by Alexei Sayle
No, you’re right, even in print it is racist.
It’s considered a sign of intelligence, isn’t it, to be fluent in languages, but then Jim Davidson speaks really good English, so I’m not so sure. It was an assumption in our family that we were all really good at speaking foreign languages but it was a lie. Because my dad worked on the railways we travelled all over Europe for free and Joe, my dad, supposedly spoke this language called Esperanto. This was one of those things invented in the early twentieth century that were supposed to make the world a better place . . . like Fascism. Esperanto as spoken by my father seemed to consist mostly of bits of French, Spanish, German and English and the word ‘boingio’. So he’d be like, ‘Me gusto boingio una sandwich boingio de jamon unt fromage boingio.’ While my mother supposedly spoke Yiddish, which was sort of similar to German, but in reality she just screamed at people until they did what she wanted.
So, anyway, my hobby has been, for years, to find the cheapest all-you-can-eat buffet in Britain. And finally I found it. Surprisingly it was in Islington, an Indian vegetarian restaurant in Chapel Market, Islington. And at the time it was all-you-can-eat Indian vegetarian food for £2.95. They did things like curried sprouts. A lot of the people in there seemed to be wearing those paper jumpsuits the police give you when you’ve been sick on yourself in the cells. And a lot of the other customers were Jeremy Corbyn.
So I wrote an article in The Times about the place and the next time I went in there the owner said to me, ‘Oh Mr Sayle, thank you for writing that article about my restaurant in the papers. No no,’ he said, ‘no no, please, let me pay for your lunch.’ And I thought, Bloody hell, every man’s got his price; it turns out mine is £2.95!
IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW
When I first appeared on the TV back in the early 1980s, people used to send letters to the BBC and make phone calls, reviewers would write articles in the papers saying things like, ‘What is this man doing on the television? He’s crazy, his routines don’t make any kind of sense, it’s all just swearing and shouting and yelling about Bertolt Brecht and Albania!’ And of course they were right but the reason I remained on the TV nonetheless was because I’m a Freemason. I attended Chelsea Art School in the 1970s and, just like the South Yorkshire Police Force, all the London art schools at that time were a hotbed of Freemasonry.
In the 1990s, though, I disappeared from the TV screens and was forced to become a writer and that was because I was thrown out of the Freemasons for breaking the rules. You remember before the millennium how people used to go over to France just to buy booze? Wine, beer and spirits were a lot cheaper on the Continent, so you got these huge booze supermarkets on the outskirts of Calais and Boulogne. But what is less well known is that it was also possible to buy Masonic regalia much cheaper in France, so there were these big regalia supermarkets and they didn’t just do Masonic stuff; you could buy Jewish yarmulkes and those big furry hats that the Lubavitchers wear, complete ayatollah outfits and Catholic gear up to the rank of cardinal. Indeed, they were a place of peace: Muslim and Jew, Protestant and Catholic, Buddhist and Hindu, Yazidi and Zoroastrian all mixed together without enmity because they were focused on what united them, not what divided them, which was the great savings to be made on giant crucifixes and hijabs. So I used to load the car up with aprons, silver-plated set squares, goblets, white gloves and medallions at a quarter of the cost I’d pay in the UK, then bring it all back and sell it to other chaps who were ‘on the square’, but then the big bosses found out about it and I was expelled from the Masons. It was really only when I joined the Taliban that my career revived.
‘They were all focused on what united them, not what divided them’
YATES’S WINE LODGE
Both my parents were in an organisation that was in some ways very similar and in some ways very different from the Freemasons. They were members of the British Communist Party; they told me it was Lenin who came down the chimney at Christmas! Them being in this authoritarian organisation gave me a lifelong distrust of leaders of political parties, those psychopaths and people with personality disorders who force themselves to the top of any grouping or organisation.
I was on The Andrew Marr Show a few years ago reviewing the papers and one of the other guests was the then leader of the Labour Party Ed Miliband and I was a bit worried about meeting him but he came up to me and he said, ‘Bloody hell!’, he said. ‘Alexei bloody Sayle!’ Oddly enough, just like the Earl of Sandwich, Ed Miliband talks in a thick Scouse accent. So it would be best if you imagine his words spoken by footballer Wayne Rooney or the late Cilla Black. He’s like, ‘I’m bleeding Ed Miliband, I’m leader of the Labour Party, I get forty per cent off in Yates’s Wine Lodge. See these trainies, see these trainies? I robbed them off Vince Cable . . .’
