Alexei Sayle’s memoir traces a life of marches, satire and left-wing doubt

At 74, Alexei Sayle is old enough to risk a familiar fate for veteran British leftists: being recast as a national treasure. But the comedian, writer and broadcaster still seems determined to resist that softening, and the new review of his memoir How I’ve Tried to Change the World suggests he has not lost the hard edge that first made him notorious.

According to the review in The Guardian Books, the book brings together Sayle’s own recollections, political arguments and comic detours as it follows him from protests in 1960s Liverpool to marches in 2020s London. The memoir draws on a surveillance file in which special branch described him as an “intellectual thug” who made “foul-mouthed comments about the royal family”. That sort of language, the review notes, fits the public persona Sayle built through stand-up, The Young Ones, novelty records, radio and later podcasts — but the book’s real focus is the persistence of his politics beneath the performance.

A central idea in the memoir is that comedy was not, for Sayle, simply a route to fame or money. He writes that becoming a “professional funny man” was part of Antonio Gramsci’s “war of position”, a way of smuggling communist ideas into mass culture by getting them onto Top of the Pops, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Doctor Who. The review treats that claim as one of the book’s most characteristic moves: part self-mythology, part serious political strategy, and part acknowledgement that activism can work through culture as well as through the street.