
Alexei Sayle
Thatcher Stole My Trousers
In 1971 comedians on the working men’s club circuit imagined that they would be free to go on telling their tired, racist, misogynistic gags forever, but their nemesis, a 19-year-old Marxist art student with a bizarre concern for the health of British manufacturing, was slowly coming to meet them. Through the next decade, Alexei Sayle would be a student at Chelsea Art School, a clerk in a DHSS office, one of London’s bottom ten freelance illustrators, a school dinner lady and a college lecturer, before he became the original MC of London’s first modern comedy club, the Comedy Store, and the landscape of British comedy was altered forever.
Recounting the opening season of the Comedy Store and his friendships with the comedians who, like him, would soon become household names, Sayle chronicles a time when comedy and politics came together in electrifying ways.