Also I guess I've been quite busy working.  I'm really enjoying being back on a paper writing for The Saturday Telegraph and they seem like a really nice bunch.  I was also up in Manchester working on an interesting film for a charity called Dying Matters all about how terminally ill people can use humour and laughter as a way of coping with their conditions.   I think it will be on their website from the 14th of May.

This Tuesday at 4.30 on Radio 4 they are broadcasting an Edition of Great Lives that I recorded recently, my choice was the Palestinian Intellectual Edward Said, it will be fascinating to find out how that is received.

Now Jay about a Young Ones re-union, I don't think there's any plans at the moment as far as I can remember.  Actually now I think about it there may be somebody who's trying to put together an edition of the Radio 4 programme "The Re-union" which would be about the Young Ones.   Though sometimes because I was sort of on the edge of the group I don't always get included. However because having been the biggest pain in the arse at the time I am now very sentimental about the early days I'd definitely be happy to do it.

The wedding of the first of the children of our gang to get married is happening in June so I imagine everybody will be there and I'll ask around then and if I've been left out I'll sulk and ruin the bride and groom's special day.

Blog 64a.

Well the response to the couple of things I've done over the last few weeks was interesting.  The R4 Edward Said piece got some nice previews though I didn't see any reviews.  I realise afterwards that I was half hoping to have the website bombarded with Zionist nutters, that's how hungry for attention you get when you start this blogging lark.

The Dying Matters film illustrated another point, there was a piece on Monday BBC Breakfast which I didn't see and I did an interview down the line with R5 but there was a lot less interest than I expected.  In fact there were a couple of other press and TV things that were pulled and I think given that the film was about how uncomfortable people in the modern world are with the whole idea of death this relative lack of interest sort of illustrated that.

Also on another topic does anybody know what your chart position on Amazonactually means?  Like if your book goes from number 65,397 to number 11,642 does that mean you've sold one book or what?  The only two sites I check regularly are this one and Amazon to see how "Stalin..." is doing so I'd like to know.

Blog 63a

I'm glad everybody liked Question Time.  As late as Monday I wasn't going to do it but then I thought I might as well give it a try.  It's actually quite a challenge because you want to be funny but you don't want to be flippant about what are sometimes serious issues.  I think in terms of panel members it was an easy ride, I wonder what it would be like if the other non politician was one of those right wing nutcases like Melanie Philips or David Starkey.  If I do it again maybe we'll find out.

On the first night on Tuesday I had also expected the audience to be hysterical and for me be be able to surf on their energy but in fact when I went out they were quite quiet and my first bit really didn't do that well.  Luckily Josh Howie did a great job of loosening them up and when I went back on I think I'd got a better idea of what was needed, the second section went very well indeed and interestingly a lot of it, given what we were talking about on the last blog, is about my complicated relationship with Ben.  After that Pippa Evans as Loretta Main and Tony Law were marvellous and the evening was a huge sucess but now I feel like I've got a huge amount of work to do before I'll be certain this all works and indeed whether I want to carry on with it afterwards.

BLOG 62a

Alice. Thank you for that.  As a performer you often have less idea of what's going on than other people in the audience and as a comic you do tend to fixate on laughs without realising that people can be enjoying the show without necessarily being very voluble about it.  As I said since I haven' done it since 1996 I'm also a bit out of practice, really I should be doing little try-outs at comedy clubs but I can't face that so it puts a lot of pressure on these Soho shows.

Blog 61a.

Hi Dredgi.

Yes Ben did pretty much write me out of 80s comedy history there, apart from a couple of brief clips at the start.  This morning I was railing against this when Linda pointed out that I had made him cry on several occasions so it was unlikely that he'd invite me onto his show.

Blog 61b.

This morning I got an email entitled: Stephen Fry sent you a friend request on Flip :)

And the email itself said: Stephen Fry has added you as a friend. Is Stephen Fry your friend? 

Yes  No

Then three hours later I got another email entitled: Please ignore the friend request on Flip sent earlier.

