Q FD2D are doing some training to start lecturing. You said in your talk you used to be a lecturer in the day doing your comedy in the evenings. What was the transition between the two like?

It was weird. I’d been teaching part time, it was a very different era, sort of 70s, I’d been teaching general studies part-time but I was just hopeless. So I thought, I was about 27-28 I thought I should at least learn how to do this properly so I went to college.

At the same time my career was taking off. When you’re young you’ve got the energy to do that but I really wanted to be a performer so in the end it became impossible.

Q Did it happen quite organically, was it something where you planned for a long time to do some stand up or was it one day you just decided I want to do some stand up?

It’s impossible to describe the comedy landscape in the seventies, there was nowhere to perform. There were no comics. When I first started doing it, it was with another guy and we’d have about a one and a half hour show but people were often very confused about what we were attempting you know.

Q Has comedy developed?

Kind of. It’s essentially the same. I mean it is a case of clearly I was in the right place at the right time but rather than take the conventional route and become a conventional comic, you know which was basically working men’s club, I performed and then got people to come to me. You know someone else would have done it, but this whole gigantic business that there is now, with Michael Mcintyre playing MEN arena, started with me. Big deal and who gives a shit (he says modestly).

Q Did you ever go to Manchester to Bernard Manning’s comedy club?

One of my friend’s Mathew Norman, a columnist who tries to rehabilitate comics like him, but as far as I’m concerned he was just shit. All those guys, people try and reinvent them but when you watch them without the nostalgia, without the filter of time they were all pretty shit. I mean Morecambe and Wise, they were alright, but I never had any time for them really.

Q In your career you’ve been on the stage, on the big screen, radio, stand up, written and produced, wrote books and been successful in all of them. Out of all these things what would you say you’ve enjoyed the most and what would you say you’d like to do more of in the future?

The writing, I’m very grateful to have found writing as a second act you know. More of that, it plays to my narcissism.

Q It plays to your freedoms?

Yes, and you know the novel has remained unchanged, essentially unchanged, since whenever the first novel was, Robinson Crusoe I suppose. Because it’s such a wonderfully complex form and you could do the most amazing things with a novel. Stand up comedy is really very explicit, you say what you mean whereas prose fiction is very implicit, it’s about meaning and mood, it’s wonderfully subtle, well if you do it right.

Q The Young Ones is one of my favourite TV programs, I’m sure you’re probably sick of talking about it. When you got into it did you know how big it was going to be and what do you think when you look at it now?

You never know how it’s going to be. I mean what I used to say in interviews when we were on tour or something was ‘we’re making this show called The Young Ones, if a lot of people share our sense of humour it’ll be massive.’ We had an expectation they’d really like it, but you’re also very arrogant when you’re that age.

Q You had a few hits in ‘Ullo John! Gotta New Motor?’ and ‘Didn’t You Kill My Brother?’ which you look back on quite fondly but you’re not doing further. What I wanted to talk about was that The Young Ones had quite a cult following in the music as well as the fashion and the comedy, what music did you listen to then?

Because the BBC was split into two departments, one was sketch shows or light entertainment, the other was comedy which was sitcoms. The Young Ones came out of light entertainment and you had to have a band in a sketch show, it was kind of a contractual obligation that we had to have a band. They made a virtue of that by putting them in the toilet and stuff like that. But I think it was me who got madness into the show because I sort of knew them. So I was into the music (on the show) but everybody was very excited to get Motorhead on, Peter Richardson who did The Comic Strip, he was huge mates with Lemmy and they were always coming out drinking. I hated all that shit really, the heavy metal shit.

Q What’s your favourite thing about the Midlands and what’s your opinion on the culture?

I did a show years ago called OTT in Birmingham and I’ve found the people there extraordinarily friendly. So, I’ve always loved Birmingham, I think it’s an amazing town, the people are fantastic really. I never played Leicester much, whenever I was on tour Nottingham, and it was a big concert hall, always sold out first so I’ve always been tremendously grateful to Nottingham and the fans there.

It’s sort of different now but when I grew up there was an enormous disdain for the provinces, you know anywhere outside the north really. And partly I think in a sense it was a conspiracy because it allowed people to do the terrible things they did. Leicester’s not really as fucked about compared to a lot of cities, but that kind of disdain was a really bad thing about the post-war period. Now it’s one of the great things about the 2000s that you can get food, you can get fashion, you can get an apartment, and you can get anything and London isn’t necessarily part of the equation. I mean you can have a really incredible life in provincial cities, and not in that ghost town way Coventry was in the seventies, making the best of a bad job. You can have an extraordinary life in somewhere like Leicester in a way you couldn’t when I was growing up.

I remember when I toured, my wife didn’t eat meat then, after the gig the only thing she could do to eat anywhere in a town like this was to get a kebab and then get them to throw the meat away. You know, there was no funky bars, no vegetarians, no restaurants, that was it and then there was shitty hotels, no boutique hotels like the lace market, there was nothing, it was vile.

Alexei Sayle 2010