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.

Alexei Sayle

Born in Liverpool, the only child of Communist parents, Alexei Sayle moved to London in 1971 to attend Chelsea Art School. He became the first MC of the Comedy Store and later the Comedy Strip. After years of stand-up, television, sitcoms, films and even a hit single, he published his first highly acclaimed collection of short stories. Barcelona Plates was followed by The Dog Catcher, two novels – Overtaken and The Weeping Women Hotel – and a novella, Mister Roberts. The first volume of his memoirs, Stalin Ate My Homework, was published in 2010. The second volume, Thatcher Stole My Trousers, was published this year.