Born in Croydon, Alex Brooker made his name on TV as part of the comedy trio of Aussie Adam Hills and Josh Widdicombe on Channel 4’s The Last Leg.
Since then, Alex has also presented The Jump and The Superhumans Show on Channel 4 as well as a whole host of the nation’s favourite panel shows and gameshows.
But outside of his TV presenting and comedy career, Alex used to be in a completely different profession, got into TV through some unusual means, and has an idyllic family life at home.
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Alex got his big TV break as one third of the regulars on The Last Leg alongside Josh Widdicombe (L) and Adam Hills (C)
(Image: Channel 4)
Alex, 37, went to school in Kent and was initially not on a path towards TV stardom.
Instead he got stuck into journalism, and moved up to Liverpool where he went to university.
Alex is a loud and proud Arsenal fan, even getting involved in fan podcast Footballistically Arsenal regularly.
So it’s perhaps no surprise that after leaving university he got a job at the Liverpool Echo as a sports reporter.
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It was back in 2010 that he entered Channel 4’s Half a Million Quid Talent Search, looking for disabled talent who could present coverage of the London Paralympic Games in 2012.
Alex, who was born with limb deformities and uses a prosthetic leg, won this national talent search, and the rest, as they say, is history – his TV career took off.
Alex also married his wife, Lynsey, who works as an accountant, just a few years later in 2014.
The couple, though quite private about their relationship, were thought to have been dating for a while before then.
They now have a lovely family, having welcomed two daughters: Daphne, 4, and another little girl born not long after whose name Alex hasn’t mentioned publicly.
He opened up about some of the fears he had built up of his children first noticing his disability speaking to The Guardian last year:
“It was a moment I’ve worried about all my life, ‘What if my kids are scared of me?’ But my daughter was holding my hand and just said: ‘Oh, you’ve got two fingers haven’t you and I’ve got four,’ and that was it.
“It was all done and dusted in five seconds. I thought to myself: ‘I’ve been worrying about this for 25 years, you could have made a bit more out of it!’
“She’s three now and she’s been able to count above two for a while, so really I was looking at this as a marker of her progress in mathematics as well,” he joked.
You can catch Alex tonight at 9pm on BBC Two’s Alex Brooker: Disability and Me where he confronts what it really means to be disabled in Britain today.
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