2011 Edinburgh Fringe

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The ultimate stat-based fun-packed thought-provoking experimental-and-sometimes-stupid hour-long comedy show. Alex Horne presents Seven Years in a Bathroom at the 2011 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Alex Horne has spent more than a decade building Edinburgh shows around niche subjects like bird watching, Latin, dictionaries and quantum mechanics. Now he's decided to raise his game. Alex is going to have a crack at life itself, and to mark this massive shift he's going to write the rest of this in the first person.

I like statistics. 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 100ml 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.

To date Alex has brought seven solo shows to the Edinburgh Fringe, including Making Fish Laugh in 2003 which saw him nominated for the Perrier Best Newcomer Award and 2004's Chortle Award winning Every Body Talks. In 2010 he returned with three shows; his solo stand-up show Odds, the innovative Jazz comedy show, The Horne Section, and The Taskmaster. In addition to Seven Years in a Bathroom he will also be heading up to Edinburgh with Taskmaster II - a one off show concluding a year long challenge in which Alex has persuaded 20 of his favourite comedians to take part on a covert competition.

2010 saw Alex film his own documentary for BBC Four, The Games that Time Forgot: Cricket on Horseback and Other Forgotten Sports. His other recent credits include The Percy Edwards Showdown, Loose Ends and The Horne Section for BBC Radio 4 and The Verb, for BBC Radio 3. Alex's world record attempt to be the world's oldest man can now be followed on the Innocent sponsored website: www.longlivealex.com