“I saw what my wife went through. I’ve lost a breast. I’ve got a scar, but I can walk topless around a pool and probably people wouldn’t even think it was mastectomy and breast cancer.
“A woman couldn’t do that,” he says.
“I never had any hair to talk about anyway, so that didn’t impact me but if you were to come across a bald man, you wouldn’t have a second thought.
“If you’d come across a bald woman, you’d think there might be something going on there.”
Alan is now on hormone tablets for the next decade – which he says are producing “interesting” side-effects.
“The madness of man’s breast cancer is I now have the symptoms of the menopause.
“I’ve joined the hot flush brigade and apparently I’m having mood swings.”
Alan admits surprise about how much humour he found in his experiences.
“Bantering with his mates” was, he says, a crucial aspect of recovery including receiving plenty of texts like, ‘you dead yet?’
During treatment he made a record of funny conversations and situations and kept them in notes on his phone.
That record is now the structure for his 45-minute stand-up set.
To prepare him for the month-long run, he enlisted the help of stand-up comedian Terence Hartnett.
He reached out to Terence after watching him perform his “One Ball One Lung” show, which documented him losing first a testicle and then a lung to cancer, at a previous Edinburgh Fringe festival
Under the established comic’s eye, Alan performed a warm-up gig to colleagues in Manchester.
“We basically hired a Greek restaurant to do a bit of cabaret and stuff and I was the cabaret,” he laughs.
He says the material worked but he found the experience “terrifying”, prompting plans for more rehearsing and another practice gig in Sheffield in July.
