Alexei Sayle and Stewart Lee discuss comedy

Here's a treat from four years ago: Stewart Lee appears as the guest on Alexei Sayle's podcast.

They talk about the inevitable apocalypse, Beryl Reid, dinner parties, comedians of the Music Hall era and Lee's film King Rocker.

The Beautiful Game: Hollywood in Holloway

The Beautiful Game are a British rock band from London whose self-declared influences include The Jam, The Clash and Oasis. I came across them via a recent Chelsea Fancast podcast.

OK so we're talking dad rock here, but I like the song and Alexei Sayle once said something wise about not trying to please the imaginary cool people in your head.

The Comic Strip Presents: A 41st anniversary celebration

A 41st anniversary is a milestone for any comedy troupe. Here actors from The Comic Strip Presents - Peter Richardson, Nigel Wallace, Alexei Sayle, Gary Beadle and Julia T. Wallace - remember the good old days.

I don't remember much about Gary Beadle, while Julia T. Wallace was to find fame in 1986 with The Life and Loves of a She Devil.

One question remains: why wasn't Peter Richardson in The Young Ones rather than that other bloke no one can remember?

The Joy of Six 1140

Julian Le Grand makes the case for universal basic capital: a £10k grant for every 18-year-old.

"Seventeen minutes in, after presenting evidence of an 'orchestrated campaign' against Corbyn, the narrator, Alexei Sayle asks: 'But if it was an orchestrated campaign, who was in the orchestra?' There follows a silent montage showing the Jewish Board of Deputies, the Jewish Labour Movement, Labour Friends of Israel, and the Israel Advocacy Movement. As a professional film-maker I recognise this wordless presentation of a controversial idea not as an accident but as a technique: using captions and pictures to state what, if spoken aloud, could be accused of anti-Semitism." Paul Mason reviews The Big Lie, the controversial film that alleges a conspiracy against Jeremy Corbyn.

Lenore Skenazy on an American mother's bafflement at what to do when her young son made a new friend and brought him home: "Parenting has become such a landmine that instead of doing something hands-on and simple - like calling the other parent or walking the boy home - parents feel dicey about any interactions with kids who are not theirs." 

"The Geese and Fountain in Croxton Kerrial, Leicestershire has everything I love about a pub. A wonderful space with a beautiful beer garden. Delicious homecooked food with many ingredients sourced from right there in the village. Dog-friendly, family-friendly – the team is welcoming to all." Laura Hadland says Britain's pubs been help before it is too late.

Jack Hutchcraft visits Rage and Revolution, a Leicester exhibition on the punk movement, and talks to the people behind it.

"In 2021 four young English spinners - Dom Bess, Matt Parkinson, Mason Crane and Amar Virdi - were brought on the tour of India. Two and a half years later, Bess is the only member of the quartet to regularly command a first-team spot for their respective county sides in first-class cricket." The problems with English spin bowling go deeper than the wound in Moeen's finger, argues Yas Rana.

Alexei Sayle on the psychology of managerial incompetence

The UK is suffering because of the "outright incompetence" of government ministers, says the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Alexei Sayle explained the reason for Britain's incompetent leadership almost 40 years ago.

In memory of Stephen Lewis

The actor Stephen Lewis, who died in 2015, was born on 17 December 1926.

ABBA: Ring Ring

I remember when ABBA started to play Waterloo at the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest. My mother and I looked at one another: you didn't get proper pop songs on Eurovision.

Ring Ring was their follow up in the UK, but reached only number 32. (Waterloo had topped the charts.)

When they won Eurovision, ABBA credited Wizzard, and See My Baby Jive in particular, as an influence. I think you can hear a bit of Wizzard in the saxophone here too.

Then came I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, which again failed to trouble the top 30. It wasn't until SOS, which made number 6 in October of 1975, that they had a follow-up hit to Waterloo in the UK.

