Thatcher Stole My Trousers – Alexei Sayle
Thatcher Stole My Trousers – Alexei Sayle
This is Alexei Sayle’s second volume
of memoirs, following 2010’s
Stalin Ate My Homework. While the latter concentrated on the
school years of the young Sayle growing up the child of devout
Communist parents in 60s and 70s Liverpool, this
focusses on his late teens to
early 20s, and his pathway from supremely unfocussed London art school
dropout to successful iconoclast comedian, TV’s acerbic self-styled
‘fat bastard’.
Sayle’s memoir thrives on the same
qualities which propelled both his earlier comedy and his latter-day
writing – an eye for the details of the urban everyday counterbalanced
finely with an otherworldly surrealism, with the added capacity for a
great one-liner. More important than all this perhaps- a sardonic,
steadfast, and hard-headed contrarianism. Here is an art school
student who despises most contemporary art, and a socialist who spends
much of the book taking pot-shots at the ideological idiocies of the
left. He savages Communism with the vicious relish of a true renegade.
Brought up in the Communist
Party of Great Britain which towed the Soviet Russian line, Sayle’s
style of teenage rebellion was to join the rival Communist Party of
Britain (Marxist-Leninist) which was beholden to Chinese Maoism
instead. This turned out to be even more disillusioning. He retains a
real contempt for Reg Birch,
tinpot dictator CPBM-L and by Sayle’s account a man consumed
with his own self-importance. Art school Alexei shared a flat in
Finchley with various revolutionary Arabs who had fled their own
repressive regimes, and while he admired their spirit, could see the
quixotic futility of their schemes even then
“hoping to stir up revolt in the
Sultanate of Oman mostly by smoking, staying up all night and reading
foreign newspapers in cafes.”
His dislike of Birch however is
nothing compared to his apparent antipathy towards his mother, Molly,
presented in the book as a fiery oddball whose behaviour seems to
reach beyond the eccentric and cantankerous (screaming continual abuse
at the world, not least in her role as a ‘vigilante style’ lollypop
lady) and into the realms of actual
mental illness. Sayle attributes his own ‘oddness’
to the influence of Molly (lack of sociability, and obsessive
nature finding interests in such disparate objects as bikes and guns)
and seems to have spent his whole life trying to escape from her,
mortified when she ends up joining his own rival Communist party. For
his grounded side he gives thanks to his much-loved wife Linda, an
omnipresent figure as the voice of sanity and support.
Of course without his oddness
he wouldn’t have the skewed take on the world which fuels his writing,
but there is certainly no thanks to Ma Sayle here.
Sayle is engagingly dry throughout,
and his observations on everything from the differing political
outlooks in the working classes of Liverpool and Hackney to a Marxist
theory of production as applied to drug-dealing are consistently
thoughtful and funny. Things
move into a different but no less engrossing alt-showbizzy realm when
the narrative moves into his unlikely progress in the world of comedy.
A scene involving Sayle’s brother-in-law outraging Bob Carolgees by
questioning the worth of his alter-ego puppet Spit the Dog is one of
many masterful minor vignettes.
Keith Allen is revealed as quite as
unsettling and un-nerving a figure as we may have imagined, whilst the
generally abrasive Sayle emerges as a fond and avuncular figure
towards the usually slightly younger comedians around him (Rik Mayall,
Adrian Edmondson, French and Saunders et al). There’s plenty of choice
meat for Young Ones fans–
apparently the stunts were often every bit as dangerous and violent as
they appeared on screen (‘Rick’’s crotch banging on the pillars as he
slid under the bannister, ‘Rick’’s head in an exploding oven – both
led to visits to hospital for the real Rik.)
Sayle’s contention that he and the
alternative gang were “nice men
pretending to be nasty, while the old school comedians were nasty men
pretending to be nice” seems a little presumptuous, particularly
given his revelation that Rik and Ade used to wreck a restaurant in
Islington while paying for damages, like a countercultural analogue of
the Bullingdon club. His writing is very wise and very funny but it
can sometimes be tricky to see where one ends and the other begins.
Sometimes he is clearly and obviously exaggerating for comic effect,
at other times the distinction is not so clear (not least when it
comes to the behaviour of his mother - was it really so psychotic?)
Still, this is Sayle’s world, and for all its strangeness and
inevitable self-servingness it
still somehow seems a lot closer to reality than most memoirs
you might read.
Any cop: Yes. The title, content and
denouement of one chapter ‘Mrs Doonican Gets a Surprise’ is worth the
price alone.
[First published on Bookmunch, 2017]
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