ALEXEI Sayle is 63 now. How did that happen? The voice (always Scouse), the look (head shaved to the nap, the brutalist architecture of that face, the bulging gut squeezed into a shiny suit) and the attitude (class angry rising to contemptuous with a side order – large – of obscenity) of the thing that was known as alternative comedy is old enough to own a bus pass.
But there you go. Time passes. We get old (and as some someone who still regrets not going to see Sayle play the Tamdhu in Bannockburn somewhere around late 1982, I qualify). Eventually the brand new, brave new thing becomes the stuff of memoir.
In Sayle’s case that memoir is called Thatcher Stole My Trousers. It’s his second; one that covers Sayle’s arrival as an art student in London who hated most of 20th-century art, and the rise of alternative comedy. It is the reason why Sayle and I are sitting in the offices of Bloomsbury Books discussing The Young Ones, the revenge of the public school actor, his communist parents, class politics and his disorientating desire for success back in the day.
The man in front of me is dressed in black, his Buddha belly covered, his beard styled to a point. He is looking good on his 63 years. What quickly strikes you, though, is the way his conversation is surprisingly hesitant for someone who on stage never seemed lacking in self-belief. Sentences and thoughts meander, peter out, stop.
It’s so removed from the voice on the page or on the stage. Coincidentally a couple of nights before we meet I catch a clip of the old Sayle (the old Sayle being the young Sayle, of course) on Gold and what is striking is the full-throttle, sputum-flecked, utterly aggressive, punkish conviction. The late Ian Hamilton, poet and Paul Gascoigne biographer, caught Sayle in full flow at the Comedy Store in 1981 and summed him up for London Review of Books readers as “a pathologically aggrieved pub lout who’s read some books”.
That’s not the demeanour of the man in the room with me. Well, apart from the book-reading bit maybe. He’s mellow, reflective, a reminder in human form that performances are just that.
The Mr Angry persona was refined compering wild drunken late nights at the now legendary Comedy Store, located above a topless bar in Soho, gonging off turns who didn’t meet the audience’s approval, watching regular turn Keith Allen (Lily’s dad) throw darts at the audience, formulating an idea of comedy that rejected the clubbability of the Oxbridge set and everything the old-school comedians represented – anecdotal, political, neither sexist nor racist. The deManningification of British comedy started here.
The Comedy Store was such a new idea at the time, was it scary? “Yeah, until you got on stage. Because there was so much of it that was out of control. It’s like an anxiety dream. It’s the middle of the night. The audience is drunk. If there was a rugby game in town there might be a lot of them in because they’re getting a late drink for £4. And it’s only three years after punk.”
If anything it brought out the middle manager in him. “I was always extraordinarily conscientious and quite schoolmasterish about the running order. And then I’d put my clipboard down and go onstage and go ‘F***, c***, p***, you f****** w****** …’”
He laughs along with me. “Is it Voltaire?” he asks. “No, it was Flaubert who said, ‘Inside every revolutionary there is a policeman.’ I enjoyed the abuse of power tremendously. I enjoyed being in a position of power probably for the first time in my life. I’d never had an authority position before. At school I was the only kid in the sixth form they didn’t make a prefect. Probably only in that one place at that one time would anybody put me in charge.”
Soon he was getting gigs on TV and would be joined by like-minded – if less aggressive – souls including Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson. By 1982 The Young Ones had been commissioned and alternative comedy was the new rock ‘n’ roll (a decade before that phrase became a newspaper cliche).

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The Young Ones was the vehicle for the dissemination of alternative comedy’s ideas. “It was the repeats of the first series before it really started to catch fire. I was out with Nigel [Planer] and some kids started shouting, ‘Kill the hippy, kill the hippy,’ and he got really frightened. And I said, ‘No, you don’t understand. It’s The Young Ones. It’s Neil.’”
I said Sayle was mellow, didn’t I? Yet more than 30 years on he has retained his contempt for much of the comedy that came before. “Yeah. Ben [Elton] was on one of those hagiographic things about The Two Ronnies the other night and Ben was saying, ‘There’s a myth that our generation hated people like The Two Ronnies. That’s not true.’ Well, it was f****** true for me. I hated them. Not so much the Ronnies … Well, I hated a lot of what the Ronnies did. But I hated them old-school guys. There was no regard. No respect for them.”
In the book, I remind him, he suggests many of them were nasty guys trying to be nice. “That was the revelation. I can’t remember now which ones I met but it did surprise me about those old-school guys. The hypocrisy. All that family-friendly s***. That was a complete lie. They were all doing coke. They were horrible, they were just horrible and false. They were bright working-class guys, a lot of them, and they had been forced into this arena by lack of education and social conventions of the time and they were stuck there and they were very unhappy and they would have liked to have been us but they were kind of trapped.”