All of which confirms my memory that ABBA were by no means an overnight sensation. It took them 18 months to have a second big hit in the UK,

For years you had to pretend to hate ABBA to satisfy what Alexei Sayle calls the imaginary cool people in your head. My theory is that everyone always loved them.

Alexei Sayle in conversation with Frank Cottrell Boyce

Recorded at the Liverpool Philharmonic in April 2016 when he had recently published his second volume of autobiography, Thatcher Stole My Trousers. The first was titled Stalin Ate My Homework.

Blair's a Fucking Bastard has yet to appear.

White supremacist sentenced to read Pride and Prejudice and other literary classics

Thanks to a nomination from a reader, the Leicester Mercury wins today's Headline of the Day Award.

And the story beneath it is worth reading too:

A young Nazi sympathizer who downloaded bomb-making instructions has been sentenced to read classic novels including Pride and Prejudice instead.

Judge Timothy Spencer QC told Ben John, 21, he could stay out of prison as long as he steered clear of white-supremacy literature and and read books and plays by Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens.

The former De Montfort University student will have to return to court every four months to be tested on his reading by the judge after avoiding jail "by the skin of his teeth".

You wonder if a young Muslim facing similar charges would have got off with a reading list of postcolonial literature, but I'm all for keeping young people out of prison if at all possible.

The idea that encountering great art makes you a better person is deeply unfashionable, though it lies at the heart of Alexei Sayle's novel Overtaken. But anything is better than reading Nazi literature.

For myself, I have never made it past the first few pages of Pride and Prejudice, but I did enjoy Northanger Abbey.

Alphaville: Forever Young

I don't believe in the concept of "guilty pleasures" anymore as I'm no longer trying to impress the imaginary cool people in my head, as Alexei Sayle once put it..

After last week's Beach Baby, here is another song that I once felt guilty about liking.

I first came across it in the early 1990s via an unlikely source. The great East Midlands broadcaster John Shaw was giving up is Sunday night show Here Be Dragons because it no longer suited the management of the independent station Leicester Sound.

This was the penultimate record he played and, as he said, it sounded good going out into a dark Sunday night.

He finished with The Levellers:

Got to go go, get out of here
Go away, they don't want me here
Got to go go, get out of here, cos
This means nothing to me
The way we were is the way that I wanna be

John Shaw, who died in 2013 aged only 56, later broadcast Here Be Dragons on Saga Radio. I'm sorry I didn;t know this at the time, as he certainly helped widen my musical horizons in his Leicester Sound days.

The fight to save Liverpool's Calderstones Park

Liverpool's Labour council wants to allow developers to build houses in the city's Calderstones Park.

You can read about the campaign to stop it here.

Local campaigners have been granted a judicial review of the council's decision, which will take place in November. They are now raising funds to pay the costs.

When I first heard about these plans I was reminded of a passage from that great Liverpudlian Alexei Sayle's novel The Weeping Woman Hotel:

Harriet recalled when she'd been a child in the early 1970s in Southport that a park had been a very different thing. There were big wrought-iron gates guarding the entrance that were firmly locked at sunset every night, there were substantial black-painted spiked railings all round the perimeter, inside there was a bandstand and a boating lake, clipped grass as neat as a Guardsman's haircut, a crystal palm house, flowers and stout native trees and a head gardener who lived in a little house by the gates and kept an eye out. 

Not in this part of north London where she lived now; those into whose charge fell the open spaces during the 1960s were having none of that old malarky - they couldn't quite explain to you how a bandstand could be oppressive of racial minorities while simultaneously putting down women, they just knew it somehow did.

Calderstones is a wilder park than that, but maybe its no coincidence that the revival of the Labour left has put it under threat.

Alexei Sayle explains why Blair and Brown were like a comedy double act

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Today's Guardian has an article by Simon Parkin about comedy double acts and how they break up.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Lee and Herring. Newman and Baddiel. They are all there.

