Alexei is back doing stand up again and he is ‘still full of hate’. Brilliant – Maoist comedians have ben in short supply of late. Here’s what Alexie has to say about the decline and fall of altrnative comedy:
‘What I didn’t understand, despite all my years of Marxist study groups, was that every revolution contains within it the seeds of its own destruction, and ours soon began to mutate in ways I could never have predicted. For me, the turning point, the moment resembling Oliver Cromwell’s suppression of the Levellers, was the making of the Bambi episode for the second series of The Young Ones, broadcast in 1984.
I turned up for the recording to find several generations of Cambridge Footlights were in the show. “I thought these people were the enemy!” I railed at the writers. “The whole point of what we were doing was surely to challenge the smug hegemony of the Oxford, Cambridge, public-schoolboy comedy network, as well as destroying the old-school working men’s club racists!”
“No, that was just you,” the writers replied. “We never subscribed to your demented class-war ravings. We think all these people are lovely. Stephen Fry’s made us lardy cake, Hugh Laurie’s been playing boogie-woogie piano all morning, Mel Smith’s going to take us for a ride in his gold Rolls-Royce, and Griff Rhys-Jones has been screaming abuse at minions to make us laugh.”
Really? I thought Sayle now made his fist full of living trashing his past, endlessly recycling his family trips to Albania, and retiring to Spain to pose as a “serious writer”…I think Sartre was self-referenced at one point, because Britain “doesn’t appreciate public intellectuals”(sic). I have seen the future and it’s marketing.
Jack Whitehall, King of Comedy. As voted for by his 24/7, ever present, quiz/panel show part of the comfy tv establishment peers. Says it all.
Always liked listening to him and reading his books.
Barcelona Plates about how the white Fiat Uno clipped Dianas Mercedes in the Paris underpass is classic