Radio 4 Extra: Comedy Controller: Alexei Sayle
Editor's note: You can hear Comedy Controller: Alexei Sayle on Radio 4 Extra on Saturday 20 October at 9am and 7pm and for seven days after transmission on the iPlayer. PM
One of the great moments when Alexei Sayle interviews Lenny Henry on Radio 4's Chain Reaction is when Lenny tells him how nervous he was about first meeting him in 1981. Alexei had a fearsome comedy reputation. So was I a little bit nervous when I got in touch about being Radio 4 Extra's Comedy Controller? Maybe...just a little....to this day I still can't shake the terrifying landlord Mr. Balowski crashing down the Young Ones door.
Yet - whether age might have mellowed him (he turned 60 in August) - or not, Alexei was the epitome of helpfulness and fun when he came into Broadcasting House. Alexei himself played with the idea of his fearsome past, about having been in the 'alternative comedy vanguard, comrade,' when we he came into the studio.
Alexei's choices really draw on all aspects of his life. It was important for him to explain how comedy seeped into every part of his childhood in Liverpool - a city, he says, with its own historical line-up of "comedy intelligentsia." How he listened to Round the Horne with his mum and dad. How listening with mum and dad was soon left behind, or should that be under, as Alexei went 'under the bedclothes' to listen to I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again.
He talks about comedy writing with Andrew Marshall (Two Point Four Children) and David Renwick (One Foot in the Grave) on his TV show, Alexei Sayle's Stuff. We get the chance to hear Renwick and Marshall's genre busting 70s radio comedy, The Burkiss Way (one with a political flavour - this is Alexei Sayle, after all). Alexei still marvels at the team that created Radio 4's On The Hour, especially its producer Armando Iannucci. It's a comedy Alexei thinks contains a profound truth about the "news" and those that make it. That thread of playing with forms inspired his fifth choice, the musings of "award winning" phone in DJ Gary Bellamy, in Radio 4's Down the Line. And let's not forget his largely ranting callers and the fact that all might not be as it seems. So much the better, for Alexei. He loved the fact that it challenged listener's expectations.
And then we come back to where I started. Alexei's been in radio comedies like Lenin of the Rovers and About Last Night, but he wanted to choose something very personal to him. Something he thinks is one of the best things he has ever done on the radio: interviewing Lenny Henry on Radio 4's comedian- interviewing-comedian show, Chain Reaction. It's a great interview: playful, funny and revealing. As Alexei says himself - "that's the power of radio isn't it. It's so intimate...." Just Lenny and him chatting..."in front of an audience of 200 people in a studio." But joking apart - as he talked about it, I could feel that it is still something that holds a great deal of value for him, both the making of the programme and the celebration of its subject, his friend Lenny Henry.
Working with Alexei that's what came over the most to me: a fearsome generosity of spirit.
Peter McHugh produces Comedy Controller: Alexei Sayle
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