Comedy of the Week - Alexei Sayle's Imaginary Sandwich Bar

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

Stand-up, philosophy and memoir from the godfather of alternative comedy, Alexei Sayle.In this episode, Alexei recalls his unorthodox upbringing in Liverpool, his subsequent move to London, and a woman called Mrs Cocker who said something that has stuck with him for ever.Written and performed by Alexei Sayle.The song was written and composed by Tim Sutton with:Sophie Creaner - clarinet and sax Tom Ellis - acoustic guitar Matt Sharp - celloProducer - Richard Morris Production Co-ordinator - Jodie CharmanA BBC Studios Audio Production for Radio 4.

BBC Sounds music radio podcast. Sports washing, pink washing or green washing are relatively recent phenomena. This is where evil corporations, armed forces or criminal regimes try and improve their image through sponsorship of sporting, LGBTQ or cultural events. For example, Saudi Arabia, by some measures the most repressive, brutal and cruel country in the world, has tried to improve its image through hosting sporting tournaments and by buying a Premier League football club, Newcastle United. It's depressing how little football fans care

about what monsters own their club. Yeah, I was a bit worried when United were bought by the aliens out of Independence Day. But the threat of being vaporised by a heat ray seems to have really focused the back three. Though Harry Maguire remains indifferent to the threats. For 15 years or so I thought of myself as an author and I used to love doing literary festivals. All the authors were so nice to me, which is amazing considering how many shit books comedians have written, especially children's

books. Yeah, the books about a horse or a tractor, little tractor that thinks it's a horse, I dunno. A few years ago I did a book reading at the Sydney Opera House as part of a literary festival. I got up at 4.30 a.m. to fly from Melbourne that morning and Qantas had temporarily lost my luggage. I was telling my publisher's PA in the car from Sydney Airport about this, and jokingly, I said it meant that I couldn't do my magic because the rabbit was in the lost luggage.

About 10 minutes later, the driver asked in a nervous voice it's not alive is it your rabbit I replied that no the rabbit was not alive the doves were but they were flying to Sydney under their own steam. Recently, there's been a great deal of pushback against this patronage, this sponsorship by monsters, particularly in the world of literature. The funding of literary festivals and literary prizes has been badly affected by scandals over these events or awards being connected to big companies or banks that are involved in fossil fuel extraction, environmental destruction or genocide. So now as the big money has withdrawn it's become much

cheaper to sponsor literary festivals and prizes. For example what was the prestigious Booker Prize is now sponsored by a small chain of local dry cleaners. And this year I won it. I won what was the prestigious Booker Prize now sponsored by a small chain of local dry cleaners. For my new novel I'll think of a funny title tomorrow. It was still a real honor to win that prize. It was my first literary prize and it meant a lot to me. There was an amazingly lavish award ceremony at a Central London hotel and I was very excited and nervous to go up onto the stage to pick up my very first literary award which was the prestigious Booker

Prize now sponsored by a small chain of local dry cleaners. So I got up there smiling and excited and waving to my friends and family in the audience and they told me that my award will be ready to pick up next Thursday. Ah, here we are at my imaginary sandwich bar! CHEERING Behold my sandwich bar Fetters at bargain prices Where all you cheats and thieves and liars

Come for rolls and custard slices Because humanity is Kant and vanity. But underneath it all a man's a man which does enjoy his daily sandwich. Hello everybody, I'm Alexis Hale and welcome to my imaginary sandwich bar. Yeah! Yeah!

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Over here is the pretend counter, behind me is the illusory coffee machine, and in front of me the non-existent customers. Here's one of them now. Hello mate, what can I get you?

Hello! Your poster in the window says, try our famous salt beef. How famous is it? Well it's mentioned in Sally Rooney's latest novel, Intermezzo. And questions have been asked about my salt beef in the Norwegian Parliament. Fair enough! I'll have salt beef on ride then. Hold the plutonium, I'm driving.

Coming right up. So, I don't think I've seen you around here before mate. No! I live in the suburbs. I'm an ex-special forces assassin. Trying to live a quiet life but enemies from my past have returned to try and kill me. And I'm forced to employ all my old skills to try and prevent that. So you're a character in one in five Netflix movies? LAUGHTER Yes!

Right, what do you think it is about the character of the ex-Special Forces assassin living quietly in the suburbs that's so attractive to movie makers? Well, I think there's essentially two things going on here. Some of it is just a usual superhero crap. A person with extraordinary powers, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, which is just lazy writing. But secondly, I wonder whether these films with their hundreds of violent slayings aren't designed to obituate us to the idea of death and murder. The last year or so has shown that anybody who gets in the way of capitalism or neocolonialism, we'd murder them. Our whole system is based on murder. The United States, where all these

movies come from, was after all founded on murder and the genocide of the indigenous population! Hey, hang on a second there mate, this is supposed to be a comedy show. Don't be talking this heavy stuff about neocolonialism and murder and genocide and stuff. Don't blame me! You literally put these words in my mouth! You say it's a comedy show, but it's not, is it? Really? It's ill thought out Marxist propaganda!