But you see, one of the problems Ed Miliband had was his advisers wouldn’t let him be himself. So anyway, Ed Miliband says to me, ‘Alexei Sayle, it’s great to meet you, do you know it’s exactly twenty-five years ago today since the release of your hit single “Ullo John! Gotta New Motor?”? We were huge fans of that song in our house.’ And I had this impression of him in his Hampstead Marxist home, him and his brother David, his father Ralph scrawling ‘I hate Britain’ in his own excrement on the walls, and all their left-wing friends – Tariq Ali and Germaine Greer and Noam Chomsky – and they’re all going, ‘“Ullo John! Gotta new motor? Ullo John! Gotta new motor?”’ So I was really charmed by him but then a few minutes later I thought, Hang on, exactly twenty-five years ago today? Even I didn’t know it was exactly twenty-five years ago today, then I thought what he’d done was he’d gone to one of his assistants and he’d said, ‘’Ere . . . Google that twat, will you?’
EL DORADO
I came from that generation of working-class kids from the 1960s for whom, through full grants and all our fees paid, the gates of El Dorado the Golden, City briefly swung open and via university places and going to art school or drama school we subsequently got great jobs in the media and the arts. Those gates are firmly slammed shut again. Until recently the Labour Party, which was supposed to represent the interests of working-class kids, had become firmly dynastic. Neil Kinnock’s son Stephen Kinnock is an MP, Tony Benn’s son Hilary Benn is an MP, Jack Straw’s son Kim Jong Straw. . .
(Hello, it’s me again, breaking the fourth wall. I notice in his columns recently the Guardian’s sketch writer John Crace has been calling Theresa May ‘Kim Jong May’ which is similar to my Kim Jong Straw gag but I can produce receipts and CCTV footage that prove I’ve been doing that gag since at least 2012.)
You know, one of the things it’s very difficult for me to do on my radio show is any really topical material because there’s such a big time gap between recording the show and it being transmitted. The reason for this is that the BBC has such a backlog of absolutely fantastic comedy shows, which need to be broadcast before mine can go out.
So I made the first series of Imaginary Sandwich Bar in March 2009. But the earliest we could get a transmission date was November 2016. I didn’t know what was going to happen between recording and transmission. Obviously I knew Gordon Brown was going to get re-elected with a landslide majority but apart from that I had to guess.
The Conservative Party, despite its recent reshuffles, is still stacked with people who went to public school and either Oxford or Cambridge and it still very much serves the ruling class. In the 1960s and 1970s all the great British movie stars were working class – Albert Finney, Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, Peter O’Toole – now they’ve all been to public school and Oxbridge. Damian Lewis, Tom Hiddleston, Dominic West, Benedict Cumberbatch and Eddie Redmayne all went to either Eton or Harrow, and they are now starting to colonise the few decent jobs that they used to leave for the working class, like you’re getting all these posh comedians now. Like Jack Whitehall, who went to Marlborough, or Miranda Hart, who went to Downe House. Footballers! Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy went to Winchester and All Souls College,
Oxford! Explorers! Bloody explorers! Public schoolboy Bear Grylls. What a phoney! He’s not a bear and he’s not a grill! Burger vans! Burger vans! All the burger vans down my local market are run by the class of Charterhouse of 2005! Mexican street food, for God’s sake! Mexican street food chain Wahaca is not owned and run by a poor but honest man called Pedro from Guadalajara but privately educated Thomasina Miers, who comes from Cheltenham! And there’s a pop-up Vietnamese pho café in Peckham High Street that’s run by the Queen and Prince Philip!
HALFPRICEMASONS
In a way though it is deplorable it’s sort of human nature that people combine together in self-serving cabals like the Freemasons. The comedy mafia in the UK is nicknamed the Laffia. The Scottish mafia, which is powerful in the media north of the border, is referred to as the Mackia, while the corresponding Welsh mafia is called the Taffia, and the Italian mafia is called the Mafia.
