Stewart Lee interviews Alexei Sayle pt 2

your first book brilliantly describes being raised by a communist family, which again they would find incredible. There could have been communists in Britain and it was okay to be a communist. You know it was good. It was a union point of view. leaders are allowed to be communists, you know you were good, he could be a Marxist historian and he wouldn't like to be lynched, he's happy, but so that you came to learn at art school and were the first. What you really thought about when you thought you could do comedy was being in a Brecht play, right?

Yes, and I mean, I had the opportunity to understand that none of this existed, it didn't exist, there was no comedy in a workers' club. city ​​of the same hundred guys doing the same 500 old jokes, but what we understand by stand-up there was nothing really like that, yeah, do you focus on the guys doing a small producer who are nothing more than characters that sometimes do the middle parts, but then you had a You had the feeling that you wanted to be funny and you weren't in a student review, what exactly were you going to do?

Yeah, no, I mean, at first, I didn't mean, yeah, I mean, I kind of got into acting acting pretty slowly, burning through it. This Mesa, my uncle Cliff, who was they, he was at school with me for a year, his parents were also in the Communist Party, he came back, he'd been in Paris, he came back to Britain and started this Brechtian group about cannabis making songs . and poems by Berthold Brecht, you know what a woman thinks, what the stripper thinks, well, she's having an abortion or whatever, you know for sure about her, Johnny, why am I feeding you?

Do that, but I can see all that in your first steps, yeah, exactly, it's exactly. like it felt like maybe you've seen it in skinny Phil what's the Keynesian interpretation that says he was very informed by that Sensitivity, isn't it again? That's what I always think, why not use everything? Yes, I used. Absolutely in everything I used aspects of acting that I've seen in art school, you know, I used my own experience living in it, you know, working and living in the tower and all that, but why not do that? Write about how you figured out how to make the same parts funny every night and felt like some of the actors weren't doing it.

That was the difference between our actors who thought far away, yes, and the comics, although when I was at Brett's, I laughed. one night hmm and then they try to do it differently, well why do you have to understand? He did it well, why with that you know, yeah, and I think that's enough. I think I felt very strongly that it was very disrespectful to do comedy to you. I know you wouldn't, yeah, we got you writing that after that, wanting to put this kind of well, it's like some kind of reviews, I'm serious, you two, maybe, oh, yeah, but a bill, yeah , a bill, months, yes, and pain, but and so on.

It's called I never asked, well, I know, yes, they called us Trippin II theater, yes, yes, the bread cabaret, no, I think the name of the show doesn't matter the light bulb, yes, and so on, but, again, where did you place it? I mean. That's another thing about more or less contemporary people, like John Dowie. I know right, there were no comedy clubs that he had to do, you had to find places, art centers, art labs, yeah, it's all benefits or exchanges. I always think about everything John. Doughty because he came too soon, yes I mean the cliff, and Bill, I mean he would jump anyway, yes I went to see him on the bush in '76 I thought this is brilliant, yes no I mean He, what I mean, was young. but, in fact, when I arrived, he was very angry, well, yes, dad, but he also had an hour, we had like five minutes, yes, he couldn't come and he couldn't either, it was bad, I mean, yes, he is where there's one of them, he's one of the greats in those comics, yeah, I mean, they're from a time where it's barely documented, I mean, if you know, because now everyone does it in their first five minutes someone's camera phone, it's on YouTube, yes there are about John Derry's Four Minute Footage in existence and he was one of the first, yes, a fallen master of comedy before, but how terrible we might as well be , is not famous, he never had his own television series.

They'll be dead, but yeah, I just had breakfast, the Brechtian cabaret troupe broke up and then, just one Christmas, I had this idea. I certainly thought there's no comedy for people like me, yeah, politically savvy about the drug lifestyle, so we just set about writing it and then me, and I was barely the only other guy left from the comedy group and Cliff , then we started to act, and as you say about John Dau, we did not do it again, there was nowhere to act, we, the student unions. Yes, a small Art Center was people's houses, yes, you know, it was difficult and some and he, sometimes, she would go to a place like us, we would go to the tram shed, which was the home of what he I would call this Halen beat, yeah, and them.

We had a big following, we'd never used Mike's before and they, it's just the guy who ran it, had to come and say, hey, now give these guys a chance, yeah, and give the audience a talk because we were going down. so bad, yeah, and what they had a concert there, so they say they had a concert there, an angel, they have a previous alternative, yeah, just pre, yeah, you know, no, it's not an imagination, it's like every invention was an agglomeration of what came before when. In a way you know, I did the whole thing was me, I invented everything just before me, but that's selfish, well, actually, the book, the books are interesting mixtures, not 99% modest, yes, with sudden flashes of incredible arrogance, yes, I mean.

I love the one chapter where it ends quite rightly by saying that you say you talked very honestly about your fears when you're doing it, put up with your anxieties, your nervousness about it, what you weren't good enough at or whatever you do, finish one from the first chapters by saying that I'm not saying that the massive business that is stand-up today is with stadiums and tours and all of this wouldn't have happened without me, but it wouldn't have happened in the same way at the same point and and actually, for me, the key to the key seems to be that reading this book because I just wrote it yourself without this selection selling thing, I know what it seems to be is that it's for better or for worse, like all these different ones.

People who wanted to do a different kind of thing in about 78,780 were coming together. They were one of the people who gave him an ideology, yes, and their ideology was: let's not do racism, let's not do sex and let's not do it. all those tropes and whether that was politically a right, the right thing to do or not, which is something that other people can argue about, certainly meant that it had ground rules and it had a dogma as in and it had a manifesto. and all the big artistic movements that you know need some kind of manifesto and the manifesto that you know you have you wouldn't have this now if you hadn't had something like that back then and then, you know, people, yeah, betray the revolution, yeah.