Why can't you do reassuring stand up about the renewed tie of everyday life or complain about woke culture and stuff you supposedly can't say anymore? Why do you have to mention genocide? You're going to get so many complaints for the show. You've already insulted all football fans, especially those in Newcastle United, in the first minute! And Saudi Arabia! I mean, they're very vengeful people, the Saudis!

Why do you persist in performing this divisive material? What is wrong with you, man? I don't know! I can't stop myself! There's your salt beef sandwich. Cheers, thanks! Yeah, see you, bye. That was Mark Wahlberg.

I've got a superpower. I have the power to melt an ice cube with my mind. Takes about two hours, but it's real. There exists a Berthold Brecht poem to fit every depressing event in the world, like a sort of reverse moon pig dot com. Of late, I find myself drawn to a particular verse he wrote in 1939 on the eve of the war entitled Motto. It goes, in the dark times will there also be singing.

Yes, they will also be singing about the dark times. This is sort of what this is. I'm actually 72 and I thought I'd seen and done everything, but in the last four years, I've lived through a pandemic and a genocide. I mean, how did that happen? I caught COVID in March, 2020, very early on, and though it was severe for a few days,

I recovered quite well, except that one of the symptoms that persisted for a while was that I lost my sense of smell. I also lost my sense of taste for months food just tasted like cardboard to me. I also lost my sense of decency. So I became a columnist for the Daily Mail. There's this program on BBC One in the 9 to 10 a.m. slot called Fraudbusters and it often features some cases like some guy who's made a big insurance claim saying he can't

move because he's got a terrible back injury but undercover footage reveals him working in the evenings as a clown for Cirque du Soleil. Now it's absolutely correct that petty fraud such as the part-time clowns is punished, but let us not forget that the Tories and their friends used the pandemic to embezzle tens of billions of pounds. Some of it for vastly overpriced equipment, some of it for vague unspecified services, some of it for equipment that simply didn't work. And nobody's tracking them with hidden cameras. And of course the Labour Party will do nothing about it in the end because at some point

they'll want to do exactly the same thing. A while ago I was doing stand-up comedy at a festival in Southport on Merseyside and in order to promote ticket sales I did one of those questionnaire things for a Southport lifestyle magazine. One of the questions they asked me was what would you say to Boris Johnson who was at that time the Prime Minister if you had five minutes with him? This was my reply. Christabel Bielenberg was a British woman who lived in Germany throughout the Second World War and the reign of the Nazis. In her book, The Past is Myself, she describes how one night she shared a

railway carriage with a Latvian SS officer who had been a member of an Einsatzkommando, an extermination squad in Poland. During the journey he tells her the story of one old rabbi who steps out from a crowd of people who they are about to shoot. The SS man says he looked at us one after another, a straight deep dark and terrible look. My children he said, God is watching what you do. Now the SS man says I could not forget that look, even now it burns in me. So he's going off to the Eastern Front to get himself killed.

That's what I would say to Boris Johnson, I wrote. My child, God is watching what you do. After reading that response, my wife Linda told me it was a bit too heavy for a publication that was mostly about footballers' kitchens. So I just left the answer to that question blank. Right now God may not be watching what with God not existing and all, but the world sees what our political classes in the West

are allowing to happen and looks on appalled. My mother grew up in a Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox Jewish home. I remember her brothers and six sisters were always very critical. They'd say, ooh, your trousers are completely hideous, or ooh, you say the most stupid and ignorant things, or ooh, your hair is horrible.

They were acidic Jews. Yeah, you try writing two hours of bloody stand-up. In her 30s, when she met my dad, my mother swapped one religion, Judaism, for another, communism. Now, there was an awful lot wrong with the style of Soviet communism my parents followed. For example, language is a fluid, constantly changing thing. Exciting new words are bombed, stampulantly being drawn into the speech. And writing of our nation. Now, these words often come from other language.

English has many such borrowed words. It is taken from French, Spanish and of course our former colonies like India. We also have more surprisingly several words that we have taken from the Russian language, though for some reason they all seem to be connected to the science fiction sphere. For example Sp Sputnik and we get robot from the Russian word the robotnik, which means worker. And we also get the word dalek from daleknikov, which means in Russian, giant wheeled talking pepper pot with waggly arms. Now you might wonder what the great communist Slav motherland might want with such a thing.

