Alex’s comic touch

Journalism didn’t claim him. But comedy did. 

Alex Horne brings his show Seven Years In A Bathroom to Shoreham’s Ropetackle Arts Centre on Thursday, December 15, 8pm - a night which comes billed as “the ultimate stat-based fun-packed thought-provoking experimental-and-sometimes-stupid hour-long comedy show”.

Alex has spent more than a decade building Edinburgh shows around niche subjects like bird watching, Latin, dictionaries and quantum mechanics. Now he’s having a crack at life itself.

“I like statistics,” he explains. “I particularly like the one that says ‘If the history of the earth is condensed into a single year, then humans only arrive at five to midnight on New Year’s Eve.’ That’s a good one. Mainly because it makes you think, blimey, just in time; isn’t the earth old and isn’t my tiny life insignificant.

“So, I’ve now made my own show all about statistics. But because I think our lives are occasionally just a little bit significant I’m only going to focus on that miniscule human section of history.

“And instead of just reeling out a load of these mind-blowing facts, I’m going to physically demonstrate them on stage with my own human body.

“I’m going to show you exactly what it would look like if a human life was condensed into one hour. That’s the big idea. You may well have heard that in your life you’ll spend two years queuing, two weeks kissing and three months opening jars, well, now you’re going to see what that would look like in the context of your entire life. There will also be some jokes, but mainly it’ll be a typical human existence squeezed into an hour.

“There will, of course, be some nifty presentation techniques (I’ve moved on from PowerPoint to the mighty Keynote), but the big news is I’ll be attempting several things for the first time ever in public: wearing a bathrobe, drinking exactly 100 ml of cider and simulating sex to name a few. It’ll be about as rock and roll as a geek like me could ever dare dream!”