The Oxford Student - Official Student Newspaper

Not a young one any more

When I meet Alexei Sayle I am surprised at just how familiar he looks. His face is seemingly unchanged over the years. Maybe he was born round and bald with a kind of coarse grey hairiness that is more than just stubble, yet not quite a beard. Perhaps another, more plausible reason for his familiarity is the longevity and diversity of his career. A stand-up comic and actor with a range that goes beyond The Young Ones to critical acclaim in Gorky Park and the silver screen success of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, he has serious performing credentials. But now a writer? He has written columns for The Independent, The Observer and Time Out on a regular basis; and out of this, he claims, springs the authorial voice of his literary efforts. His two collections of short stories - Barcelona Plates and the recent paperback The Dog Catcher - are accomplished, rather the cliched attempts of the television masses to dominate the publishing world. As Alexei himself says, "every performer, comedian, gardener" now turns their often infantile hand to fiction. Yet he has managed to escape the crap trap and impress the critics. His latest literary outing is a surprising and challenging read. I ask whether he finds it hard to be taken seriously in the literary world and he recounts an incident at the Oxford Literary Festival when he and Michael Palin received a somewhat hostile reception from what he terms "real authors". "Michael turned to me and said 'they hate us you know'". Yet despite this, he says this is the happiest period of his career so far. "The short story form just came to me naturally"....