I remember reading ‘Stalin ate my Homework’, the first volume of Alexei Sayle’s autobiography some years ago, and thoroughly enjoying it. His family and early life were a little different to the norm – well, very different actually – and he wrote engagingly about it.
This is the second volume, following directly on from the first, and takes us through his student days and his encounters with a wider variety of people and classes. He takes on a wide variety of roles and jobs – not all of which he is quite qualified or suitable for – and gradually finds his niche, eventually finding recognition and fame.
His path to comedy was not straightforward, or really planned. He almost falls into it, and as he tries things out, and experiments, he also comes to meet all those others that were such a part of the alternative comedy movement – the Comedy Store group, the Young Ones, and so on. There are lots of familiar names to those of us who were young(ish) when it all kicked off, as well as a few I had forgotten – Arnold Brown, for instance, who I remember as being strangely hypnotic.
The real meat here, though, is his funny, often caustic, take on Britain in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. He is ten years older than me, but so much of what he writes brings back memories of growing up in a country where nothing seemed to quite work; restaurants and hotels where guests were seen as an inconvenience, TV that was still full of stars and formats that were ten or twenty years out of date, public services that did the bare minimum to justify their existence.
He negotiates his way through all these things with a realistic, sometimes bitter, eye. He sees the irony in getting some benefit from the very things he railed against. For me, he gets the tone just right; honest about himself and others, not afraid to look back and see himself objectively.
His mum is as cantankerous as ever, and a source of much humour – to us rather than him, I suspect – and Linda, his wife, comes across as a crucial part of his success and sanity.
If you lived through the 1970’s and 1980’s, or have memories of the people and ideas that came out of the ‘alternative comedy’ circuit, then this will bring back a lot of memories. If not, it is still an entertaining and funny memoir of a sometimes complex and serious-minded man who was very good at making people laugh – and, very often, think.
This is a review of the Bloomsbury 2016 Kindle edition.
It is an extended version of my review previously published on Amazon and Goodreads.