There are traps for everyone, though. For Sayle it might have been his desperate desire for success always rubbing up hard against his desire to not play the game. “I wanted to be a huge superstar while at the same time not compromising. Not selling out,” he admits. “It’s a ludicrous ambition. Really impossible to reconcile those two polarities. There’s a tremendous amount of dissonance.”
How did that impact on him? “It’s not a recipe for happiness, is it? You look at someone like Stewart Lee, who I really admire. Stewart sticks with the core values of the brand in a sense. You won’t see him on telly with Roland Rat or whatever the modern equivalent is. He’s learned from the terrible sacrifices I made that you shouldn’t go on Roland Rat or whatever.”
He doesn’t turn up on The One Show, does he? “Yeah. I’m doing The One Show next week. I don’t learn, clearly. It’s too late for me now.”
Perhaps oppositionalism was written into Sayle from the beginning. He was raised by communist parents, spent his younger years holidaying in the Eastern Bloc (that was once a thing, children). Can we blame the parents? His mother Molly is a fierce comic presence in Thatcher Stole My Trousers. Imagine the Julie Walters character from Dinnerladies but with a Scouse accent and a copy of Das Kapital in her back pocket. His father Joe, meanwhile, rather fades out of the book when we learn he has Alzheimer’s. Between comedy and invisibility you wonder if there are darker currents being hidden here.
Sayle acknowledges there is little humour to be found in his father’s final years. “There is a line that says: show me a comic and I’ll show you somebody who lost their father when they were 11, which is true. If you look at a lot of comics there’s a missing father or they’re adopted like Stewart. One year at Edinburgh there were like 97 comedians doing shows about their dying fathers, 76 of whom were still alive and not at all unwell. That’s not a direction you want to go, to wallow in that.”
As for Sayle’s mother, the implication is that finding the humour in her interventions was a necessity. He starts talking about the Times columnist David Aaronovitch, whose background is remarkably similar to Sayle’s. “I reviewed David Aaronovitch’s book for The Guardian. They didn’t sub it much, but the line they took out was where I said, ‘I had chosen in terms of left-wing politics to stand on the sidelines laughing unhelpfully at everybody,’ which is kind of what I did, whereas Aaronovitch took it seriously. And that also explains his trajectory to being a right-wing pawn of Murdoch. He believed it.
“I chose to turn Molly into a comic creation. There was a lot of darkness there which I’ve chosen not to hide from but to treat as essentially comic. I think that’s what saved me in a way. It made me able to have a loving relationship with her, although she is extraordinarily difficult. Aaronovitch’s mother is very similar, extraordinarily similar. You could sense that there was still a lot of repressed anger [in Aaronovitch].
“It allowed me to remain left wing and to ultimately have some kind of relationship. Linda was talking about this. She likes the bit in the book where I imagine an alternative lifestyle I could have had living next door to Molly, going round on a Saturday night and going, ‘Oh God I’ll do your hair, Molly.’ And then murdering her.”

