by Alexei Sayle
I now believe I’m having a similar experience. Though my sleep is heavy, I’ve got into the habit of half-waking every few hours and looking at the lit-up clock on the bedside table to see what time it is. Now generally the clock shows a normal hour, 1.27 or 4.38, but more often than I think can possibly be explained by coincidence, the screen displays the same three identical numbers such as 2.22, 3.33 or 5.55. (I also think that on one occasion it read 7.77, but on the other hand I did get very drunk the night before.) What I take from these numbers on my clock is that life is a giant fabrication, as in the movie The Adjustment Bureau (based on a Philip K. Dick story), where there is no free will and all human life is controlled by mysterious men in natty hats. The operatives who are in charge of maintaining the illusion that our world is real during the day are highly competent. They never let slip for a second any hint that things are not as we believe they are. The night-time crew are another matter; they are the sort of people who staff petrol stations and convenience stores in the early hours or who you find on the night bus, inattentive, hung-over, resentful, a bit weird and they don’t always do such a good job. Most obviously they are supposed to make sure that time continues to run forwards while everybody sleeps, but sometimes they are out the back of the control room having a fag or they themselves have nodded off, and so time stalls and the clocks freeze on a default setting, hence the identical numbers. So that’s it, our world is a chimera and a mysterious organisation controls what we do, for our own good. I certainly hope that’s the case or we’re all fucked.
THE CHIEF RABBI’S BASEBALL CAP
I’m sixty-five now. They say you know you’re getting old when policemen start to look young to you. My mate Harry says you know you’re getting old when the chief rabbi starts looking young to you. But this business of getting older is a strange thing. For me it’s amazing how much history I’ve lived through. Like a lot’s changed since I invented alternative comedy. One of the things that’s distressed me is the role of the topical TV comedy panel show in the rehabilitation of the reputations of war criminals. When I say war criminals I mean people like John Prescott and Alastair Campbell, people who led us into two illegal wars in which hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people have died. I mean if Joseph Goebbels was alive today he wouldn’t be on trial at Nuremberg, he’d be hosting Have I Got News for You! At least when she lost power Thatcher had the good grace to slink off into an alcoholic haze but people like Alastair Campbell and Ed Balls will do anything to remain in the public eye! ‘Alastair Campbell talks movingly on Panorama about his depression. . .’ Of course you’re depressed, you bastard, you’re a mass murderer! Doesn’t matter how many marathons you run, you’ll never get away from your conscience! It’s Three Bastards in a Boat: Griff Rhys Jones, Rory McGrath and Robert Mugabe! Tonight on Strictly Come Dancing we’ve got Freddie Flintoff, Emily Maitlis and Radovan Karadžić, the Butcher of Bosnia!
Now, lots of people, like my girlfriend Susan Sarandon, have said to me, ‘Alexei, you like dancing, you should go on Strictly Come Dancing, you should, Strictly you should, go on.’ And Yo-Yo Ma, even he’s going, ‘You should go on Strictly, Alexei.’ And Neil Kinnock, he’s going, ‘Yeah, you should go on Strictly.’ And Professor Green, he’s going, ‘You should, you should go on Strictly, Alexei.’ And Shinzō Abe, the prime minister of Japan, he’s going, ‘Yeah, you should go on, you should go on Strictly, Alexei.’
A lot’s changed since I invented alternative comedy
Now I do like dancing, I can salsa as well as any north London social worker, but I will never go on Strictly. First of all I hate all TV talent shows such as The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent. It was my distant relation, filmmaker Albert Maysles, who stated, ‘Tyranny is the removal of nuance.’
Which brings us to Strictly . . . Everything is wrong with ballroom dancing: the clothes, the music, even the expressions on the dancers’ faces, plus of course the dancing itself. The reason for this is simple – you get points for it. Ballroom dancing is an aesthetic pursuit, an art form, which has been turned into a competition, the result of which is that everything is done to attract the attention of the judges. The competitors must try to fit in to a set of rules rather than display emotion, artistry and invention, and so a tawdry, flashy, kitsch aesthetic takes over. Imagine if actors got points for doing Shakespeare what kind of overblown, hammy performances you would get. If you see a couple performing a proper Argentinian tango you are watching a dance created in the brothels of Buenos Aires that reeks of melancholy and sex. Then you watch the ballroom version of tango, all gurning faces and robotic, angular, hideous movements. You are seeing a great popular art reduced to a terrible travesty.
Now obviously dance is not revolutionary in itself, indeed I believe that no art can directly affect politics. It’s a mistake to think that it can.
I think the best thing about comedy affecting politics was said by Peter Cook when he opened the Establishment in Soho in the 1960s. He said he wanted his club to resemble those German cabaret clubs that appeared during the Weimar Republic and that did so much to stop the rise of Hitler.
But what the celebrities who appear on Strictly are doing is they are taking part in the ongoing cultural war on critical thinking. Just as in Orwell’s 1984 where War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, so in Strictly, Ugliness is Beauty, Prancing About is Dancing and Len Goodman isn’t a leathery old cockney idiot. The end result of all this is that when people are confronted by the truth, they cannot see it because they have been so confused by lies. But don’t let that stop you enjoying it.
