There's around 120 people in lecture room 2.13 for "Alexei Sayle in Conversation". If you don't know who Alexei Sayle is, I'm not going to do a big intro to him here. He's eminently googleable (that's a word I've never used before and one I may well have made up. I should google it to see if anyone else has used it). I've been a fan of Alexei since his first appearance on national television (I'm sure he was in the first ever BBC2 show to feature the new rising "alternative" comedians - "Boom Boom, Out Go the Lights" in the late 70s), then through the years in "The Young Ones" (1982-84), frequent appearances in "The Comic Strip Presents ..." (1985-93); "Alexei Sayle's Stuff" (1988-91), "The All New Alexei Sayle Show" (1994-95), "Alexei Sayle's Merry Go Round" (1998), "Paris" (1994). He even did a memorable turn in a Doctor Who story during the otherwise lamentable Colin Baker era ("Revelation of the Daleks", 1985).
He's always embodied a genuine "outsider" persona, though paradoxically, his shows in the late 1980s and eraly 90s were broadcast on BBC2 at peak time, and pulled in audiences of around five and six million - which would be amazing viewing figures in today's multi-channel TV environment.
In more recent years he's become Britain's most succesful writer of short stories since the Second World War. For a while, I used his short story, "Barcelona Plates" (from his first collection of short stories, of the same title) in Creative Writing classes I was teaching as a virtually perfect example of the genre. It was the only book of short stories that I recommended students buy and read - and some of them did, though to mixed response as I recall.
Well, alright then; it seems like I am doing an intro to Alexei for the uninitiated - of sorts.
Alexei's from Liverpool, of Lithuanian Jewish descent, raised in a fairly hardline communist family. The distinctive mix of radical politics and the heritage of his religion have always featured in his comedy and now in his wiriting. If I had to justify why this event would turn up in my Council of Faiths blog, I guess this would be the hook. He talks about his upbringing in the kind of terms one might use to speak about being raised by missionaries or in a household of evangelicals. He talks about the beliefs and values that motivated his parents as being akin to those of a cult. I have always loved the heightened self-awareness that pervades his work - and his heightened awareness of the forces that shape our lives around us. Which he makes funny, of course. And his skill at pulling the rug out from under the expectations you build up in his routines (which of course is a great skill for a writer of short stories).
Alexei keeps an informative and entertaining blog:
http://www.alexeisayle.me/
No comments:
Post a Comment