Stand and Deliver!

It seems to have been one of the best kept secrets of literature and comedy. Somewhere, some time, that loud, in-yer-face comedian Alexei Sayle left the world of comedy and became a brilliant author.

When his first anthology of short stories, Barcelona Plates, was published, it was in all the shops, but I don’t remember reading much about it. Same with his second collection, The Dog Catcher, but I must have been more cashed up by that stage, because I not only bought a hard cover copy of it for myself, but also gave a couple away as birthday gifts.

I was truly amazed at the quality of the writing – funny, clever, perceptive, with great imagination. Each one with a little twist at the end, sometimes hilarious, sometimes macabre like Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected. This was genuinely surprising because I was the kind of Alexei Sayle fan who had read his other, earlier books, Train to Hell and Great Bus Journeys of the World. They were like his records, in that, they were like his stand-up: drawing from that surreal, in-yer-face, absurdist vein of humour that Alexei Sayle practically copyrighted. Barcelona Plates and The Dog Catcher were so different. The short stories they contained were still funny, but they were less self-conscious in their content and execution.

Cut to the 2003 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. There’s a Writer’s Festival going on at the same time, and by the time I get myself organised enough to check out the program, I discover that I’ve missed Alexei Sayle by a day. It appears that he has written his ’first’ novel (if you don’t take Train to Hell into account) and it’s called Overtaken . One day I’m walking passing the OxFam shop in the centre of Edinburgh, and notice a sign that informs me that I’ve missed Alexei Sayle by a couple of hours. I can at least buy an autographed copy of Overtaken that he’s donated to the shop. Reading it, I realise something vital: even as Sayle has graduated to writing proper, full length novels that are less like his stand-up than his original ‘zany’ attempts, there are themes and issues present throughout his work, from the stand-up to the ‘serious’ literature. Furthermore, even his stand-up had a knowing, declamatory style that was as much story-telling as it was stand-up.

At least Alexei didn’t seem to mind about having to cover old ground. He graciously autographed my twelve-inch single of ‘Didn’t You Kill My Brother?’ that I bought as a teenager who usually saved his pocket shrapnel for Beatles and David Bowie singles. He cacked when I told him how my mother hit the roof when she first heard it, disgusted that I would spend my money on this sort of record. But that was then. This is now. If you haven’t read any of Alexei Sayle’s more recent literature, I recommend you start almost immediately with The Dog Catcher. And if you’ve never heard any of his stand-up, that’s your loss. Start with The Young Ones on DVD, and hope that Alexei Sayle’s Stuff is re-issued soon. Grab The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball on CD if you can find it, or hunt down his album Panic if you can. But do read his books.

This interview was broadcast 22 May 2004. Here’s the MP3 if you want to listen as you read.

Soundbite: ‘Meanwhile’ – from the single of the same name.

Alexei Sayle: It was just another day for Raoul, the Tasmanian with the talking trousers, as he put a lizard into each top hat. Little did he realise that opportunity would soon come a-knocking in the shape of a giant Idaho potato which bore a strange resemblance to the late J. Edgar Hoover, right down to the striped spatula with the words ‘hokey kokey’ written on it in yellow ink…

‘Girlie’ Chorus: Meanwhile,
In another part of town,
Just a-a-a-a
Few miles away,
Seventeen years ago,
Later that very same day.

ALEXEI SAYLE: Indeed.

Demetrius Romeo: How was it to make the transition, and why did you make it?

ALEXEI SAYLE: Well, I think I’d sort of personally reached the end of a stage of my life of being a comedian. I didn’t really have the commitment to the life to want to do a hundred shows a year, which I think you really have to do to refresh your material and yourself, and I couldn’t really face that. So I was casting around for something else to do and I started writing short stories. That became the sole thing that I did, really.

Demetrius Romeo: You were writing books before that – your first couple of books were closer to your comedy that to the books you’re writing now.

ALEXEI SAYLE: Yes.

Demetrius Romeo: Did you make a conscious effort to reign in that side of your writing psyche?

ALEXEI SAYLE: Well, probably initially, writing those ‘zany’ books in the 80s was in a sense a lack of confidence in stretching myself, in a way; staying closer to my core kind of performing style, but when I started writing the short stories I really wanted to get away, to really do some serious literature. I mean, it’s still comical and satirical, but it’s aiming as high as you can – it’s ‘proper’ literature. That’s sort of, by then, what I really wanted to do, to distance myself from the ‘Coco the Clown’, the previous incarnation.

Demetrius Romeo: Was it a large stretch to go from the anthologies of short stories to the novel?

ALEXEI SAYLE: No, it was a natural progression, really, but it was one I took the time to work up to, not to force myself to do it until I was ready to do it, really.

Soundbite: ‘Ullo John, Gotta New Motor? – Part III’ – from the twelve-inch single of the same name.

Alexei Sayle: What a lovely motor the Cortina is, eh? What a lovely motor. What style. What lines. What beauty. What poetry, eh? All that poetry in a motor. ’Ere. Ever see Wordsworth do anything like a Cortina, eh? ’E didn’t did ’e, eh? Tennyson? Eh? Any of that? Any of them? Any of them fellers, eh? Didn’t do anything as poetic as a Cortina.