A MESSAGE TO THE PEOPLE OF BRITAIN
Here, I’ll tell you what I hate . . . Fascism! I can’t stand it, me, I think it’s really, really terrible. I do. I think its bang out of order. That’s just me, though. You might like it, you might think it’s OK. Indeed, you might be a fan of radical authoritarian nationalism but I think you’d be wrong.
THE LESSONS OF HISTORY
You see, I am able to have insights like that because I’ve had a long life and also, unlike a lot of comedians, I actually have had a very wide education. My original background is in science; for my first degree I studied in France at their famous research institute the Laboratoire Garnier under the renowned Nazi professor, Dr Oetker. Dr Oetker actually got off light at the Nuremberg war trials because he did all the catering.
Then unlike most leftists I also have a background in business and I actually know quite a lot about how the stock markets behave. I used to trade in Near East long-term debt derivatives, trading ratios on the Frankfurt DAX Exchange . . . but I pulled out because it all became too commercial.
The philosopher George Santayana, before he founded his Latino-influenced guitar band, said, ‘Those who forget the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them.’ This seems to have been adopted by Western governments as a policy strategy.
One of the problems with the way we in the West receive our current affairs is that each broadcast or article, whether in old media or on the web, is totally without context – each story acts as if history began last Tuesday and not a day before. This of course tends to favour our own self-pitying view of ourselves as victims of random and incomprehensible violence from ‘the Other’. From my life experience I would propose that all news stories concerning the Middle East would have to go back as far as the Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916, a shameful time when we betrayed the Arab nations to whom we and the French had promised independence, while every fifth piece would have to go all the way back to the Crusades to provide vital historical context, and every news story concerning China would be required to include a lengthy section about the Opium Wars when Britain forced the drug on the reluctant Chinese. All this context would mean that each edition of Newsnight would be eleven hours long instead of just feeling like it’s eleven hours long, and each article . . . would be the length of a novel, but that sadly would be the price we’d have to pay to be well informed.
A MERRY COMMUNIST CHRISTMAS
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When I was a kid, given that we were two thirds Jewish atheist Communists, Christmas was a surprisingly important occasion in our house. On British television, during the 1950s and 1960s, the holiday period was also a time when presentations from the Soviet Union were prominently featured. It was as if there was considered to be something seasonal about performances originating from a godless, authoritarian dictatorship.
I suppose that they felt that Santa was a lot like Stalin
The Moscow State Circus, with its spectacularly unfunny clowns, disturbingly dangerous high-wire acts and animal cruelty, would be transmitted live and at interminable length from a tent in Manchester. Now one of the things you have to remember about my parents, particularly my mother, is that they believed, being Communists, that anything from the Soviet Union was superior to anything from the West, so, ‘Best horsemen in the world,’ my mother Molly would say with a tremble of pride in her voice, referring to the Cossack horsemen who leapt on and off the backs of their stocky ponies as they hurtled round and round the circus ring. Presumably these men were the direct descendants of those Cossacks who had set fire to her grandmother’s village. ‘Oh yes,’ she would say, ‘best Jew-murderers in the world . . . ooh if you want a pogrom organising, get yerself a Cossack.’
How long you live is not what killed your parents but what killed your grandparents . . . so I should live for ever, as long as I don’t bump into any Russian Cossacks. Which basically means not going round Knightsbridge or Chelsea. Many of the flats in those neighbourhoods are now used exclusively to house the ponies of wealthy Cossack oligarchs.
The Bolshoi Ballet, too, was a regular fixture of the holiday period and I can vividly recall sitting on the couch, jammed in between my parents Molly and Joe, as they fell asleep the moment the programme began, leaving me to watch three hours of Swan Lake to the accompaniment of stentorian snoring.
My parents, though, were always remarkably keen to take me to see Santa at his grotto in Lewis’s department store in central Liverpool. I suppose that they felt that Santa was a lot like Stalin. Their names were sort of similar and they were both kindly looking, rotund gentlemen with facial hair and red uniforms whose headquarters were located in the northern snowy wastes and were based upon a system of slave labour.
At first we would shop for my presents at something called the Daily Worker Bazaar which was held at the Communist Party bookshops. On long trestle tables would be arrayed sickly pot plants, Marxist literature, Paul Robeson records and crudely carved wooden toys from East Germany and dolls from the Soviet Union, which when you unscrewed them sometimes contained scribbled notes from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn begging to be released from the gulag.
I THOUGHT HE WAS MY FRIEND BUT HE WASN’T
It’s amazing how the world has changed even in my lifetime. When I was young you’d see these signs on flats for rent that would say: ‘No Dogs, No Blacks, No Irish’. Which was terrible, though it always bothered me why dogs were trying to rent their own apartments!
This is a personal thing, but I’ll tell you, there’s one working dog that I can’t stand and that’s that sniffer dog at the airport. He acts all friendly, doesn’t he? He acts like he’s your mate, you know, with his waggly tail, but really he’s just a nark, he’s a snitch, he’s a graaass! He just wants to find out if you’re carrying your lucky hand grenade onto the aeroplane.