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Linda is the other loving relationship in the book. Sayle married her in the 1970s before he’d left Liverpool for London. She is the book’s quiet heroine. She has always had a fierce dedication to her husband and an absolute belief in him, he says, “coupled with an extraordinary kind of exasperation”.
She helped him keep his feet on the ground when the media first started promising stardom, or at least Time Out cover slots. “There’s a really difficult thing for any performer in that period when you’re nearly there but you’re not quite. You think, ‘If I act like Rod Stewart then I will become Rod Stewart.’ So you start acting like a terrible dick really without the concomitant status to do it. I think at that point Linda had a word.”
How did his dickishness manifest itself? “I wasn’t bad. Just a kind of arrogance, really.”
The problem with arrogance is what happens when others don’t share your
high opinion of yourself. Sayle is admirably open about the jealousy he felt when his contemporaries began to become the stars. Was he then the Jeremiah at the feast?
“Oh God, yeah.”
This is something he wants to write about in the next volume. A version of the Morrissey song We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful. “One of the things I really want to write about is how Jennifer [Saunders] and Dawn [French] suddenly surpassed us all. We never thought that [would happen]. I always thought they were tremendously talented but then they are suddenly superstars and I’m still playing Wolverhampton Civic and we’ve only sold 75 per cent of the tickets. ‘This is profoundly wrong. That’s supposed to be me. I was the one on the cover of Time Out in 1981, not you. Why are you a star?’”

It was the same in the 1990s when he was a BBC Two regular. His writers at the time were Graham Linehan and Arthur Matthews, the duo who went on to create Father Ted. “When they started out I felt very parental and as they grew away from me I couldn’t quite cope. It took me five years, 10 years to see that Father Ted was a masterpiece.”
Of course he didn’t help himself either. He refused to get involved in Comic Relief even though his friends were the people behind it at the beginning. “I was making things difficult for myself. Having done the Secret Policeman’s Ball I said, ‘I’m not doing another one of these.’ And yet the early years of Comic Relief looked so much fun and it was so useful for your career.”
Maybe that’s the thing in the end. His convictions always overcame his desire for success (the odd Dairylea voiceover aside).
This century he has reinvented himself as a writer. A good one too. Thatcher Stole My Trousers is a pleasure to read. A couple of years ago, though, he returned to stand-up. He thinks by the end of his run (in Edinburgh, as it happens) he was on fire. “One of the reviews I got in Edinburgh said, ‘I’ve been reviewing comedy for 10 years at the Fringe and this is the finest comedy I’ve seen’ And he’s right, really.”
Quoting your own reviews? I’m not sure if that’s neediness or honesty talking. Maybe a bit of both. He doesn’t do anodyne or disengaged. When I bring up his contemporary and friend, the late Rik Mayall, who died in 2014, 16 years after he had nearly died in a quad bike accident, there’s regret and realism in his answer.
“It’s profoundly sad. The intensity of my relationship with Rik … Once he left Lise [Mayall’s ex-partner Lise Mayer, who co-wrote The Young Ones] I didn’t see that much of him. We’d had that very intense few years when we’d go on holiday all the time. We’d spent days sitting in each other’s houses. And after his accident he was changed because the drugs made him different. He wasn’t the same person I had known.
“The 16 years he had after the accident I think he was relatively happy. Yeah, it was shocking but it wasn’t unexpected because he was terribly ill.”

It is a conservative truism that all revolutions end in failure. Thatcher Stole My Trousers ends with the collapse of the miners’ strike and the University Challenge episode of The Young Ones where the Oxbridge lot – Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson – turn up. At the time Sayle couldn’t understand why. “Didn’t we agree they were the enemy, exemplars of systemic class oppression?” he asked the others. “No,” the others told him. “That was just you.”
Still, he says, it’s curious that in a world where the dialectic now is between neo-liberal corporatism and medieval Islamic fascism there are not more political comedians on the circuit, apart maybe from Russell Brand. But perhaps that’s because comedy is a middle-class career choice these days. As is everything. “There was a brief period where they allowed us to swarm through the gates and then they thought, ‘F***, that’s not happening again.’
“Capitalism endlessly adapts like that. That’s the remarkable thing about it. There’s also a very concerted effort – it’s not exactly a conspiracy but it ends up there – to make sure comics don’t act like they acted in my day. There was a brief vacuum when the shit was out of control.”

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What does his ambition amount to now? Does he want to be the best writer in the world? “I’d settle for something less. Sunday Times’ top 10 and a small literary prize from a festival in Scarborough. The impetus is mostly to write the best book I can write. I don’t know what I’d do to be suddenly big again. I’m 63, I’ve got my bus pass. I haven’t got the energy any more to be famous.”

Thatcher Stole My Trousers is published by Bloomsbury, priced £16.99. Sayle is appearing at Glasgow book festival Aye Write!, of which The Herald is media partner, next Friday at 7.30pm. Visit ayewrite.com.