I was reminded of an old column by Alexei Sayle, where he discussed the same subject.

It dates from 2005, and it contains an observation on the politics of the day so penetrating that I remember it today.

For Sayle wrote:

In trying to fathom the personal dynamic that exists between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, it occurs to me that the closest show business equivalent is that funny business version of the abusive marriage - the comedy double act.

Over the years I have studied double acts. Although I have always been a lone-wolf solo act, the original Comic Strip Club touring line-up was me, and three pairs of comedians. So I have always been well placed to witness the internal affinities and tensions that power these co-dependent comedy relationships. 

In the early days, they start out in hope and a deep and profound friendship. After all, the members of a double act will spend a lot more time with each other than they'll spend with their partners and families. In the early days there is also an equality between the two performers, but then, as they start to become successful, things almost always begin to go wrong. 

From my experience, one member of the double act inevitably begins to get more attention than the other. The neglected one may indeed be less talented, or they may just be less fashionable, or less adept at smooching journalists. 

Whatever the reason, they begin to sink into bitterness and rancour, while the performer who's regarded as the talented one starts to believe that they are truly better than their partner and begins to adopt a "I can't help it if I'm more talented" attitude. They start to waste a great deal of time fighting with each other, to gain tiny crumbs of status over their sidekick. 

But there is also poison contained within the unhappy realisation that maybe the two of them still need each other, they both fear and suspect that there is some gestalt that exists, that what they do together is greater than the sum of its parts. 

The result is that they are locked into working night and day with somebody they now hate.

As his short stories have shown, Sayle is a remarkably good writer.

Alexei Sayle's Imaginary Sandwich Bar and Wilf Mbanga

I have been enjoying Alexei Sayle's Imaginary Sandwich Bar on Radio 4.

One of the best stories he has told this time is about he and his wife's cat Wilf Mbanga.

When it went missing Sayle used his celebrity status to get at article in the local paper.

This led to the revelation that the original Wilf Mbanga, a Zimbabwean opposition politician, was living in exile nearby.

A tweet by Zorro P Freely led me to a Camden New Journal article that proves the story was true.

Written after Wilf Mbanga had been returned to the Sayles, the article says:

The real Wilf Mbanga, a journalist critical of the Mugabe regime who lives in London, told the New Journal three weeks ago he was “tickled pink” after hearing Mr Sayle had named his cat after him. 

But he said he would not join the hunt because he was allergic to cats and suffered from severe hay fever. 

This week, Wilf Mbanga said: “I am delighted Wilf Mbanga has been found. Even in times of distress, we need to laugh at ourselves.”

It gets better:

With world debate focused on the outcome of the Zimbabwean elections and the reinstatement of Robert Mugabe as leader, Mr Mbanga appeared on the BBC World Service on Saturday. But in a surreal few minutes, a newsreader also discussed the missing cat named in his honour.

And, in a final touch which I don't think Alexei Sayle mentioned, they first adopted Wilf Mbanga after he had turned up as a stray in John Humphrys's garden.

That's the cat, not the exiled Zimbabwean politician.

Alexei Sayle's Comic Roots 3

We've had part 1 and part 2. What better way to finish Alexei Sayle's Comic Roots and the pub crawl of which it consists than with part 3?

Alexei Sayle's Comic Roots 2

I am not feeling inspired this evening, so here is part 2 of Alexei Sayle's Comic Roots. (I posted part 1 yesterday.)

It begins with a reminder that in 1982 Fleet Street was still Fleet Street.

Alexei Sayle's Comic Roots 1

Last week I posted a Bobby Chariot video in honour of Alexei Sayle's 65th birthday.

But this is better. It's the first of three parts of a programme on Sayle in the Comic Roots series that was shown in 1982 and has not been seen since.

Happy Birthday Alexei Sayle

The great man is 65 today.

