Kevin McAleer is still the surreal deal

DURING his early 20s, Kevin McAleer spent some time walking the earth. He lived for a spell in Barcelona, not long after General Francisco Franco died.

His abiding memory of post-dictatorship Spain was the talk about inflation. “Everybody was complaining about the prices going up. A bottle of wine cost 6p instead of 4p!” he remembers joyfully.

Shortly after returning to Ireland, he got hit with the comedy bug. It was around 1980. His start on stage came at the old comedy club on Harcourt Street in Dublin (where the pay scales were on a par with Franco’s Spain). The comedy club was a basement room in the old Holyrood Hotel; it doesn’t exist anymore. He says he was petrified getting up on stage for the first time.