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Enlightening . Funny, smart, original and provocative ... It is hard to imagine the stalwarts of Mock the Week recognising the Druze militia leader Walid Jumblatt in a London cinema' New Statesman What I brought to comedy was an authentic working-class voice plus a threat of genuine violence - nobody in Monty Python looked like a hard case who'd kick your head in In 1971 comedians on the working men's club circuit imagined that they would be free to go on telling their tired, racist, misogynistic gags forever but their nemesis, a 19 year old Marxist art student with a bizarre concern for the health of British manufacturing was slowly coming to meet them. Through the next decade Alexei Sayle would be a student at Chelsea Art School, a clerk in a DHSS office (where nobody did any work), one of London's bottom ten freelance illustrators, a school dinner lady and a college lecturer (who kidnapped his students), before he became the original MC of London's first modern comedy club, the Comedy Store, and the landscape of British comedy was altered forever. Thatcher Stole My Trousers chronicles a time when comedy and politics came together in electrifying ways. Recounting the opening season of the Comedy Store, Alexei's experiences with Alternative Cabaret, the Comic Strip and the Young Ones, and his friendships with the comedians who, like him would soon become household names, this is a unique and beguiling blend of social history and memoir. Fascinating, funny, angry and entertaining, it is a story of class and comedy, politics and love, fast cars and why it's difficult to foul a dwarf in a game of football.… (more)
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Throughout this period Alexei would probably have been very far from what he was about to achieve without his partner Linda helping him at every step along the way. Together, they transition away from their Liverpool brand of anarchist-leftist activism and (via the Civil Service) towards a life in leftist-anarchist 'performancism'. In early Thatcherite Britain, the second seemed the more popular.
One weekend, when she was visiting me in London, Linda and I went to the Odeon in Leicester Square to see the newly released Sylvester Stallone movie Rocky. Before the lights went down I noticed in the audience a few rows behind me a mournful-looking, slightly pop-eyed, balding man with a droopy moustache. I whispered to Linda, 'You see that man in the fifth row, I think it's Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Druze militia from the Chouf Mountains of the Lebanon.'
'You're always saying that,' she replied.
'Yes,' I hissed, 'but this time I'm certain.'
He was right. It was Walid Jumblatt. He thought Rocky was 'all right'.
From his days as a late-70s era impostor Civil Servant, Sayle provides a delightful guided lunch-break tour of London's Piccadilly, his "Boulevard of Broken Dreams". There were the UK head offices of Aeroflot and the tourism boards of war torn Lebanon and Northern Ireland among others.
Next there was my favourite, a shop that formed the sole retail outlet of a government agency named the Egg Information Council, which was tasked with the dissemination of all ovum-related data. In their dusty unwashed window were displayed eggcups and a device popular in the 1960s which consisted of a pin on a spring-loaded plunger rather like the instrument diabetics use to take blood samples. With this contraption you could prick the egg you were boiling so that all its contents leaked out into the pan.
Eventually finding his way to a stage, Alexei stumbles on the medium he's most suited for - stand-up comedy. But wary of "the kind of heavy-handed left-wing 'humour'" he wants to avoid, he strives for something different.
What I wanted was smart relevant popular comedy that paid for itself. I was also certain I didn't want to confirm the opinions of the people in the audience like CAST did, rather I wanted to challenge and mock them. After meeting Roland Muldoon I wrote a bit about agitprop theatre that went, 'People think if you've got baggy trousers and a red nose, you're automatically funny. Didn't work for Mussolini, did it?
Smart and relevant, Sayle has always been. This book is a very enjoyable telling of how he came to be a popular comedian, and how he fitted in at the top of the fast-changing and heady atmosphere of what became known in the UK as 'Alternative Comedy'.