THINGS WE LEFT ON THE BUS
Mind you, I sometimes wonder what we gained, us bright, working-class kids, by getting to see El Dorado because in a sense we lost our tribe, we became deracinated. In a way we were no longer authentically working class but we were nothing else. A friend of mine, Terry, after his first couple of terms at art school came home for the holidays and he was sitting in the front room with his dad and they could both sense that something irrevocable had shifted between them, something had changed for ever, something that they could never get back, and there was this uneasy silence between them until finally Terry’s dad looked up from the paper and he said, ‘So, Terry, what do you fancy for the National?’
‘Well. . .’ Terry replied. ‘Peter Hall’s production of Troilus and Cressida. . .’
POSH HIPPY ENTREPRENEURS
I was doing a book reading a while back and in the question-and-answer session I was amazed to chance upon an enormous amount of hatred for James Dyson. Perhaps there’s something about the self-congratulatory nature of his vacuum cleaners – ‘Ooh look at me, I’m bagless but I’m in bright colours!’ – that enrages people. I don’t know. Whereas there was a great deal of affection for those Henry vacuum cleaners because they‘ve got a face on them.
But the phenomenon of the posh hippy entrepreneur such as James Dyson or Richard Branson: they put themselves at the forefront of their products, which is a relatively new thing, isn’t it? And their hippy credentials, I think, are often false. Like Ben and Jerry of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, they actually met in Vietnam when they were both in the Green Berets. A lot of their early flavours had names such as Napalm Nut Cluster, Agent Orange and Die, You VC Gook, Die!
THE REST IS GEOGRAPHY
There’s this TV channel called Yesterday; it’s a history sort of channel, but when it first appeared on Freeview for some reason it used to go off the air at 6.30 in the evening, at which point they’d put up a sign on the screen that said: ‘Yesterday will be back tomorrow.’
Of course when I started out in TV there were only three channels, which then expanded to four. Whereas now there are all these new outlets, not just all the stations on Freeview and cable, but Netflix and Amazon. Which is good, because a working-class entertainer like me is being forced off the main channels by all the posh Jack Whitehalls and Miranda Harts but I’m actually working on a new comedy series which will be shown exclusively on ITV2+1. It’s absolutely brilliant, but you will never see it because it will always appear one hour into the future.
DANCE, DIEGO, DANCE!
Of course the upper classes were never ever truly going to accept us bright working-class kids, even a class traitor like Bryan Ferry; when he rides out with his local fox hunt, they’re all making ‘wanker’ gestures behind his back.
They were never going to accept us because, let’s face it, rich people are horrible! That is not a value judgement, that is simply evolutionary science, because poor people, they need to be nice to each other, like you need to be nice to your mate because one day you might want to borrow his van. But Roman Abramovich, he’s got his own van! A 2014 Renault Trafic, air conditioning, satnav and Bluetooth. Roman Abramovich, he’s like, ‘Ha ha ha, I’ve got all the cheese in the world, ha ha ha! Now I’m going to get Diego Costa to come round to my house and dance about in his underpants! Ha ha ha. Dance, Diego, dance! Dance, you petulant-Brazilian-slash-Spanish man-child, dance! Now I’ll get John Terry to come in and say something racist! That’s what it’s like in Belgravia!
WHO ATE ALL THE BISCUITS?
Perhaps the one person, certainly the one political leader who embodies everything that is noble and honest and staying true to yourself, is Nelson Mandela. I actually met Nelson Mandela in 1992, not long after he’d been released from prison, a while before he was elected president of South Africa. I’d done some benefit gigs for the ANC and so they invited me to meet him at this small reception at a hotel in central London. And I got really nervous about meeting Nelson Mandela, I thought, What if I meet him and he’s not admirable, what if I meet him and he’s got the cold dead eyes of the professional revolutionary, the cold dead eyes and the wet handshake of the kind of men who used to come to Communist Party meetings in our front room and eat all the bleeding biscuits! And by the time I got to meet Nelson Mandela I was so nervous that I couldn’t speak. But luckily Nelson Mandela took my hand in his and he said, ‘Bloody hell!’ he said. ‘Alexei Sayle! Do you know it’s exactly eight years ago today since the release of your hit single “Ullo John! Gotta New Motor?”? We loved that song on Robben Island.’
The kind of men who used to come to Communist Party meetings in our front room and eat all the bleeding biscuits!
