How I’ve Tried to Change the World by Alexei Sayle: The godfather of alternative comedy looks left

How I’ve Tried to Change the World By Walking Down the Middle of the Street Shouting

Author: Alexei Sayle

ISBN-13: 9781399629140

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Guideline Price: £16.99; 395pp

Did you hear the one about the writer with the split personality? He had to release two memoirs. Alexei Sayle, meanwhile, is on his third volume, the big Scouse show-off, and as they say in Liverpool, it’s dead good.

Then again the “Godfather of Alternative Comedy”, and an acclaimed writer and broadcaster, has plenty of yarns to spin after 50 years in the business. Yet the business is only a small part of this earnest, entertaining (and yes, funny) book.

It’s mostly a look back through a life engaged in ideas of the left and that big-tent term socialism; something Sayle has always carried with him, in his work and as a way to live. It stems from his parents, committed communists in their lifetimes, and using a clever structure Sayle considers several significant moments for the left through various marches he was part of down the years.

The book never veers into being preachy, though, even if the author is usually wobbling on a soapbox for our entertainment, with his scatter gun on various political theories, Palestine and Zionism, the Chicago Boys, Syria, Thatcher and so on. There are lots of laugh-out-loud bizarre recollections, too: Sayle polishing off the Golden Girls in America (you need to read it), or old communist country bus tours, one with a great tea towel gag.

The memoir is most satisfying when Sayle, after decades of involvement, looks at the flaws as well as the draws of the left, and the establishment’s profound enmity towards it. Personal experiences capture some problems succinctly: attending CND marches against nuclear weapons back in the day, when some in the Communist Party of Great Britain were content for the Soviet Union to be armed, as it would be “The People’s Bomb”, as it was called. “As if we could all own one like a Volkswagen,” writes Sayle.

Or when the media continually attacks the left, such as their spurious claims that Jeremy Corbyn was anti-Semitic when leader of the Labour Party. Sayle states again that Corbyn isn’t, and I’ll take the word of a Jewish man before trough-fed Tories or right-wing newspapers.

If a young person in your family is showing an interest in the left, this would be a nice nudge in that direction (along with Paul Foot’s Words as Weapons), particularly if they maybe feel that it’s losing on points. The fight isn’t over.

NJ McGarrigle is a journalist from Co Tyrone