This email said: An erronerous Flip Friend request was sent earlier on behalf of Stephen Fry. Please ignore the earlier email with the friend request. Apologies for the inconvenience.

So for three hours I was Stephen's friend.  It was lovely while it lasted.

So I’ve still been going round the comedy circuit and Anthony I’m sorry I missed you on Wednesday I’ll call in again when I’m passing, its been a fascinating experience, I was actually at the Comedy Store when Michael Macintyre came and did 15mins .  Also at some point I’m going to put my live album Cak here on MP3 as somebody was asking, also I did a radio show with Richard Herring on Sunday and he said him and Stewart Lee had bought the rights of their TV show off the BBC and were going to put it out themselves, I wonder if I could do the same with “Merrygoround” and “The All New Alexei Sayle Show” I might look into that. 

And twitter I should look into that, and getting a new jacket, I should look into that too.

Blog 60a.

Hi Mark.  No there doesn't seem to be a way apart from taking them down as soon as we notice.  She was coming from internet cafes in Tokyo and now a T-Mobile site in Liverpool so she gets around.

Michael Macintyre.  Hmmm, well the audience were very excited that he was there but after that he didn't go down any better than any other act on the bill which is sort of strange considering how popular he is.  I remember when Robin Williams used to come down to the Comic Strip club there was this sense of a huge talent standing in front of you and he would do these performances that would blow the whole room away and there certainly was no feeling like that, still he was friendly enough in the dressing room.

Blog 60b

I should point out this isn't a full return to standup, I'm just mc'ing the shows at the Soho theatre and the show at the Bloomsbury on the 19th of December to try out new material and a different style of delivery and see how it goes.

If you want to hear me back in the old days the Cak album is now available on the Links page along with the Fish People.

In the meantime I have been going round a few comedy clubs to get a feel of what the scene is like these days, if anybody’s got any recommendations for acts they think are good I’d be keen to know.  The one thing I don’t find very interesting is all the bland observational stuff that’s out there, “young men in T shirts noticing things” as Tony Laws one of the acts I saw and liked in Edinburgh put it.

Blog 59a

Since you ask Mr Semple, there is a sequel to "Stalin..."  planned all being well it should be published in Spring 2013.  The title I have at the moment though I may change it is "The Way We Was"  It starts round about the time when the film "The Way We Were" came out.  For those of you that don't remember this was a movie that starred the two biggest stars of the era Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford and it was all about how great Communists were. 

Blog 59b

Hi Mike, if you want a copy of "Didn't you Kill My Brother..." going by Rachel's post there's a copy of the picture 12inch nailed to the wall of a bar in Montmartre.  Otherwise its on the Panic album I think.

In comedy news, after doing that Stewart Lee curated thing at the Royal festival Hall in the summer it started me thinking about doing some standup again. However I don’t fancy performing a whole set so I thought I might MC some nights and see how that goes.  At the moment I’m in talks with the Soho Theatre about me putting together some comedy nights in the autumn and I’m going to MC a part of one of Robin Ince’s Christmas events at the Bloomsbury Theatre, so that should be interesting.  I went up tp Edinburgh to look at new comedians but I only saw three and one of those was Stewart Lee.

Dan, I felt shame when you described the behaviour of people at the supermarket salad bar because that is me, I am a crammer.  However I do think taking a rubber band is cheating, you have to be able to get the lid on, that’s the game yo. Its like there used to be one of those weird Chinese Veg buffet places just over the road from the pub in Clerkenwell where all the bike messengers used to meet on a Friday.  Some of them would come in, pay the takeaway price of £3.50 rather than the sit down price of £6.00 but then they would cram their takeaway container way beyond  the level where they could ever possibly get the lid on.  The messengers would then sit outside the restaurant and eat their food.   To me that was an absolute outrage completely betraying the whole morality system of the all you can eat buffet but I never said anything because I didn’t want my parcels to go astray. 

Since you ask, here’s my article from The Times yesterday but sadly not the photos.

ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT-BUFFETS

You don’t always know exactly when you fall in love - once it has happened it is very hard to remember that you were not always in thrall to the beloved one - but I can date my lasting passion for all-you-can-eat-buffets to a specific moment which  involved some art students, gravity and a hat-stand.  When I was a child in Liverpool working-class families such as ours did not eat out frequently but when we did, at the Bon Marche department store or a Kardomah Cafe, there always seemed to be a tremendous lack of generosity in both the service and the cuisine.  The staff would grudgingly dole out tiny portions of food as if us diners were survivors of a shipwreck who were now crammed into a lifeboat under the baking sun with rescue not expected to arrive for weeks.  You always had the feeling while dining in a British restaurant in the 1950s or 1960s that if you tried to get more than your meagre rations the head waiter was going to shoot you with a revolver.

I might have accepted this if I hadn’t had something to compare it with.  My father was a railway guard and the most important thing that came with my his job was free rail travel.  Every railway worker and their family could go absolutely anywhere in Europe for twenty-five percent of the normal fare and we were in addition entitled to six free passes a year which meant we could travel right up to the borders of the Soviet Union for nothing.  All ferries - to Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Scottish Isles, across the Baltic and over the English Channel - were also included in the deal.   So from the age of six I travelled with him and my mother all over Europe and, as he was also a communist, our journeys tended to end in one of the countries of the old Soviet bloc. In a workers’ cafe in Paris I had dined on simple cuisine de terroir: fresh bread, coq au vin, fragrant salad of a quality you couldn’t approach even in a top hotel in Liverpool. On the tables were Duralex glasses, sturdy and elegant, carafes of water and a rough but drinkable vin de table. I’d eaten a Wiener Schnitzel with a fried egg on top in a traditional restaurant in Vienna, a huge old place with warped ancient wooden floorboards and a gigantic, ornate, black iron stove in the centre of the room with a fat pipe reaching up to the ceiling and among the tables waiters in long aprons pirouetted with massive trays of food held high above their shoulders. In Hungary in a cafe beside Lake Balaton I saw what a salad really could be like :there were red, green and yellow peppers, corn on the cob, huge tomatoes stuffed with Russian salad, artichokes, celery, lentils, okra and fresh herbs all of them covered in rich oils or smooth mayonnaise.  In none of these places did I feel like I was appearing in an amateur production of In “Which We Serve.”

I longed to discover the same munificence in Britain but it wasn’t until I was studying at art school in Chelsea that one of my fellow students told me about a place in Kensington that for a single price let you eat as much as you wanted from what they described as a groaning buffet table. Almost in a trance I said “I want to go to there.”  Urged on by me an enthusiastic group of us arranged to visit this Promised Land the very next night.

Entering the place in Kensington I was overexcited and nervous. I did not notice the hat stand by the door was already vastly over-loaded and without thinking I took my coat off and flung it on top of the heap of clothing already hanging there.  The weight of my coat proved to be the final straw and caused the hat stand with a creaking groan to topple like a giant redwood tree:  it seemed to tumble in slow motion until finally it came crashing down onto a table around which six or seven diners were seated. This table proved to be only an unsecured circle of chipboard resting on a trestle so the whole thing, with all the group’s food on it, tipped up and flew through the air, fortunately without hitting anyone.  For a second I was paralysed with fear: in any eating place, especially back in my native Liverpool, at the very least I would have had to pay for seven people’s dinners and would still in all likelihood also have got beaten up, but with a rush of gratitude I suddenly realised that in this place and this place alone I only needed to say to the people at the table, “Look I’m very sorry about that but you can see that the hat stand was overloaded and anyway you can just go and help yourselves to more food.” Which is what they all did. And from that moment I was in love with all-you-can-eat-buffets.

