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COMEDYSeven Years in the Bathroom

SEVEN years! That’s how long the average person spends in the bathroom during their lifetime. And that’s the statistic Alex Horne has chosen as the title of his current show, or as he puts it, “the ultimate stat-based, fun-packed, thought-provoking, experimental and sometimes stupid hour.”

Horne has spent more than a decade building shows around niche subjects like bird watching, Latin, dictionaries and quantum mechanics, including the bizarrely titled Making Fish Laugh, which led to his nomination for the Perrier Best Newcomer Award at the 2007 Fringe.

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Now he has decided to raise his game and have a crack at life itself, as his audience at The Stand will discover, on Tuesday evening.

“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,’ Horne says. “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.

“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.

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“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 but three.

“It’ll be about as rock and roll as a geek like me could ever dare dream.”

Seven years In The Bathroom is one of three shows Horne brought to the 2011 Fringe - The Horne Section (which has since been commissioned as a Radio 4 series) and Taskmaster II were the other two.

Maybe his next challenge could be to work out how many hours the average stand-up spends on a stage during their lifetime.

The Stand, York Place, Tuesday, 8.30pm, £12, www.thestand.co.uk

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