At Home With... Colin Murphy

Voted the second most popular comedian in Ireland (after Tommy Tiernan) in the most recent Hot Press Readers’ Poll, Colin Murphy is also one of the most ubiquitous comedy talents on our TV screens. When not popping up all over the place – as a guest on shows like The Panel and the BBC sketch show This Is Ireland to name just two, he’s usually to be found presenting his own shows such as the hugely popular RTE series Blizzard Of Odd which returns for a new series later this year.

Originally from Downpatrick – the home of Ash, Relish and, as he is quick to remind us, of long forgotten pop legends Rosetta Stone – Murphy lives these days in Belfast, “in the posh bit of town” off the Lisburn Road.
“I love and hate Belfast in equal measure,” he says. “It's narrow minded and bigoted but that’s probably what makes it so endearing in a strange way. What I really like about Belfast is that it doesn’t try too hard to be trendy like Dublin, which thinks it’s trendy and it’s not. Belfast makes an attempt every now and then and a new bar will open with a strict dress code but after a week they discover there aren’t enough trendy people to fill it and they let anyone in. Belfast is also the home of the tracksuit. People in tracksuits smoking their heads off – that’s Belfast.”
Murphy shares his traditional Belfast red-bricked abode with his wife and two sons aged four and one. "We’ve moved here about six months ago so we still haven’t fully unpacked,” he says. “The place is a bit chaotic, full of boxes and we haven’t even started on the decorating bit yet. Every house we move into we do nothing for a year and then tackle the DIY. In the last house I built the kitchen myself, basically because we were broke at the time. Of course it ended up costing more than if we’d got someone in to do it. I’ve a big problem with numbers – if I measure something I’m likely to get the inches and the centimetres mixed up so I like to think of my DIY attempts as ‘quirky’ or ‘handmade’ and ‘individual’ – words like that perfectly describe my creations.”
Murphy has becoming a huge draw on the live circuit – his recent Vicar Street show sold out and he spends an increasing amount of his time on the road both at home and abroad. But when not touring his stand-up routine or appearing on a myriad of TV and radio shows, Murphy says he likes nothing better than to stay indoors and potter about the house. “I don’t go out all that much and I was never much of a clubber,” he says. “I don’t really have any mates in Belfast – they’ve all moved away and most of them are in London but if they’re in town they would pop around. I would have been more of a pub person in the past but there aren’t that many proper pubs left. I used to love places like The Kitchen Bar which was like an old music hall bar which was knocked down to make way for a shopping centre. I would go to the comedy club at The Empire but that would be about it. I don’t do the walking thing that much – I’m a big fan of a taxis.”
Despite making a good proportion of his living appearing on TV, Murphy is a huge fan of radio, which he says is on permanently when he’s at home. “I don’t watch DVDs much and we haven’t even unpacked the stereo yet so the radio is my main source of entertainment,” he says. “BBC Radio 6 and Radio 4 is mainly what I listen to. I’ve got Gardener's Question Time on at the minute. There’ll probably be a documentary on the lives of the Inuits or something coming up next. That’s what I like about Radio 4, the fact that it’s so quirky. If I’m in the house on my own I’ll maybe do a bit of housework and then I’ll have a nice coffee and do the Guardian crossword.”
Reading is another passion of Murphy’s and he says there isn’t enough shelf space to contain the boxes of books dotted about the house.
“The house is literally coming down with books, though most of them are my wife’s – she’s the obsessional reader. I tend to read a lot of biographies – the Woody Allen biography is sitting in front of me right now. Friends of mine are illustrators so I’ll end up reading books that they’ve illustrated... Travel Books are another big thing with me. Every where I go I’ll buy all the travel guides, read them and promptly ignore all the advice in them.”
Staring out the window towards the back garden, Murphy bemoans his lack of gardening skills. “The guy who lived here before us was quite a good gardener but it’s all very wild and overgrown now. The only thing I’ll say is I haven’t killed anything over the winter. No doubt I’ll kill something over the summer. I tend to just hack away at the things and hope for the best. And I haven’t a clue about plants. Women seem to know a lot about that sort of thing. My wife will just randomly come out with something about a strange looking plant – is there’s some secret thing among women that they intuitively know these things?”

Colin Murphy is currently on tour. He appears at The Town Hall Theatre, in Galway on Saturday April 23 and at An Grianan Theatre, Letterkenny on Friday April 29.