There seems to be a trend adopted by comedians — good ones anyway. They start out, work ferociously hard to get to where they want to, tour relentlessly, do TV and then burn out and stop, bored of the nomadic loneliness of stand-up. But after years in the wilderness, the itch just won’t go away. It gets worse with every year of exile until, unable to contain themselves, they’re forced back on stage, older and wiser. This has been the case recently with Stephen Merchant, Paul Merton, Alan Davies and now Alexei Sayle, who last toured in anger last century.

He laughs when I tell him my theory. “They’re sick,” he smiles, “and maybe there’s an element of that, although I don’t feel it’s a compulsion. But it has been a long time.” Sixteen years to be precise. But then Sayle’s case is slightly different, because he turned his back on the very genre that many people credit him with having created in the first place – stand-up. After all, he was the first ever MC at The Comedy Store, lynchpin of The Comic Strip, voted one of the UK’s Greatest Stand-ups, and star of the The Young Ones. Then he vanished. And yet here he is at Oxford’s Glee Club tonight, with a whole new set. What happened? “Look, it’s not mentally healthy to do stand-up,” he says. “And when I stopped doing it 16 years ago I was sick of it and couldn’t see where I was going with it, or what I was doing.”

He felt his persona on stage was so far removed from who he was that he had turned into a fraud. “My novelty factor was being angry and crazy, and I could not modulate that. No one else was doing smart political stand-up. What I did set the scene — it was original, and therefore pressured and superceded everything else . . . I was tired. I wanted to do something more intelligent and complex.”

The Liverpudlian took up writing instead and did very well as an author. And then he agreed to perform at a charity gig at the Comedy Store earlier this year. “When I got out on stage it was a bit like dying,” he chuckles, “because I saw a bright light and felt a tremendous sense of serenity. It was very, very odd but the perfect way to come back.”

His legions of fans knew he had it in him, so why his own lack of confidence? “I had never known how good I could be because I was a comic persona and was so combative and wound up that I never believed I could enjoy doing it. “And then it gradually dawned on me that I could do it differently and I thought, ‘If you’re good at this why aren’t you doing it?’”

So now he’s back in a different guise — as himself — and while comedy’s still as hard as he remembers, he’s enjoying it: “I did four nights in Soho and when I went on it didn’t work at all. So I had to have a big rethink in the second half and then it was fine. It’s a f***er to do and it doesn’t matter how much the audience wants and likes you, you can still f*** it up.” It seems there’s a little anger still there.

“I’m not against mellowing,” he smiles, “but if you call mellowing playing golf and putting my money in a bank in the Cayman Islands then I am. I’m still intolerant of injustice but I’m less of a fanatic and not as dogmatic. So in the show there’s lots of political stuff, as well as a little bit about penguins because that bit works. And lots of new stuff I haven’t done yet because its very vitriolic. So don’t worry I’m still pretty cross.” Still, he admits his wife Linda thinks he’s still only popular because he’s an enigma, and that jumping on stage as himself can only lead to disaster. Whatever the outcome, he much prefers the lower-key lifestyle of his current tour to what came before. “I used to get picked up in a car, taken to the theatre for hours of soundchecks, do the gig, go to the celebrity aftershow party, and then get taken home. Now there’s none of that. I get on the bus, do the show and have a drink with the punters in the bar after. It’s easy. I even splashed out on a cab last night, much to Linda’s dismay, and it’s so much nicer than the other stuff.”

And while his fans still worship him, he remains unperturbed. “I deal with the pedestal early on in the show because the audience seems to have a kind of affection and degree of expectation, and the reality is some fat, old bloke running around the stage arthritically, diluting the legend. “So I hope there aren’t any hecklers — I'm too old for that sh**.”

Glee Club, Thursday October 4.

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