Chapter Four
A SPECIAL GIFT
I know someone who is very good at giving presents. She is assiduous about remembering when everybody’s birthday or anniversary occurs and then handing them the perfect gift, beautifully wrapped with a nice little card containing a witty personalised message. I am not like that, I rarely give any sort of present to anybody, though this is not just due to meanness or my lack of social grace but it is also because I am traumatised by the memory of the terrible damage a poorly thought-out present can cause.
I once had two friends, a couple called Mike and Sue. On the occasion of their tenth wedding anniversary one of Mike’s old schoolfriends, now the manager of a successful rock band, gave them a very expensive gift. It was basically a book of vouchers that entitled them to dine at all kinds of smart restaurants, go on sailing holidays, enjoy beauty treatments and many more wonderful experiences of all kinds. The only catch was that it was basically a two-for-one offer, so if Mike and Sue dined at the Ritz say, then Mike would eat for free but Sue would have to pay the full cost of everything, or if they took the seats at the opera then again one of them would be paying nothing but the other would be paying quite a lot. Nevertheless, though they were not free, the vouchers in this book offered the couple an entry to all kinds of exclusive places and experiences that they could not normally have dreamed of enjoying.
However, Mike and Sue soon found that when they had a bit of free time they did not necessarily want to dine at the Ritz on the chef’s table or go rock climbing, even if accompanied by Bear Grylls. But if the couple went out somewhere and the place was not in their book of two-for-one vouchers, they suffered a tremendous amount of guilt and anger because they were paying the maximum price, yet if they did visit a place that was included in their book of coupons they were consumed with a murderous rage at being forced into going somewhere they didn’t really want to go.
Slowly the pair stopped going out altogether and after work remained in their flat with the curtains closed and the lights off in case Mike’s old schoolfriend was passing and saw that they weren’t out enjoying his gift. This meant that they began to get on each other’s nerves and in time Sue came to blame Mike for having such a thoughtless friend who would give them this poisoned offering. They turned in on themselves, horizons narrowed and from there it was only a short time until both of them fell into depression and despair.
Finally, in an act of desperation, the couple took out the volume of vouchers, which to them had come to resemble a book of evil spells, and from its depths they booked a hot-air-balloon flight over the scenic Cotswolds.
On a sunny Sunday morning, once the craft had reached a sufficient height, the couple threw themselves out of the basket. Well one of them did.
OUR COUNTRY’S FAIRLY OK
Tonight I want to talk about history and the role of entertainment and the entertainer in society. Audiences for classical music and theatre audiences think they’re superior to stand-up comedy audiences but I’m not so sure. A few years ago my wife went to a performance of a play called Our Country’s Good written by a woman called Timberlake Wertenbaker and after the play had finished, as they were filing out, she heard a woman in front of her say, ‘Oh, I was at school with a Timberlake Wertenbaker, I wonder if it’s the same one.’
You hear people misusing language these days, don’t you? They say ‘mano a mano’ thinking it means ‘man to man’ when in fact it means ‘hand to hand’, since speaking Spanish isn’t about just putting an ‘o’ at the end of English words. And I heard a sports commentator say on TV the other day, ‘It’s time to batter down the hatches.’ What does that mean, ‘batter down the hatches’? Like people say ‘a damp squid’. I mean all squids are damp!
I was somewhere and one of our party said something obvious and another person in response said, ‘No shit, Shylock!’ I mean what would you say that would be obvious to a seventeenth-century Venetian Jew?
2.22, 5.55
When I was about fifteen I discovered, in a tatty little second-hand bookshop in my neighbourhood of Anfield, a box of these pulpy, square little magazines some merchant seaman presumably had brought over from the United States. They had names such as Astounding Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction and If. The owner wanted a shilling per copy, which I eagerly paid, and each proved to be a box of treasures, short stories, novellas, many written by the masters of the genre, Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451, I Sing the Body Electric) and Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, ‘Duel’). I remember reading one story that has stayed with me to this day. It concerned a man who, when he was sleeping, would sometimes come to in the middle of the night with that familiar sensation of being up in the air then, in the split second before truly waking, plunge back down to the bed. Anyway it turned out that the sensation wasn’t an illusion and he was in fact flying and I can’t recall what happened in the story after that.