Thatcher Stole my Trousers by Alexei Sayle

If I had to name my favourite comedian it would be Alexei Sayle. Not only - as this, his second volume of memoirs, goes a long way to prove - did he invent politically engaged alternative comedy, he can do whimsy and the absurd too.

Sayle is also a proper writer - not only memoirs but fiction. Every Oxbridge comedian has one novel in him before he gets the call from American television, but Sayle is a master of the unfashionable form of short stories.

Douglas Adams called Sayle's story 'The Last Woman to Die in the War' a masterpiece. He was right.

Thatcher Stole My Trousers is a good-natured romp through Sayle's rise to fame. It also tells us a lot about an important moment in British comedy:

verdict on the other comedians he met at this height of his fame is surely right:

I came to the conclusion that mainstream comedians were nasty men pretending to be nice whereas alternative comedians were nice men pretending to be nasty. (Apart from Keith Allen.)

Allen has a role as antihero of this book, exceeded only by Sayle's mother Molly. The heroine is his wife Linda.

Stewart Lee talks to Alexei Sayle

The new series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle starts at 10 this evening on BBC2.

While we are waiting, here he is interviewing Alexei Sayle about Thatcher Stole My Trousers, the latter's second volume of memoirs .

Something the two have in common is that, rather than flatter it like lesser left-wing comedians, they attack their audience's view of the world.

Listening to Dapper Laughs

I arrived at the Battle of Ideas at lunchtime on Saturday and found there was a debate on comedy and offence starting shortly in one of the Barbican's cinemas.

It sounded my sort of thing, so I went along.

When I got there I found Dapper Laughs was one of the speakers.

If it had been any other event there would have pickets or I would have been called "Tory Scum" or spat on by Guardian columnists. Because it was the Battle of Ideas I just wandered in and found him there.

I got the memo. I have written for the Guardian and the New Statesman. I know I am meant to hate Dapper Laughs.

It's just that I have never heard him perform.

I did not rush back to listen to him either. I have reached an age where I don't like many comedians.

When you are younger, comedy matters immensely. It helps form your own sense of humour and even your view of the world. When I was in the sixth form (that's years 12 and 13 by my calculation) we conversed using lines from Fawlty Towers and Reginald Perrin in the way Victorian schoolboys are supposed to have swapped Latin tags.

Today I will admit to liking Alexei Sayle and Stewart Lee, and that is about it.

So I shall review the Dapper Laughs I saw on Saturday.

The first thing to say is that he was intensely irritating. When you look at local papers from the 1950s, you see that if a well-known comedian was in town he felt compelled to pull a face when he was photographed to prove how funny he was.

That approach has crept back in (think Mel and Sue saying "Bake!" in a range of achingly funny voices) and Dapper Laughs has certainly bought in to it. He spent the whole debate mugging to the audience and punched the air if someone agreed with him.

And for those who worry about manspreading - personally, I grew up in an era when radical politics involved something more than telling people to sit up straight - he contrived to take up three chairs.

But his arguments were better,

Because, he told us, he is not Dapper Laughs, His name is Daniel O'Reilly. Dapper Laughs is a character he plays. He is making fun of men's sexism, not celebrating it.

And before you dismiss that, remember how annoyed you get if some right-wing commentator fails to appreciate all the layers of irony in Stewart Lee's act - Will Self wrote well about him the other day - and assumes that something he says in his act is his real view.

As the other panelist, Tom Slater, pointed out, we middle-class liberals celebrate our ability to navigate Lee's shifting meanings but assume that a working-class man who hears a joke about rape will assume rape is just fine.

Well, maybe. But I find arguments that rely on affecting outrage on behalf of some other group inherently unconvincing. Too much education debate today takes place between people pretending to be outraged on behalf of teachers and people pretending to be outraged on behalf of parents. The real issues never get discussed.

So that was Dapper Laughs. Or "Dapper Laughs".

I did not rush to watch his videos when I got home. I expect I would hate him. But then I hate most comedians these days.