Watch stand-up Alex Kealy talk to Phil Hewitt/SussexWorld about gigging, silicon valley and the pandemic

It’s his second tour, having just about managed to get the first one in before the pandemic shut everything down: “I just about managed to complete it before Covid. I had about a dozen dates in spring 2020. My last date was in Glasgow and it was real end of the world vibes. Most other comedians had already cancelled their shows so I had a lot of people coming to my show who had originally wanted to go and see other people! Obviously the pandemic wasn't good. Every industry has its own lockdown sob stories. It was certainly annoying for me because I found Edinburgh 2019 had gone really well and I was doing a lot of support work. I was really enjoying being on stage at that time and I went from 300 gigs a year to doing maybe eight or ten between March 2020 and March 2021. In one way I was lucky because the other string to my bow is that I was able to do maths tutoring. I was able to earn some money. Obviously maths is not very funny but I do enjoy teaching and I was able to teach up to A Level. And obviously I did whatever everyone else was doing and I took up exercise and new hobbies and running and so on and I engaged with reading about my pandemic a lot.

“Actually I think one of the ways the whole experience did help me was that like with any moderately traumatic experience you consider new perspectives. I'm the kind of person that can catastrophise everything before going on stage rather than focusing on making it successful. I would just be thinking about all the different ways that it could actually go wrong but the pandemic reminded me that the whole point of comedy is to go out and have a great night and if things go a little bit wrong, it really doesn't matter. I think it meant that I could perform with more abandon but actually weirdly that kind of lesson is actually quite hard to maintain, like when you come from a trauma. I had a car crash on my way to a gig once and after that I was thinking ‘Well, it's going to be live for the day’ from now and making every day count but it's surprising how quickly the old mental structures come back in and you just start avoiding risk again.”

As for the current show, Winner Takes All looks at Silicon Valley tech monopolies and explores advertising and addiction and why big tech has become the big political tussle of the 21st century. There’s also room for gags about relationships, mental health and levelling up.

“I read a lot of books during the pandemic about these tech companies and that spurred me into writing a show about them. In the show, I look at the economic and cultural impact of monopolies, how various technological and political developments allowed for a surveillance business model for social media companies and the social and psychological impacts of these corporations constantly grasping for our attention. I do it with laughs, of course.”