Alex Warner is the nephew of Cathy Matthews and first visited her in September 2015 when she was staying with Roy Cropper in his Victoria Street flat. Cathy was determined to make him a cake to mark his visit and told Roy that it had to be a wedding cake, complete with figures on the top, as he had had a thing about such events since he was eight years old. From this, Roy gained the impression that he was still a child and when he collected the figurines from Cathy's house, he also collected a horse-racing game named Escalado that he had enjoyed playing himself when a boy.