It’s a brave man who’d agree to have his desperate quest for love conducted under the glare of the TV cameras for all the nation to see. But that’s exactly what stand-up comedian Karl Spain did for the RTE show, Karl Spain Wants A Woman.
Throughout the six-part series Spain subjected himself to every conceivable ritual of the modern dating game including speed-dating, internet-dating, even match-making.
“Initially, I was very wary of the whole thing,” he says. “It had started out as a college project I had done which was looking at how dating was going to change in the 21st century. I always thought it would be much better if we put someone in the situation for real, not realising it was going to be me.”
Prior to the series Spain had earned a well-deserved reputation as a stand-up, winning a BBC New Comedy Award and appearing at comedy festivals in Montreal, Edinburgh and Australia, not to mention the Kilkenny Cat Laughs (where he appears again this year). But as he admits, there was a void in his life that was becoming more and more apparent.
“I hadn’t had a serious relationship for about five years. For three or four years of that time I was quite happy with the situation. I never had much problem meeting girls. Hanging on to them was the problem which was a lot to do with the job I have. I might meet someone in Galway and it was like, ‘Jesus, I’m not back in Galway ‘till next month,’ so that was the end of that. The show gave me a chance to focus on relationships and on my career at the same time.”
Around 200 girls applied to take part in the show and he ended up dating about 30 of them in total. Nice work if you can get it, would be the attitude of most blokes, but Spain reveals that he had some reservations about the kind of girls who might want to take part in such an exercise.
“There were two or three of those wannabe TV stars that are everywhere these days,” he says. “One of them even brought her show-reel along and asked me could I give it to the director. ‘Give it to him yourself,’ I told her. There was a little bit of that but I was pleasantly surprised that most of the girls were genuinely out there and single like myself looking for someone. Once I started meeting some of them and I realised they were genuine I thought if I’m not going to be 100% genuine myself it’s going to be horrible. So I put more of myself into it than I thought I would and it came across that way, I hope.”
He says he detected a subtle difference in attitudes among the slightly older female participants. “Yeah, girls in their 20s were more interested in finding out who you were as a person but some of the girls in their 30s were slightly more sort of, (puts on inquisitive voice) ‘And what do you do for a living? What kind of car do you drive? Do you have your own house?’ But most of them were great craic.”
Much to his own surprise his hunt for a partner was eventually successful and he is still going out with Limerick pensions administrator Rachel O’Keeffe, who he met on the show during a wine-tasting event.
“I genuinely didn’t think I’d end up with a girlfriend at the end of the show,” he says. “It’s amazing now to find myself in a relationship 12 months on. Everyone thought I made the right decision which is reassuring. But I know myself that I did the right thing and I’m very happy. Some people might think it’s a strange way to meet someone and we joke about telling the grandchildren how we met. ‘Tell you how we met? We’ll show you how we met! (laughs).”
Spain was bitten by the comedy bug early while watching TV at home in Limerick but it was a live show that made his mind up that he wanted to be comedian, as he recalls. “There were no comedy clubs in Limerick or anything like that, and I remember before we got the multi-channel in our house the only comedy you’d see was someone like Tom O’Connor on the Late Late Show which was funny in its own way. Then when we got the cable in and suddenly I’m seeing Just For Laughs with Bill Hicks and Emo Philips and I started thinking these guys are unbelievable. It was a sort of epiphany for me and I thought, ‘I’d love to do that’ but I also thought I’d like to be a footballer and there wasn’t much chance of that. Then Billy Connolly came to Limerick to do a show and I never laughed so much, so that was it.”
He comes from what he describes as a typically Irish middle class background – how did his parents feel about his decision to pursue a career in comedy?
“My brothers and sisters all have really good jobs and I was the black sheep for a while. I ended up in fast-food before going to college as a mature student to study TV production. But once I started appearing on TV the family thought it was great. My father loves all the TV stuff and the articles in newspapers and magazines – he’s got three or four albums of clippings and photos of me.
“I think it finally hit home that things had worked out when I did Montreal a few years ago. It felt to me like Alan Kernaghen must have felt at the World Cup and that was good enough for me.”

Karl Spain appears at this years Cat Laughs Festival in Kilkenny which runs from June 1 – 5.