Alexei Sayle dot ME

When I was a comedian I would never do stuff about adverts.  To perform a routine getting angry about the vapidity and stupidity of some TV commercial seemed lazy and a cheap laugh.  Of course TV commercials are stupid and vapid, they’re either trying to sell you something that is exactly the same as a hundred other products or something you don’t need in the first place!  So why point it out?

Having stated that I would like to say I am extremely disturbed over what has happened to Mr Muscle.  I am a fan of cleaning products and possess an incomparable range of creme cleaners, Cillit Bang, brass polishes and e-cloths. I think it was a year or so ago now when I noticed the change that had come over Mr Muscle.  You will recall that the eponymous character featured on the range of cleaning products,  Window & Glass Cleaner with Lemon Fresh Anti-Bacterial Action, Multi-Task Kitchen Oven Cleaner etc, that bore his name used to be a weedy fellow, with a thin arms and glasses in some sort of green suit. Now though he is muscled!   Recently he has become a kind of muscle bound superhero with dark glasses, chiselled features and glossy hair.  In his previous incarnation there was a large degree of irony in Mr Muscle’s appearance since the last thing he was was muscular, now that irony has vanished.   There was a quote Russell Brand used twice on some TV doco he did last year  "Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance". ( I tried to find who said it originally so I wouldn’t have to admit I’d got it off Russell Brand but couldn’t after spending at least two minutes on Google) and maybe he is right.   Were people emailing the makers of Mr Muscle, SC Johnson claiming they were confused by the weedy man on their Lavender scented furniture polish or have SC Johnson decided not to offer such a level of semantic complexity from the fictional characters on the labels of their cleaning products in order to further the right wing removal of nuance from the public discourse?  I think this is more likely.

Also is Toilet Duck going to be next? 

In September I’m teaching an Arvon course in short story writing and as a preview at Free Word Farringdon Road on Thursday 18 March I’ll be doing a short reading at a special Arvon Open Evening. http://arvonfoundation.org/p75s350.html

I’m glad you liked my shirt/jacket, I bought it down Leather Lane Market which is where I go to buy my oddly shaped fruit and past-its-sell-by-date cheese slices, I recently got five Polish-made Lion bars for £1!  The jacket was £7.95 I think and is from a stall that does end of lines and fashion overrruns, one of two in the market, when I searched on the internet it appears to be a US Wal-Mart product,  I don’t know how it got over here.  The only other one I’ve seen was being worn by a homeless guy in the Elephant and Castle but I think I carried it off better.  

My shirt/jacket was probably my most successful contribution to that Gaza meeting, my wife LInda says I try too hard to be original at those things when people only want simple stuff but I’ve never been able to do that.  Still,  going on about windmills at a Gaza meeting just confused everybody.

Last weekend I was one of a small group who met Dr Mustafa Barghouti, Palestinian democracy activist and  2010 Nobel peace prize nominee and I think I got on his nerves too.   It did make me feel proud though, people complain about the lack of political engament in Britain but Dr Barghouti said that the UK is by far and away the most active country for protest against brutal Israeli actions against Palestinians and a world leader in the Boycott Israel campaign.

I am bad about keeping you informed of my appearances so here’s a list: Cultural eXchanges Festival at Leicester De Montfort University.  5.30 March 1st.  Book reading. Southend Library March 3rd.  Hudersfield on the 11th and I’m doing a reading at the Oxford Literary Festival on the 23rd though not of my own work but one of the winners in the Sunday Times Short Story Competition.  Also the Sunday Times Magazine is running a new short story of mine “The Store Detective” on March 14th.  I also notice BBC 2 and 4 have been showing my old Great Railway Journey.  September, October, November we’re planning a big live tour of my memoir which I think I finally finished writing yeseterday and I’ll keep you up to date on that, I think I’m doing a preview  at Udderbelly on the South Bank July 14th.

