made over there and came out over on this side because the family came home in 1969," he says. He worked in Chicago himself in the summer he had to repeat his Leaving Certificate. He was just 18 years old working the door at a nightclub checking punter's ID. Later he would graduate with a BA (Hons) in History and English from the teacher-training college, Mary Immaculate Limerick. But it was the coal face of the media rather than the chalk face of the classroom that lit his fire. When TG4 went looking for part-time weather people, he put up his hand and made the grade.

So now we have this new version of Hector on the road again: as the soundtrack belts out road classics from Dylan, Hendrix and Creedence. Route 66 is now almost a ghost road in places - old towns long depopulated by the arrival of the Interstate, roads that are flooded or a two-lane that suddenly peters out into a dirt track. Occasionally Ó Sé has to rumble back onto the Interstate and reconnect with 66 further down the line. This once vital transport artery now fading into myth and memorabilia. Ó Sé likens it in some ways to the Irish towns and villages that have been bypassed by motorways or dual carriageways. "Perhaps there will come a time when I'll do a programme on the N17," says the Galway-based man. But in Ireland there are, as Heaney put it, there are no prairies to slice a big sun at evening and this is what Ó Sé's odyssey captures: the lost highway and heartland of a vast continent.

En route we meet some strange folk (yes, even stranger than Dáithí). In Springfield, Illinois an Abraham Lincoln look-a-like chews the fat with the Irishman. "No, I haven't seen any good plays recently," says 'Abe' with a straight face. "In fact I need to see one like a hole in the head." Later Ó Sé stumbles into a staged shoot-out in Oatman, Arizona and there's a seemingly crazy couple shacked up at a Route 66 curiosity shop in Oklahoma. Dressed in red and white striped jump suits, they 'regale' the TV traveller with their throat-ripping, ear-splitting homage to the road. "I was just driving down this road looking for the shop and this mad hoor comes along on a bicycle, waving a tricolour," says Ó Sé. "They were fecking stone mad out of their heads altogether. So there some things that you could not plan for."

Heights scare the bejesus out of Ó Se (on Celebrities Go Wild he baulked at the bunjee jump) but in this series he gets into a Lilliputian elevator that zaps him to the top of the Jefferson Arch in St Louis and also signs up for a thrilling (and bumpy) trip in a hot air balloon over the Rio Grande. "They were just dying to get me up into high buildings and other places," he says. The hairiest high rise moment was over the Grand Canyon. Ó Sé was in the back of a helicopter when the pilot's door flipped open. The broadcaster had to hang out of the chopper and attempt to slam the door shut. "It all happened so fact," he says. "If I actually thought about it I would probably have freaked. I had to take off my harness so that any wrong move and I was gone out the door."

He survived to tell the tale. Lots of tales. Some of which don't make it into the final cut. The ones that do reveal the roguish side (is there any other?) to this cute and disarming Kerryman (currently attached ladies). "You have to take those chances," he says of the opportunities that cross his path. He calls these the "sideline jobs" as opposed to his bread and butter work with TG4. There are a quite lot of them. Next up is a gig in Glasgow to record for TG4's Christmas Show and there are tentative plans for another Great Road Trip across America. It depends on how Route 66 goes down: who will buy it, who will watch it, who will want another dose of Dáithi. Whatever happens I can't see the moss growing under Ó Sé's cowboy boots.  "I'm 31 now," he says, as if his best years were rapidly disappearing in the rear-view mirror. "I'm pushing on a bit."