Finding a woman is a serious business, as the comedian Karl Spain tells Brian Boyd
'There are no slow sets any more," says Karl Spain mournfully. "Not so long ago the rules were simple: you went out somewhere, and if you asked someone up to dance it sent a message that you were, you know, interested. But that isn't there any more."
Poor Spain. The 33-year-old Limerick comedian simply can't find a girlfriend - or perhaps, more precisely, can't find any clubs in Ireland that do slow sets, so he can do the walk of death across the floor to ask a lovely lady to join him in a smoochy dance.
"It's not just the slow sets. Everything has changed now," he says. "Trying to get a date is impossible. People are so busy these days. A lot of people meet up because of work, but that doesn't apply to me. As a comedian I work weekends. I wouldn't really like to go out with someone who has been in the audience at one of my gigs, because I don't want them to view me as a comedian. And the handful of female comics on the scene know better than to have anything to do with me."
Things have got so bad for this likeable, clever and witty man - I'm bigging him up, ladies - that he has made a television series, called Karl Spain Wants a Woman, that details how he fares in the modern dating world. He tries speed dating, internet dating, blind dates and newspaper advertisements in his elusive search.
"A large part of the show is me trying to remove the stigma of using modern dating services. It's not all desperate freaks using them," he says. "It's something I've always considered doing to meet a woman, and, to be honest with you, it's something I would have done anyway, with or without the television series."
Spain had the idea for the show while studying television production at Coláiste Dhúlaigh, in Coolock. He put together a small television show about dating agencies on a very limited budget as a college project, and he always thought it would make a good series. It's just he never imagined himself in the lead role.
"Over the six-part series we examine both traditional and modern ways of dating," he says. "We put advertisements in newspapers a few months back, looking for women who wanted to participate in the series. We got over 100 replies. One of them was from a married woman who said she was interested in an 'afternoon of love'. We got in touch with her and explained that was fine if she didn't mind being filmed. But she quickly lost her interest.
"I do more than one date in each show, and the women who agreed to participate were brilliant. We had to weed out the ones who only wanted to be on television. This is a serious show about the dating process."
The dating footage is intercut with Spain doing his comedy act in a club (but not necessarily talking about the women he has met). There is also a panel of Spain's female friends, who provide a running commentary on how he is doing on each of his dates. "They don't hold back on their opinions - at all," he says.
To get away from the traditional Irish date - the time-honoured "I'll meet you in the pub" - he brought his dates on a variety of excursions. One was to Bunratty Castle for a medieval banquet; another was to Leisureland in Galway; a third was to a football match. Spain, you can't bring a lovely lady to a football match on your first date. "It was her idea," he says. "She's a big football fan."
Spain still has no idea how the series ends: they're still filming, and they will be even as the first programme goes out. "Everyone who I've talked to about the programme says to me that, obviously, the last show is going to be me meeting up with my perfect partner. But that is not the case at all. The first thing is that the decision is not mine. The decision lies with the woman I'm dating. She has to decide if she wants to see me again. I can decide I like someone, but that person might not be interested."
The series became more of a voyage of discovery than he ever expected. "To be honest with you, I'm not sure if I would have done it if I had known in advance what it would entail," he says. "It got a lot deeper than I thought it would. I'm not naturally a confident person, and I did find the process difficult. The whole TV world is watching me on these very real dates.
"They got in a relationship expert to help me, and a 'flirting expert' came over from Britain. Both of them did a makeover on me. I was all "But I want someone to love me just the way I am," but they really got to work on me, even down to things about how I dressed. They suggested certain shirts I should wear and how I could make myself a bit more confident. For me that was the most positive thing to come out of the show. There were genuine improvements in how I dealt with the dates. I know people might think it's all a gimmick for television, but what you see is very, very real."
Spain is well aware of how exposed the series will make him, but he says he was motivated by a desire to normalise the use of dating services.
"What would make me really happy is that, in five years' time, someone comes up to me and says: 'I saw that show you did on dating agencies and I met my wife through one of them.' That would be a real result for me."
Karl Spain Wants a Woman begins on RTÉ 2 on September 6th. He also hosts Karl Spain's Sunday Roast, at CrawDaddy, in Dublin, from 7.30pm every Sunday