Android :: ASync Task Progress Dialog Not Showing Until Background Thread Finishes

I've got an Android activity which grabs an RSS feed from a URL, and uses the SAX parser to stick each item from the XML into an array. This all works fine but, as expected, takes a bit of time, so I want to use AsyncActivity to do it in the background. The line items = parser.getItems() works fine - items being the arraylist containing each item from the XML. The problem I'm facing is that on starting the activity, the ProgressDialog which i create in onPreExecute() isn't displayed until after the doInBackground() method has finished. i.e. I get a black screen, a long pause, then a completely populated list with the items in. Why is this happening? Why isn't the UI drawing, the ProgressDialog showing, the parser getting the items and incrementally adding them to the list, then the ProgressDialog dismissing?