ONCE an anarchic, angry young comedian in a tight shiny suit, who shocked and delighted audiences when alternative comedy came into its own in the 80s, Alexei Sayle still claims to be rather cross, and shouts quite a lot during his shows.
Meeting the 63-year-old Liverpudlian today, he's no longer wearing the button-popping suits that became his trademark during his days at London's Comedy Store but he is still round, although no-one would describe him as cuddly.
His second autobiography, Thatcher Stole My Trousers, charts his years from the early 70s through to the 80s, a period during which he believes he was instrumental in changing the landscape of British comedy.
"There aren't many people who can look at an art form and say, 'I invented that'. But with modern comedy, I did.
"It would have happened anyway without me, but it would have looked a bit different," he adds. "But I can look at [Michael] McIntyre or Lee Evans or some young, struggling comic and say, 'I began that whole process'."
After those heady days, when he and the likes of French and Saunders, Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall, Keith Allen and other hellraisers heralded a new era of comedy, Sayle starred with his comic cohorts in The Comic Strip series, The Young Ones and his own TV show Alexei Sayle's Stuff, toured with his peers, wrote some books and made plenty of money doing voice-overs and guest appearances.
Then three years ago, he returned to stand-up, embarking on a mammoth 100-gig tour for the first time in 17 years.
"When I stopped in 1996, I thought I'd come to the limit of what I could do. I'd hit a wall. I was tired. Then I was invited to do a nostalgia show in 2011 and I thought, rather than do old material, I'd write something new. What I wrote was completely different from anything I'd done before and really worked.
"That guy in the tight suit was not me. He was a persona. He was a particular kind of creation. There was a limited amount of stuff he could talk about. I realised that in 2011, I could talk about my actual life and make it appear as stand-up comedy. It was so much nicer than the first time around."
Today, he's keen to remain more neutral when it comes to political comedy, observing that audiences seem uncomfortable with the genre, so he has curbed his trademark left-wing propaganda diatribes.
"I would do stuff about [Jeremy] Corbyn, I suppose, but I think it's important that we're not attached to any political parties, because we have to be free to criticise.
"On the other hand, if you looked at the last election, it was one b*****d in a suit from Oxford versus another b*****d in a suit from Oxford. People's desires are much wider than that."
He laughs at the suggestion that he was gunning for Ben Elton, who co-wrote The Young Ones.
"I felt very bitter at Ben because I felt he'd taken certain aspects of what I did and been much more successful, made a lot more money. I was angry about that.
"But the story I tell in the stand-up is that I apologised to him. And he was surprised and invited me to the opening night of his Rod Stewart musical. I paid for every moment that I'd ever been sh***y to anybody, sitting through that for three hours..."
The deaths of fellow comics Rik Mayall, Robin Williams – who inspired Sayle with his spontaneous appearances at the Comedy Store – and Mel Smith have made him think about the legacies that entertainers leave.
"It's a business that takes its toll. The consolation to any kind of artist is to say, 'At least I've made a mark'. There is the 1985 edition of my appearance on the Roland Rat show."
Sayle, an only child to Communist parents, has enjoyed the trappings of showbiz success. He's lived in London for years and has a holiday home in Spain. He's been married to Linda for 43 years.
"I wouldn't have been me without her. I'd be retired by now, or a lecturer at a college in Saffron Walden, teaching media studies and being very angry about everything."
In his latest memoir, he slams the old-style comedians whose behaviour was often terrible, he claims.
"No woman was safe from their attentions, they all drank heavily and a lot took cocaine. In contrast, all the comedians I worked with, despite our acts often being aggressive and challenging, were in stable relationships, were non-racist and non-sexist, didn't drink or take drugs to excess very often and were able to have a normal conversation that didn't end in a punchline," he writes.
"I came to the conclusion that mainstream comedians were nasty men pretending to be nice, whereas alternative comedians were nice men pretending to be nasty (apart from Keith Allen)."
So who makes Sayle laugh these days?
"Stewart Lee is very funny. Micky Flanagan is really good," he says. "It's harder to be a comic now... it's very difficult to distinguish yourself. There's always somebody who's a bit like you."
:: Thatcher Stole My Trousers by Alexei Sayle is published by Bloomsbury.
