At Home with Karl Spain

It’s a hectic morning for Karl Spain when Hot Press drops in for a visit. He’s in the process of packing his bags before catching a plane to Bristol, where he’s scheduled to play two of the city’s comedy clubs. “A work trip, but work can be pleasurable,” he says. “I was in London last week as well. The way calendars and venue bookings go, you can be all over the place from one week to the next. I’m pretty much booked up until September now though, which is always good!”

Although Karl famously ‘wanted a woman’ in his 2005 TV series, he remains an eligible bachelor and currently lives alone in this modern city centre apartment in his native Limerick. One imagines that the heart of a student city like this is not the most tranquil of locations after dark. “I’m away at the weekends, so I don’t notice that really,” say Karl, “but there does always seem to be skateboarders outside during they day! They’re Limerick skateboarders, though, so I think they’re middle-class and they’re not very good. It can be fun to watch them fall over sometimes.”
In his student days, Karl took a TV production course in Dublin’s Coláiste Dhúlaigh and spent a year studying in Wolverhampton in the UK. He’s been fortunate enough to have no truly horrific student accommodation tales to tell, but things did go slightly awry the day he arrived across the pond.
“A couple of us went over in a group, but the landlord of the accommodation we were supposed to have changed his mind about it the night before, so we didn’t even meet him. I ended up moving into a room in a six-bedroom house at very short notice,” Karl recalls. “I got the impression that the other people in the house didn’t really want anyone else moving in. So they played heavy metal music at ridiculous volumes and really messed up the place, trying to deter me. But they ended up encouraging me: I said, ‘oh, they’re playing music really loud and the place is a bit of a mess, I’ll fit in here really
well!’ ”
Karl has been installed in his Limerick pad for a few months now. “I haven’t really put my footprints on it,” he admits, “I’ve had no spontaneous urges to become a DIY or interior design guru for now, anyway,” he laughs. He’s also yet to move his extensive library of books from his family home to his new abode. “Audio books are my latest obsession,” he says, “I like listening to them in the car while I’m driving around.” Karl admits that his kitchen is probably the least-used area of the flat. “I might have breakfast at home, but the one way in which I’m like Woody Allen is that I eat out a lot,” he laughs.
So how close is the apartment to Karl’s idea of his dream home? “Well, now that you mention it, my family home was quite nice actually!” he says, “it’s a suburban bungalow with a converted attic, an extension out the back and a big garden. So there was loads of rooms and plenty of space. I had a full-size pool table, something this apartment is sadly lacking, which really helped with my study for the Inter and Leaving Certs.”
Despite his nostalgia for the family home, however, a return to spacious suburbia is not on the cards. “At the moment this is fine,” he says. “In my line of work, there’s always the possibility you could end up living somewhere else. I’ve often toyed with the idea of moving to London – I keep saying ‘maybe I’ll do it in eighteen months, but I’ve been saying that for nearly ten years now so I probably never will! I can see myself being happy here for a few more years anyway.”

Karl Spain plays The Black Box, Galway on March 23 as part of The Galway Comedy Festival. He also plays Barrel O”Laughs in Crawdaddy, Dublin on March 27.