But you have to remember that the old Soviet command economy was not very good at producing consumer goods. The bureaucrats who controlled production placed orders for what they thought the people should have, not what they wanted or needed and if the Soviet apparatchiks thought it was a giant talking pepper pot with waggly arms or a rocket-powered salami that the proletariat should have then Soviet citizens were a queue for hours to buy one for themselves and think themselves lucky that they had acquired such a thing. I had to get away from Liverpool so I came to live in London when I was 18.

The reason I had to get away was my parents, being active in left-wing politics like me, had started attending the same post-pub after closing time parties that I went to on a Saturday night. I would be in some student flat in Liverpool, ace, trying to act all cool and hard. Then I'd look across the room to see my mother, Molly, telling a group of pretty anarchist girls some anecdotes about my potty training. Or how I used to think as a child that I would be kidnapped by bananas. That's him over there in the leather jacket, Molly would say pointing in my direction. There's a journalist called David Aronovich who's

now very right wing but started out left wing. That journey from left to right is one many take, particularly those who are most loudmouth when they are leftists. But it is one journey that I've never gone on. I've remained always a loudmouthed leftist. Aronovich's parents, Sam and Lavender, were like my parents Joe and Molly, for many years members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Now if you were in the Communist Party then all the people who work for you had to be in the party too. At one point the Aronovich family fell out with their dentist. This woman was of course in the party just like their builder, their plumber and their accountant and the disagreement was ideological rather than orthodontic.

On moving to a new politically neutral dental practice, Aronovich says in his memoir, there we discovered that some practitioners actually used a local anesthetic before they did fillings. This was exactly my experience, suffering for years at the hands of a dentist, who though incompetent and cruel, and I always believed was trained by the KGB, maintained the correct line on the dictatorship and the proletariat, which was thought by my parents to be much more important. Those who become comedians often do so because as children they have lived a life that is in some way or other outside of mainstream society. Of the Young Ones comic strip group

it was surprising how many had been service brats. IE their parents were or had been until recently serving members of the armed forces. Amongst others, Dawn French's father was in the RAF, of the armed forces. Amongst others, Dawn French's father was in the RAF, Adrian Edmondson's father was in the Army, Keith Allen's father was a Submariner, and my parents were in the Viet Cong. LAUGHTER We saw the Vietnam War as a crucial war of liberation

against the Empire of the United States. I went on so many anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in Liverpool when I was a kid. The movement was buoyed by the unsubstantiated rumor that Ho Chi Minh, the leading Vietnamese revolutionary and chairman of the Communist Party of Vietnam, had once worked in one of the many restaurants in the city's Chinatown. Hello, Mr Ho, and we'd like two chop suies and a mixed meat fried noodle, please. And I hear you're planning to overthrow French colonialism. Welcome for you. Well done.

You stick it to them French, them neo-colonialists. Incidentally there is also a story that Adolf Hitler visited Liverpool in 1912. It is certainly true his half-brother, Alois, lived in Upper Stanhope Street, Toxteth-Liverpool 8 at that time. Unlike Uncle Ho, nobody in Liverpool took pride in Hitler's visit. Though many say, perhaps with partisan motives, that while Hitler was on Merseyside, he supported Everton Football Club. The victory of the People's Republic of Vietnam over the Empire of the United States, that brave nation freeing itself from colonial exploitation to become the place where your trainers are made, was a great moment to triumph for us on the left,

perhaps the last one we'd ever have. When I got away from Liverpool and moved to London, I rented a grimy bed-sit in North Kensington. It did have underfloor heating for a day. Then the downstairs neighbors managed to put the fire out. And my mother came to visit me. I took her for a walk and as we strolled along a street called Chepstow Villas Molly suddenly said, I know some people who live here and before I could stop her she ran over the road to hammer on one of the front doors.

After a few seconds, it was answered by a sleepy-looking East Asian man. The brass plaque by the entrance read, Legation of the People's Republic of North Vietnam. Oh, hello, Molly. The man said, giving me the feeling that this might not be the first time she had appeared unannounced at the legation. Because of her work collecting money for medical aid for Vietnam, my mother was well known to many of the diplomats from the North. We were shown into the front room and after a while the military attache, a man who had been one of the heroes of the great battle of Dien Bien Phu, where the Vietnamese

decimated the French colonial forces, entered wearing his full dress uniform with row after row of shiny medals at his breast, which he had done for our visit and made painful small talk with us for half an hour, I imagined he'd rather be back in the jungle being napalmed than doing this. One thing my parents communism did give me was a hatred of racism and a hatred of injustice. This hatred of injustice still burns within me, particularly when I see people getting a free coffee in Waitrose when they clearly haven't bought anything.

