Alexei Sayle

The rise of the comedian-turned-compere

Stand-up legends Frank Skinner and Alexei Sayle are returning to their compering roots. But how do famously funny MCs avoid upstaging the acts they are introducing?

Alexei Sayle: my wife thinks I'm making a big mistake

Alexei Sayle tells Dominic Cavendish why, at nearly 60, he's returning to live performance.

Michael Grade, an engaging guide to the world of variety six months ago, now delves further back to unearth its rougher, cruder parent in the halls. Grade has no illusions about showbusiness and tells us how his uncle Lew danced the Charleston on a table top. Now he explains how music hall grew out of the back rooms of pubs and comic songs were fleshed out with patter.

The story is interspersed with enjoyably vulgar songs and chats with Jo Brand and Alexei Sayle, plus a fine turn from Peter Sellers in 1970. There's some fun stuff, but the story of how music hall was tamed sags a little at 90 minutes.

Purveyors of elegant pastiche for almost 30 years, The Comic Strip - aka writer/director Peter Richardson - mixed recent political history with British post-war thriller to produce The Hunt For Tony Blair.

Loosely based upon The Thirty Nine Steps, with a multitude of other film references thrown in for good measure, it told of how the former Labour prime minister became a fugitive from the law following the invasion of Iraq, WMD fiasco and attempted assassination of a stage memory man.
Atmospherically enhanced by the stark black and white photography, The Hunt For Tony Blair was characteristically well crafted, continually clever, crammed with comic details and energetically paced. Over an hour's duration the conceit was stretched pretty thin, subtlety frequently went as AWOL as Blair, and there was a noticeable absence of belly laughs, but The Comic Strip once again proved its pedigree as one of British TV comedy's truly class acts.

Stephen Mangan, managing a very creditable vocal impersonation, starred as a bright eyed, bushy tailed and cheerfully amoral Blair, who also provided a suitably disingenuous narration. No Alexei Sayle, alas, but the rest of The Comic Strip repertory company were present and correct in a variety of supporting roles. Even swathed beneath layers of costume and make up, Rik Mayall was instantly recognizable by his shameless overacting, but it was Nigel Planer who stole the show as an oleaginous Peter Mandelson or, as investigating officer DI Hutton (Robbie Coltrane) preferred to call him, "Squealer".

The only false note was when the story quite literally went off the beaten track to visit Margaret Thatcher's country retreat, shared with obsequious butler Tebbitt and a skeleton in the closet that turned out to be Denis. Jennifer Saunders played Thatcher, having already played Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher in The Comic Strip's Strike. In a perverse and curious case of life imitating art, the real Meryl Streep is soon to be seen as Thatcher in a feature film called The Iron Lady.

Alexei Sayle: How Stalin stole my childhood

Comedian Alexei Sayle got heckled by his 90-year-old mother, who calls his memoirs 'a pack of lies', so it's no mystery where he gets his tireless revolutionary fury from.

The scourging of the Murdock empire is a goldmine of new material for comedians. The biggest audience guffaw in this returning series comes when interviewer Rhys Thomas asks his guest - fellow comedian Simon Day - if there really isn't anything that he wouldn't do for money. Day, fast as a whip, comes back with "Well, I wouldn't hack into people's phones." It's no secret that I love this series: it's akin to the empathetic questioning techniques of Kirsty Young or Victoria Derbyshire being channelled through Alexei Sayle or Steve Coogan - lots of insight, but even more laughs. Rhys does not push Day too closely on his addictive personality - something that the comic has been very open about in his recent autobiography - but we do get to hear about his spell in a borstal, which he refers to as being like "a violent boarding school".

Video - Five minutes with: Alexei Sayle

Writer and comedian Alexei Sayle talks to Matthew Stadlen about modern comedy, all-you-can-eat buffet lunches, chasing men around a park and doing it for the money.

This second series of the show in which comics and TV personalities riff off mad inventions and ideas from the audience works so much better in
its new informal, chatty format.

Tonight, the pair deciding what's brilliant and what's not comes in the irresistible shape of Tim Minchin and Alexei Sayle, who have great chemistry and have a fine old time finding mirth in the general bemusement. What's a genius, Tim? 'A genius is a nuts person who turns out to be right.'

Alexei Sayle: I once hit a dancing punter

Comedian-turned-writer Alexei Sayle, 58, appeared in groundbreaking 1980s comedy series The Young Ones.

Alexei Sayle: Stalin, the Young Ones and my mum

Raised by staunch communist parents in 1960s Liverpool, it was Eisenstein, not Bambi, for the young Alexei Sayle. But the comic's odd childhood has made for a hilarious new memoir.