That flim “Curacao” is also known as “Deadly Currents” and in fact when I made it, it was titled “A Circling of Sharks”. It was “Deadly Currents” when I saw it was on the TV a year or two ago and yes I was pleasantly pleased with my accent and the way I handle that Ingram Mac 10 .45 cal machine pistol.  I remember the film had no proper armourer and the guns were being handled by a producer, which is really dangerous and he didn’t know how to cock the Mac 10 so I had to show him.  It was the proudest day of my life!  It also starred Bill Peterson the original star of CSI who seemed like a nice man.

Yes, yes vote for me, vote for me! How am I doing?  I was thrilled with my 18th place in that Channel 4 poll a few years ago even though I haven’t done standup for 14 years now. In the time when I used to win lots of awards I was terribly dismissive and didn’t even turn up to get my Broadcast Press Award or RTS Best Comedy now I long for the validation of strangers.  I’m not being sarcastic I really do, preferably I’d take one of those literary awards but anything will do, I'd take up smoking a pipe if they'd make me Pipe Smoker of the Year.

That’s an interesting question who Alexei rates as a grade A stand up comic.  Well of course on one level Alexei never rated anybody as a grade A stand up comic except himself but if I’m honest I have to say that seeing the young Keth Allen was an extraordinary experience, this was the first time I saw a comic that you were genuinely frightened of.  One early gig we did at Goldsmiths College he threw darts at the audience and then attacked them with a fire extinguisher, another night at the Albany Empire he upset a table full of Poles on the night that martial law was declared in their country.  I think he influenced me more than I admitted either to myself or him at the time, his problem was that he either couldn’t or didn’t want to reproduce the same performance night after night so that sometimes he would just be bad.  Jerry Sadowitz was the same, the first time I saw him, the self-lacerating rage of his performance was inspiring and he really was in many ways the best thing I’ve ever seen but then the next time I took a quite conservative French woman friend to see him at some small theatre in the West End and he was naked the whole show which was pretty horrific but worse than that he wasn’t funny at all.  

Just to prove its not just aggression I like, there was one particular tour Victoria Wood did, maybe early 90s, when she was really on it, I saw her at the Albert Hall I think and she’d done hundreds of gigs in the previous couple of years which had made her incredibly sharp.  Robin Williams used to turn up at the Comedy Store and the Comic Strip and was also hugely influential on me  though after a while you could see how he was doing it.  Chris Rock?   Yes, I’ve only seen that Comedy Central show but it was terrific.  Though further than that I think he’s hampered by wanting to be a comic who criticises life in the US from an outsider perspective and at the same time wishing to be a Hollywood insider.   It’s not possible, you can be one or the other.

More modern British comics?  I dunno, I’m still interested and they’re all very slick and so on but you do feel for all of them its more of a career rather than an artistic endeavour.  That’s not their fault, purely by an accident of timing I was central to a whole new way of doing comedy, but you can only invent rock and roll once.  Now there is so much press attention, internet chatter, so much money to be made, so many acts that are similar to what you do, it must be hard to think of a way to be original. If I was young now I think I’d be trying to find a whole new way of being an airline pilot or a punk heart surgeon.

I’m glad you enjoyed my reminiscing about writing those old shows. Yesterday I was in a place called the Dean Street Townhouse, a trendy club and restaurant with two of my restaurant reviewer friends and I pointed out that the building we were in was the site of the original Comedy Store back in 1979.  You took a lift which could only accomodate four people to the third floor I think, you were then in a topless bar called the Nell Gwynn, customers seeking new wave comedy then had to walk through the bar and go down a flight of metal stairs designed by Mondrian or possible Matisse to the Gargoyle Club which was the site of the Comedy Store.  I told the maitre d’ all this and he was tremendously uninterested.

Funnily enough, though the maitre d’ was a very thin man he was dressed in a suit that was too small for him, which is apparently the new look but it made him look a bit like he was wearing one of my old stage suits.  Truly there is nothing new in the world.