Also they taught me to identify with the oppressed rather than the oppressor. As Federico Garcia Lorca said, I will always identify with those who have nothing and are not even allowed to enjoy that nothing in peace a Letter came to my house the other day and it was addressed simply to the occupier. So I sent it to Israel Anybody who laughed at that joke and is still in the Labour Party will be expelled immediately. There is nobody more multiply oppressed than the Palestinian people. In the back pages of the homeless magazine, The Big Issue, they used to print poetry submitted by its vendors.

One month there was a verse written by Vendor 511 entitled The Interfather. It went, he might be short, he might be fat, but I love Yasser Arafat. He did not pause, he had no flaws, when he was married to the cause. Yes, he might be short, he might be fat, but we all love Yasser Arafat. Unfortunately, I think Vendor 511's admiration for the leader of the PLO was misplaced. The great tragedy of the Palestinian people is that they have been let down by their leaders as well as by the rest of the world. I'm a great admirer of the poet W.B. Yeats, partly because of his family's chain of Yeats' wine lodges, but also because he wrote the greatest apocalyptic

poem of all time, The Second Coming. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. The best like all conviction, the worst are West Streeting. LAUGHTER Honestly, West Streeting, how can somebody be so awful with just one head? LAUGHTER Being socialist, communist, my parents made it very hard for me to be a comedian. They said I couldn't tell a joke unless I could guarantee everybody got it. Everywhere in Britain, the left is in retreat and dissenting voices are being silenced.

The one area this country leads the world in is not AI or e-commerce, but in jailing climate activists. The right to protest has been replaced with the right to obey the police. In my grimy bed-sit in North Kensington, the flat upstairs was occupied by an alcoholic woman called Mrs. Cocker. One evening I came home from college to find Mrs. Cocker lying drunk at the foot of the stairs. She blearily looked up and said, what is this place you've brought me to, Roger? From then on, when I am in some frightening or mystifying place I often find myself thinking what is this place you've brought me to Roger.

It happens a lot these days. Half sleeping, half waking, I look through my drapes At a nightmarish vista of ubers and vapes A pound shop affair, a dystopian milieu Where a drone could deliver your groceries or kill ya And I see silhouetted against a red dawn, A horrible vision all twisted and torn, A bony limped harpy disfigured and clammy, Which screams, I love Trump, with the voice of David Lammy, Which pecks at my liver and spits in my face, Oh, what is this place that you brought me to, Roger? At the apex of bliss or at ecstasy's height, I can still feel it writhing just out of my sight. With novichok breath and a hard-on for death, selling emancipation through mass annihilation,

and behind it a fright scape of flash flash flooded mud, of Tesla's turned sentient and lusting for blood. Toxic TikToks and rooftops and vanished existence and I hear a sad voice somewhere off in the distance. It punctures the bubble of weak liberal thought crying, what is this place that you've brought me to, Roger? When I see that our striving brings nothing but folly, I think finding hope is like playing Where's Wally?

Then I think of my Linda and my radio show, and I feel a warm glow from my head to my bottom. But as I walk homewards through grey London rain an unwelcome suggestion drops into my brain. Am I comedy god with satirical Insightful, vivacious, her bane debonair, Or am I Mrs. Cocker, sat sprawled on the stair, Crying, Roger, Roger, Roger? Are you there? You may or may not have been listening to Alexi Sale's Imaginary Sandwich Bar. Thank you, good night! Alexi Sale's Imaginary Sandwich Bar was written and performed by Alexi Sale,

with additional material by vendor 511. The song was written and composed by Tim Sutton. The producer was Richard Morris. It was a BBC Studios audio production for Radio 4. From BBC Radio 4, this is What Seriously? I'm Dara O'Brien. And I'm Izzy Sutty. And in our new series, we're bringing you short stories and tall tales.

What Seriously? is packed with real life strange but true stories that make you go, what, seriously? And provide you with excellent social ammo to impress your friends. The twist is we don't know how each story unfolds and we'll have to figure it out one fragment at a time with our special guests who each have a mysterious connection to the tale. That's right, I am your spy expert. And I don't really want to bring you back to the real facts of the story because you're making me laugh so much but I feel like I should. We're the only country in the world that eats the animal on our crest like and I never know whether to feel terrible or brilliant about that. All these engineers trying desperately to reduce

the amount of dust in space and you get Izzy taking up a balloon full of glissando. Wow! You're welcome. I've had that one at the house. You've come up with all the stuff. I know right. It's like I'm reading from a sheet or something, but no I am! Join us for What Seriously? from BBC Radio 4. Available now on BBC Sounds.