A few years ago a friend of mine was going through a US airport and she’s an animal lover and she bent down to pat the sniffer dog on the head. And immediately the dog’s handler began to draw his weapon and shouted, ‘Step away from the federal officer, ma’am!’
THE PAST IS ANOTHER COUNTRY. HATS ARE CHEAPER THERE
Undoubtedly, especially over the last 150 years or so, people’s life expectancy in the industrialised nations has got much, much longer. But does it mean that because we are living longer we are enjoying the extra time that we’ve gained? For example, nowadays we get really narked and frustrated if we are held up on a car journey for a mere few minutes, and an hour or two sends us completely crackers, yet in the past when people’s lives were very much shorter they didn’t seem to mind spending a much greater proportion of them on journeys.
This is a press handout from Thames Trains. In the seventeenth century when most human beings only lasted into their forties, three years to sail to India and back on the off chance of seeing a new kind of fish wasn’t a problem; in the eighteenth century nine months to walk to Italy to buy a special sort of leather hat was considered a cool thing to do; and in Charles Dickens’s time four days on the stagecoach from Swindon to London to take your shoes to a bloke in Cheapside who wasn’t a particularly good cobbler, well why not? And interruptions to the journey would be taken in your stride: held captive by Levantine brigands for a decade on the road to Samarkand? When you got back, your family would say they hadn’t noticed you’d popped out.
OBSERVATIONS ON THE FEELING OF THE BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME
I don’t want to brag or anything but I can still get into the same pair of trousers that I was wearing thirty years ago. Mind you, I was attending clown college at the time!
THE LE CHRISTMAS PARTY
I’ve always had a wonderful working relationship with the Corporation. When it first went out, The Young Ones wasn’t that popular, but the BBC, with its profound elephantine wisdom going back half a century knew it was going to be good and that year, even though it still hadn’t really taken off, they invited the cast to the Light Entertainment Christmas Party – a real vote of confidence. No younger comedians had been invited to the LE Christmas Party, the high point of the year for all comedians, comic actors and sex offenders, since a dark day in the 1970s when the Pythons had been asked to this black-tie event and had turned up dressed in jeans!
I felt it was a sign that the BBC believed that acts like me, despite all the references to Marxism and Brecht and the left-wing propaganda, were still in many ways conventional show-business turns. I didn’t wear a tuxedo but did dress up in a smart suit and tie and tried very hard to behave myself. I nearly succeeded until the moment when Jim Moir, the head of Light Entertainment, came over to me leading the Liverpool-born comic performer and radio DJ Kenny Everett. I bridled immediately. A few months previously, during a Young Conservatives rally held at Wembley Arena, Kenny had inflamed the reactionary, right-wing, tweed-jacketed crowd by coming on stage and shouting, ‘Let’s kick Michael Foot’s stick away!’ and, ‘Let’s bomb Russia!’
Jim said to me, ‘You know who this is, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, turned and stalked off. My high-minded gesture was undermined by Kenny being way too stoned to notice what had happened and Jim assumed it was probably just some sort of a gay thing.
Later on Rowland Rivron showed his penis to Mrs Val Doonican in the lift. It was an indication of the corporation’s priorities that all this was still considered better behaviour than the Pythons attending the Light Entertainment Christmas Party wearing jeans.
CLOSING TIME
So that’s it, the end of another non-existent day at my imaginary sandwich bar. It’s time to get into my van and drive home. Maybe my girlfriend Susan Sarandon will be in and we can have a nice evening free from recrimination and anger as long as nobody mentions weather forecasting.
There is a problem with me getting home, though. About a decade and a half ago an authoritative university report announced that in central London over a monitored period of five years the average speed of a car had dropped from eleven miles an hour to six miles an hour. Unfortunately this trend didn’t stop there, it continued, and over the next few years, in the middle of the capital, traffic slowed down further and further, then eventually came to a complete halt. In keeping with the laws of physics there was a brief period when all vehicles remained absolutely motionless. Then all the cars, vans and trucks in London subsequently started to go backwards. Slowly at first, then faster and faster the vehicles went until now they are travelling at the speeds that th
ey obtained before the war, but in reverse. So all those environmentalists were wrong: the problem of gridlock in our cities has been solved, that is as long as you don’t mind travelling backwards and as long as you make certain you start your journey from the place where you were planning to go to in the first instance.
Goodbye everybody! Make good sandwich choices.
A Note on the Author
Born in Liverpool, the only child of Communist parents, Alexei Sayle moved to London in 1971 to attend Chelsea School of Art. He became the first MC of the Comedy Store and later the Comic Strip. After years of stand-up, television, sitcoms, films and even a hit single, he published his first highly acclaimed collection of short stories. Barcelona Plates was followed by The Dog Catcher, two novels: Overtaken and The Weeping Women Hotel and a novella, Mister Roberts. The first volume of Alexei’s memoirs was Stalin Ate My Homework; the second, Thatcher Stole My Trousers.
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