ALEXEI SAYLE: Well, I don’t know. I mean, it’s partly… well, probably, I think, me dad worked on the railways, so that’s maybe one of the inspirations. And also, we never had a car, so I always had a kind of slightly ‘outsider’ view of cars. They seemed like ‘miraculous’ kind of contrivances, really, so I’ve always been interested in cars. But then I’m also interested in the kind of landscape – motorways at night…

Soundbite: ‘’Ullo John! Gotta New Motor? – Part III’ – from the twelve-inch single of the same name.

Alexei Sayle: Ullo John, gotta new motor?
’Ullo John! Gotta new motor?
’Ullo John! Gotta new motor?
’Ullo John! Gotta new motor?
’Ullo John! Gotta new motor?
’Ullo John! Gotta new motor?
’Ullo John! Gotta new motor?
’Ullo John! Gotta new motor?

ALEXEI SAYLE: I do, but then a lot of it is also made up. I don’t like novels that are meticulously researched, particularly; I sometimes find that tedious. A lot of writing, especially books or authors or creators have a narrow remit; before my comedy, the subject matters were incredibly narrow. Why can’t you do a stand-up comedy routine about Bertolt Brecht or architecture or electrical design. All of those things I’ve done routines about.

Soundbite: Alexei Sayle monologue from ‘Boring’, Season 1 Episode 4 of The Young Ones

Alexei Sayle: I’ve not always been mad, you know, but um... I was actually driven mad by the indifference of architects and council planners. You see, I live in a tower block, and um, the thing about those is, there’s terrible noise problems, ’cause there’s no noise insulation at all, you know, and eight floors below you, there's always some bastard who's got a Yamaha home organ, you know. You’re just about to go to sleep and you hear this “DOOT DOOT! TCH-TCH, DOOT DOOT! TCH-TCH, ROLL-OUT-THE-BARRELS! DOOT-DOOT, TCH-TCH, DOOT DOOT, TCH-TCH” And like, the people who live upstairs from me, I can’t understand what they’re doing, you know, I listen. And all I can hear is this weird noise that goes, “VOOM VOOM! BLAM BLAM! VOOM VOOM! BLAM BLAM!” It sounds, right, it sounds like two elephants on a motorbike riding round and round, while a seal bangs a kipper on the table!

ALEXEI SAYLE: Well, obviously, a large part of my childhood I spent – we’d spend – in Eastern Europe and it was kind of like stepping through a curtain into fairy tale. When you’d cross the border in the train between, say, Austria and Czechoslovakia, everything was different. The trucks used to run on this sort of evil-smelling diesel and there was one brand of toothpaste in the shops, ‘toothpok’ or something. There was no advertising, there was only abstract art where the advertising billboards would normally be, and it was just this incredible kind of strange other universe that nobody else went to apart from us, really, me and me mum and dad.

Soundbite: ‘Dedicated’ – from the flipside of the ‘Didn’t You Kill My Brother?’ single.

Alexei Sayle: … and I’d also like to dedicate this song to the people of Czechoslovakia, excluding Mr and Mrs Oleg Potseg, 49 Volaches, Prague 18…

ALEXEI SAYLE: Evelyn Waugh is always someone that I cite as somebody who was kind of a social satirist, but also someone who could be very dark. I think it’s in ‘A Handful Of Dust’, the moment when the woman – she’s got this lover called John – and they tell her that her son John has been killed in a horse riding accident, but the groom says, ‘no, little John’, and she says, ‘Oh, thank God,’ and then realises what she’s said. I think that’s one of the greatest and most chilling moments in literature, that. That somebody like Waugh could write something like that, I think that’s staggering, and that was in the 30s. Amazing.

Demetrius Romeo: Having done your fair share now of comedy festivals and writers’ festivals, which do you prefer?

ALEXEI SAYLE: Oh, writing. I mean, you’re not really treated with as much respect as you should be, really, as a comic. I felt I wasn’t, which is maybe just me being antsy, but you’re always treated a bit as a simpleton when you’re a comic, even though, you know, my references would be Kierkegaard and socialism and so on, whereas, as an author, you’re treated as being much more intelligent. There’s a kind of an implied ‘maestro’ whenever anybody talks to you. And it’s a trade-off: you’re not as central to the culture anymore. You start having to start to wait longer for tables at the best restaurants, but in place of that, there’s enormous satisfaction.

Soundbite: ‘Meanwhile’ – from the single of the same name.

Alexei Sayle: “Ooh la la! Ooh la la!” chanted the traffic warden, but Steve was in no mood for Swedish volleyball that day. He swore to himself that if Erica came home again dressed as a chicken, he would tell the monopolies commission who had really been putting cream cakes in the Lord Mayor of London’s underpants. Then the avocado dip would really hit the fan.

ALEXEI SAYLE: Thank you.

Soundbite: ‘Meanwhile’ – from the single of the same name.

‘Girlie’ Chorus: Meanwhile,
In another part of town,
Just a-a-a-a
Few miles away,
Seventeen years ago,
Later that very same day.

Meanwhile,
In another part of town,
Just a-a-a-a
Few miles away,
Seventeen years ago,
Later that very same day.