Since that day I have watched as the concept has slowly spread across the country and I feel by and large that it has been a good thing.  Admittedly not everyone agrees, I was reading an article a while ago lamenting the fact that Manchester’s Chinatown now has many all-you-can-eats where before there were conventional restaurants and describing this process as a race to the bottom. There is an element of truth in this. Certainly you are not going to get absolutely the finest cooking at a serve-yourself joint: it’s highly unlikely that Heston Blumenthal is ever going to open an all-you-can-eat snail porridge and black pudding ice cream restaurant (though how much of that you could manage to cram down yourself is open to question) but at the top end of the buffet market there are plenty of Chinese and Indian places that have their own sushi chefs, naan makers and wok fryers while at the bottom of the scale they are just incredible value. A friend, knowing my interest, told me about a number of pubs in the Hull area that do a carvery for a mere £3.50! Admittedly you only get one go at the huge joints of lamb, beef and pork but you are allowed to make as many trips to the vegetable selection as you like.  She said that this formula had saved many of these large pubs from closing and each day coachloads of residents are brought from care homes, hospitals and prisons to eat a much nicer lunch than they would get if their establishments were doing the catering and at a price the institutions can’t match.

But I think the most persuasive argument for them is that, in my experience at least, all-you-can-eat-buffet restaurants always seem to be full of really happy people. Maybe this is because the diners are freed from many of the anxieties that still trouble them when they visit other  establishments.  None of the customers are going to act superior, there is no daunting menu and you serve yourself so there are no snooty staff unless you fancy being snooty to yourself.

Of course on the downside it can be hard to have a conversation because you’re always thinking about what you are going to eat next and a certain compulsion can settle in. Once when we were visiting Zen CX at the now sadly vanished Oriental City Complex in Colindale North London my friend Harry found himself pouring with sweat and certain that he was having a heart attack but he still couldn’t stop himself eating.  It was only when he stopped trying to force more shrimp down his gullet that the sweat and the palpitations went away and he realised his number wasn’t up just yet.

Since the incident with the hat-stand I have dined at some of the finest buffet places in the world, such as those at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok  and the Oberoi Hotel in Adelaide, but It has also become a hobby of mine to try and find the cheapest all-you-can-eat place in Britain.  So far it is still Indian Veg in Chapel Market Islington. When I started going there the price was £2.50 though it has now crept up to £3.95. There always seem to be an extraordinary mix of people in there, including a large number of academics discussing string theory with pappadum crumbs in their beards, off-duty Buddhists and a smattering of people in those paper jump suits the police give you when you’ve been sick on yourself in the cells. 

I have mentioned this place in a newspaper once before and when I next visited I discovered they had constructed a little Hindu shrine to me consisting of an old photo garlanded with paper flowers.

The manager also said, “ Of course Mr Sayle your meal is on the house.” “ Great... “ I thought, “everybody has their price and mine turns out to be £3.95.”

Then on Tuesday we caught the train to Liverpool for the opening party of the Musuem Of Liverpool  which made me resolve from now on to only visit museums I’m an exhibit in.  Then on Thursday we had a signing for the paperback of Stalin Ate My Homework at News From Nowhere, Liverpool’s radical bookshop.  

I also took my mother to the Tatton Park Flower Show which was nice but a bit disappointing, I thought there’d be more flowers and less stalls selling wierd carved wooden owls but perhaps I missed some bits.

Also I’m doing an article for a newspaper on my hobby of going to all you can eat buffets and I wondered if any of you had any stories about them, I think I said I’d file copy by the 29th of July so before then would be handy if you do.

Without retracting any of it I do sometimes feel a little guilty about Nic and Tob, (Vic’s still funny with me if we meet but Bob’s fine) and its true they had done very little to deserve it at the time but then that was sort of the point.  After all its easy to attack those that deserve attacking but to pick on somebody who’s blameless, popular and talented takes things to a whole different level.

At Last the 1981 Show Report.  Well it was a very odd night, I felt very relaxed and I thought all the new material I did went really well and I definitely got the biggest cheer of the night so all that was good, it was gratifying to find out how much love there is for me out there as a comedian (though quite what I do with it is another matter).  However for reasons unrelated to the show it was also a very sad night because after I’d been on I got a phone call from Peter Rchardson to tell me that the lovely Simon Brint (one half of Raw Sex and the original keyboard player in the Comic Strip house band who also did the music for all my TV shows ) had died.   So it was really wierd to be with some of the people from that time, Nigel, Arnold and Pauline and to find out that the first of our gang had gone.