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ALEXEI SAYLE @Brighton Comedy Festival: Corn Exchange: Review

Alexei Sayle

After I’d watched Alexei Sayle‘s gig at the Corn Exchange, and before I forced myself to sit down to squeeze out the review, I did a bit of Googling. This is usual for us journo types. Cheat if at all possible.

Well, it was all Sayle‘s fault in a way as his introduction had made a big deal of him not having done proper stand up for nearly twenty years. He mentioned he’d written books (which I knew about but hadn’t got round to reading) but I thought I’d Wiki him and see exactly how many years he’d been on the comedy horizon for.

What I didn’t expect to find was that this most radical of the alternative comedians of the 1980’s, the granddaddy of it all according to some, was now writing a newspaper column on driving for….wait for it…the Daily bloody Telegraph! Was I the only one not to know this sordid little secret? Was every other 50 year old sat in the cavernous Corn Exchange on Friday night privy to this bit of information?

Now, I’m genuinely not sure what to make of this. The bit of me that’s still in the 80s, the bit that wore a long black coat, puffed away on roll-ups, and spent my weekends at Greenham wants to slap Sayle round the chops with a rolled up copy of Marxism Today (an old copy obvs, seeing as it went out of business in the 90’s). But the mature me (ho ho) wants really to just be able to squeak ‘meh’ and get on with reviewing the gig.

And then I thought of ‘Hello John, Got a New Motor’, and I had a get-out clause. Sayle had, like the rest of us all too human beings, been selling out for bloody years. We all grow up. We all get less angry. We all ‘sell out’. So there. Although, of course, Ben Elton is exempted from this bit of ‘we all do it, don’t we’ nonsense, as he’s obviously just a first class cunt.

Bounding on stage with all the athleticism of a 61 year old fat bastard and the clothes sense of a council estate Scouser rather than the Primrose Hill author he now is, Sayle launched into a couple of ‘easy target’ rants which the audience, despite probably adoring Michael McIntryre (‘Look, your father’s never coming back – now fuck off’) and The Great British Bake Off (‘It’s all the cupcakes that have broken my proud spirit’), guffawed at like loons.

Sayle‘s style hasn’t changed much from back in the day. He’s still sweary, he’s still (that horrible phrase) ‘off the wall’, best and funniest when his surrealist side is let off the leash as in a wonderful set-piece when it’s Sayle as the pleb, and Boris Johnson as the officer, both going Over The Top. Or when Charles Dickens turns up sounding rather a lot like Pete Burns.

His political side is also still there, albeit a little diluted, but as he himself says ‘There’s not much political comedy about but then there’s no ideological clarity anymore.’ I liked that honesty, but still longed for more venom, more vitriol, more bite. He’s no longer an attack dog, but it’s not that his teeth have been removed, more that the dangling bone of a Thatcher no longer exists to get him in as much of a frenzy. He acknowledges this nicely by replacing her in one of his opening rants with, of all people, Dizzee Rascal (you just know that it’s because it gives him an opportunity to say ‘bonkers’ with relish).

Fame is a topic nicely mined too, as in when he ends up at a swanky first-night party for one of Ben Elton‘s musicals and finds himself placed in a cupboard with Lembit Opik and the sax player from Madness. Well, fame and the price of insulting fellow comedians really, as it’s Elton‘s ultimate fuck you to Sayle for dissing him in the past.

Ultimately though, rather than coming out of the gig all fired up, I slunk out into the pouring rain feeling sad. Sad for all the youthful fire we all once had and how it all melts away as age creeps up. And sad for all the now youthful, most of whom don’t give a toss about anything political at all. I mean, can you name one comedian at the Brighton Comedy Festival who is in any way overtly political? Sayle may now fly a tattered flag, but at least he still had the gumption to fly one at all.

Alexei Sayle played the Corn Exchange, Brighton on October 11 2013, as part of the Brighton Comedy Festival

 

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