‘I passed out. I couldn’t walk, I went blind.’ The godfather of alternative comedy is describing the disease that almost ended his career. Five years ago Alexei Sayle collapsed and was rushed to a neurological unit in London. Doctors were initially unsure what was happening, then Sayle’s wife Linda recalled he had been diagnosed with sarcoidosis, an auto-immune condition, 30 years previously while on tour in Australia. Linda was right. Within a week Sayle was responding to the steroids that can keep the symptoms in check.
‘Linda remembers everything,’ Sayle says, ‘We’ve been married since 1974. She’s seen every show I’ve ever done and she doesn’t even like me going on tour. Hates it!’
Alexei Sayle’s Imaginary Sandwich Bar on Radio 4, in which he blends comedy, philosophy and politics, proves his powers are undimmed
Sayle, 67, became the compere of the famous Soho club The Comedy Store in 1979, the year that Margaret Thatcher came to power. Fame followed with anarchic sitcom The Young Ones, in 1982, the same year’s single, Ullo John! Gotta New Motor?, and the Emmy-winning Alexei Sayle’s Stuff in 1988. His left-leaning comedy did well under Tory governments.
‘If you wanted to see intelligent comedy you had to go and see me,’ Sayle says of his high-velocity act, peppered with references to Trotsky and Lenin. Yet with the arrival of Tony Blair in 1997, Sayle found himself out of fashion. ‘Suddenly, there were people offering a lighter experience,’ he says. ‘Skinner and Baddiel, all that laddy s***. I was resentful and p***** off, but it’s how you react that matters.’
Sayle stopped performing and took to writing acclaimed novels and autobiographies instead and, for a time, was a newspaper motoring correspondent. But his recent series on Radio 4, Alexei Sayle’s Imaginary Sandwich Bar, in which he blends comedy, philosophy and politics, proved his powers are undimmed.
‘At one point it was trending at No 1 on Twitter,’ he says of Sandwich Bar. ‘That’s phenomenal for a show on Radio 4.’
Sipping sweetened black tea in a Bloomsbury cafe, Sayle looks well, if – with a pointed silver beard and dark clothes – slightly Mephistophelean. Sarcoidosis left him with a swollen trachea and lymph glands and affected his balance.
‘I’d done martial arts with a trainer over the years but since the sarcoidosis, I started going to a class,’ he says. ‘It’s White Crane style Kung Fu to help with my balance. I do three hour-long classes a week when I’m in London and then try to practise every day. It’s been transformative, partly just being in a group of people and being the worst and the oldest by a long way, that has been marvellous. I do a lot of standing on one leg. I love it.’
In 2018 there was another health scare. Doctors told Sayle he had cancer of the bladder and a camera was pushed up his urethra. ‘There’s only one way it can go,’ he says. ‘And it involved a rubber sheet and lots of water.’
Happily, further investigations showed he was cancer-free, and Sayle was left with material for his new show rather than a shortened lifespan. ‘At my age stuff happens,’ he laughs. ‘Life is difficult!’
Sayle was born in 1952 in Anfield, Liverpool, near the famous football ground, to working-class parents: his father Joe was a guard on the railways, his mother Molly descended from Lithuanian Jews. ‘My mother was brought up very Orthodox,’ he says. ‘She’d rebelled against it and that brought great tension to the family. She was the major influence on my life.’
Sayle regards himself as part of a tradition of Jewish stand-up comics with broad popular appeal. ‘I never saw myself as a performance artist,’ he says. ‘I was a mass-market entertainer in as much as I could be. I felt very Jewish.’
In the recent furore about antisemitism in the Labour Party, Sayle, a Labour supporter, was among those refuting attacks from other prominent Jewish stars who claimed the party was being destroyed by institutional racism. What does he say when a Jewish comedian like David Baddiel claims there is a problem?
‘I’m right and he is wrong,’ is all he will say on the issue.
Whether you agree or disagree with Sayle’s politics, he does stick to what he believes, often to his own disadvantage.
‘I wouldn’t go on Comic Relief, which I profoundly disagree with,’ he says. In his stand-up routine he used to say that it had been ‘invented by the poor of the Third World to help struggling comedians’.
Today he stands by the decision, perhaps a little ruefully. ‘I wouldn’t do absolutely anything to make me stay famous, but on the other hand, I was annoyed I wasn’t famous. Worst of both worlds, really!’
Others of his generation settled into conventional careers. His Young Ones co-star Ade Edmondson has now appeared in Star Wars and Young Ones writer Ben Elton, once professionally angry, created a musical with Queen. ‘They were young performers looking to make their way in the world and they would do anything to get on,’ Sayle says of his former colleagues. ‘None of them shared my background, so why would they follow my particular path?’
Sayle performing at London’s Palladium in 1982. ‘If you wanted to see intelligent comedy you had to go and see me,’ Sayle says of his high-velocity act
Ask Sayle which comedians he likes today and he names Kevin Bridges and Micky Flanagan, and expresses sympathy for fellow Liverpudlian stand-up John Bishop.
‘The first shows he did were about his life as a travelling salesman, then the next one’s about Sport Relief. It’s problematic. Your early material is obviously based on your life before you’re a performer, but then what do you talk about?’
He can boil down the appeal of his own act to one sentence. ‘If you want to see a 67-year-old man going bonkers, then come.’
Alexei Sayle tours the UK from January 31 to April 7, ticketmaster.co.uk