I’ve got it on the best authorities that he’s a changed man. After all, before I head out to meet Alexei Sayle for lunch I’ve read the two volumes of his compulsive and funny autobiography, and I’ve seen him many times presenting thoughtful arts shows on the BBC, and we have a couple of mutual friends who tell me what a friendly bloke he is, but still I can’t help feeling a slight vestigial anxiety. What if I find myself sat opposite that indelible 1980s Sayle, scourge of wrong-thinking hecklers, tight-suited, headbanging monologuist, undisputed heavyweight champion of the Comedy Store, taking on all comers, and ranting them eruditely and gobbily into spittle-flecked submission?
It’s fine. When I get to the Quality Chop House, Sayle has arrived early and manoeuvred into one of their unforgiving seats, side on “like a pasha”, and is all beard and grin and handshake. It turns out, at 64, he’s wary of that former version of himself too. He talks about him as if he’s safely locked up in the past: “When I did standup back then,” he says, “if there was an ounce of warmth in the audience, I would do all I could to destroy it. I would leave the venue immediately after the gig because I didn’t want to dilute his threat. To be honest, I grew to hate him …”
Sayle has been coming to the Chop House on London’s Farringdon Road on and off since it was first revamped from its Victorian origins as the “Progressive Working Class Caterer” by former Caprice head chef Charles Fontaine back in 1989. After a subsequent strange meatball period, that revival has now itself been revived with pitch-perfect British cooking. Sayle orders the grouse – “I like it as much for what it represents as what it is” – and I have a pork chop, we both have cep mushrooms and a flask of Côtes du Rhône, and we sit there scoffing the lot on our wooden benches like caricatures by Cruikshank, talking about the substance of Sayle’s second memoir, Thatcher Stole My Trousers, and the various political dreams of those years, and how they turned out.
One of the things the books have had him dwell on is the “sheer awfulness of how some things were” in the 1970s. The food for a start. “You couldn’t buy a takeaway salad, you had to go to a kebab shop and chuck the meat away. And all that ripping out of pubs and writing ‘ye olde pies’ on the menu …”
The broader cultural revolution Sayle ranted for didn’t get much beyond Britain’s restaurants but at least it did get that far. He gestures around the Chop House. “This is the world we dreamed of really, isn’t it? British restaurants serving hand-crafted ales and local produce,” he laughs. “But it doesn’t feel quite enough somehow, does it?” With some of this in mind, he is thinking of calling the third, and probably final, instalment in his Proustian project “Blair Blackened my Codfish”.
Sayle is a devilish diarist of Britain’s strange convulsions, and from a front-row seat: the Comedy Store opened the week after Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election win and was a satirical bulwark against what followed, although, as he points out, political comedy has its limits. He quotes Peter Cook on his aspirations for the Establishment Club, the forerunner of the Comedy Store in Soho. It would, Cook argued, be “like those cabarets in Weimar Republic Germany that had done so much to stop the rise of Hitler”.
Sayle comes at the past from a singular perspective. He was indoctrinated in the revolutionary struggle in Liverpool as the only child of Molly and Joe Sayle, stalwart Communist party members. His dad was a railwayman and shop steward and the Sayles took advantage of the provision of free travel anywhere in Europe then available to British Rail union officials. Holidays were to Sofia and Budapest, on trains that would “take you as far as Moscow and Tehran in great discomfort”. They were greeted like royalty.
The world came to the Sayles’ house through a similar filter. “Watching the news was quite tricky,” he recalls, “because my parents were yelling ‘Lies!’ all the way through it.” The only approved shows were those featuring actors with links to the party. “They liked Alf Garnett for that reason. And there was a period when the writers forced out by the McCarthy blacklists had come here and were working at ITV. We would watch The Adventures of Robin Hood on the basis that there was a secret Marxist message in it.”
Partly as a result of some of the vivid strangeness of this upbringing, when Sayle arrived, quite late, to television, he looked like nothing you had seen before. It felt a bit like that to him, too. He wasn’t aware he was playing a character, he was just unleashing his various demons and trying not to question it too much.
Writing his books and doing readings has, he says, allowed him to reflect a bit more on that period from the outside. “People sometimes say to me: ‘My son or daughter wants to be a writer, what can I do to help?’ I suggest they make sure they fuck their kids’ life up in childhood as much as possible.”
His mum, Molly, looms large in his memories. Both books are in part a voyage around her. “I have chosen to see her as a comedic figure,” he says. “And she was to a degree. But with a slight change of perspective it could have been a misery memoir.”
Have the books contained her?
“It’s odd her being dead,” he says. “She died three years ago at 97. Her funeral was like, sold out. Hundreds and hundreds of people. I couldn’t speak because I feared I would have treated it as a gig but Linda [his wife of 42 years] spoke. The time Molly used to take up is kind of empty now. I’d ring her every night. If I was up in the north-west I’d stay in my old bedroom. There will be a lot of that in the next book, the late-night drives to the hospital and all that.”
He has fewer reasons to go up to Liverpool now, though people ask him from time to time “for a northern perspective on the Labour party or something”, which strikes him as odd because he hasn’t lived there since he was 18. “It’s still the only city where I ever really get recognised,” he says. “That’s partly because there are big posters of me all over the place as a ‘son of the city’, on the library and all that. It’s like being President Assad.”
His book events there always go down well. He did one in Crosby when Molly was in her 90s and she stood at the back as he read, shouting, “Lies!”
His grouse, a big roasted bird, arrives on cue.
Looking back at the 1970s when he first came to London to study at Chelsea College of Arts, he can’t help feeling it was a brief window of possibility. “The great British movie stars of the 70s were all working-class kids: Michael Caine, Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay. All our movie stars now have been to Eton. That has to be stupid and unfair, whichever way you look at.”
It’s Sayle’s view that Tories only make a mistake once – and we are living with the consequences of that. “The left meanwhile makes the same mistake over and over again.” Still, he says, attacking his grouse, he’s genuinely hopeful about the party’s direction under Corbyn. His wife, Linda, is part of the Momentum group.
“I think it is exciting,” he says. “I like chaos. I sort of think now would be such a great time to do more standup.”
Only with not so much shouting this time around?
“I can still take an audience on if I have to,” he says, “but I certainly don’t want to.” He laughs. “After a while I discovered if you are trying to do some cerebral gag and you are also trying to shut up six skinheads in the front row, it can get a bit wearing.”
Thatcher Stole my Trousers (Bloomsbury, £8.99). Click here to buy a copy for £7.37 from the Guardian Bookshop
