Less and less of 'that fat bloke shouting at everyone'

In one of his newspaper columns, Alexei Sayle took a deliciously barbed and about-time-too swipe at comedians who think what the world is waiting for is for them to write a book. He wrote that a certain comedian felt his "sublime comic gift was a thing to be sneered at as merely mass entertainment and instead produced a collection of meretricious short stories, which he desperately hopes will give him the intellectual recognition from a snobby coterie of journalists and critics which he craves".

Funny, because here in my hand is a collection of short stories written by the comedian turned author, Alexei Sayle. "I quite like unprovoked maliciousness, in a mild pathetic sort of way," he says, "and that was an example of that."

To be disappointingly fair, what prevents Sayle being hoisted by his own petulant petard is that his books are always reviewed along the lines of "all books by comedians are crap, but this is an exception". His first collection of short stories, Barcelona Plates, published two years ago, attracted the sort of acclaim that was a deal more gushing than that which he used to receive as an "angry, alternative" comedian.

But it's still a bit of a clichΘ isn't it, funny person tries to go all literary? "I don't think so. In my case I've always been writing, not like the other lot.

"I brought out three comic novels in the 1980s and have been contributing to magazines and newspapers for as long as I can remember. I never said comedians shouldn't write books, I just said they shouldn't write such bad books," he says.

Such were the reviews for his first collection of stories that he felt he should try to do a novel. However, put off by "the bigness of it all", he has instead just brought out another collection of short stories called The Dog Catcher, which will make you smile - as much as shudder - as you survey his dystopic world view, leavened as it is by lashings of barbed humour.

In a story called 'Barcelona Chairs' we meet an architect called "rupert" (his sense of design is such that he can't have any capital letters in his name). Having designed his Belgravia home along ultra-minimalist lines, he then switches his attentions to his wife - who, he believes, is "under-achieving". After climbing his way up the New Labour hierarchy, his life dramatically unravels - all because of a tiny bit of graffiti. As much an old-fashioned Tale Of The Unexpected as a potent piece of contemporary satire, it reads like the bastard child of Roald Dahl and Bret Easton Ellis.

There's more brutal humour in 'Who Died and Left You In Charge?', a tale of two cross-dressing men who wage their own private war on cyclists in London.

Most notably, in 'The Only Man Stalin Was Afraid Of', Sayle intertwines politics, surrealism and pathos in a story that could well have been a novel. And the title story itself is a macabre account of heroin use in a small Spanish village.

As much about people and their peculiarities as they are original and mordantly funny, these stories are coming down with ideas, plot twists, narrative flips and shocking surprises. There's a real contemporary feel to proceedings, as all manner of political and showbiz figures enter and exit the action.

While most comics talk about making the leap into writing, Sayle says for him it was more of a continuation, and he's still "sticking up two fingers at polite society". Now, at 49, he says he is seen less and less as "that fat bloke shouting at everyone".

Sayle was born in Liverpool to parents who were communists. "I never thought it that strange to be eight years of age and out on a demo, it was just the way it was. There's a lot there about that sort of upbringing, I might try and expand upon it some day. I find, after that sort of upbringing, it's difficult to believe in certain things. Like football, I like football and that, but I can never really identify with any particular team - it's like a shoe fetishism. I've the same attitude to hero worship."

After going to art college in London, he ended up working on the construction of the London Underground's Jubilee Line, and then moved into acting and stand-up. He arrived as a new wave of entertainment was hitting the clubs, and he was the first ever compΦre of the infamous Comedy Store. "It's hard to describe what Britain was like then," he says. "There was no stand-up, just that Bernard Manning type of garbage. I wanted to use the classic American form, where you dressed in a suit and talked about hip subjects. That had never been done before, but I knew it was possible."

Sayle was a great stand-up - all wound-up aggression and splatter-gun sardonicism. His Jewishness and his communist background gave him plenty of material to work from. He was known back then chiefly as the man who used to finish his sets with a routine about Isherwood and Auden's wartime flight to the US. His contemporaries included Rik Mayall, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and Ben Elton. He went on to appear in The Young Ones and The Comic Strip Presents series, but always kept his distance personally - "I was really snotty back then".

A much in-demand voice-over artist (though nobody seems to recognise his voice on the many ads he has done), he kept performing while pursuing a career as an actor (Gorky Park, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) before he rather oddly signed a seven-year contract with a US television station to appear as a chef in a spin-off from the Golden Girls series called Golden Palace.

"They were horrible old ladies," he says, "and I was losing all sense of self-respect. It was quite a disgraceful thing to do. Luckily they fired me for being shit."

On arrival back in Britain in the early 1990s, Sayle was dissuaded from returning to performing by the changed comedy climate.

"I had kept on doing the same sort of thing I used to, but it had ceased to be what people wanted. The world left me behind a bit. The gaps between my television series (Snuff on BBC2) got longer, and I felt I was just giving the audience what they wanted."

He is withering about the current state of comedy. "So much popular shit - well-performed shit, but still shit. But then the British like that dumb, stupid, smutty stuff. Why haven't any of the channels shown a cutting-edge sitcom since Taxi? Anything that is daring and tackling human issues is now to be found in the soaps."

He particularly dislikes Harry Hill, The Fast Show and Vic 'n' Bob - "it's all harmless rubbish, unchallenging and undemanding". One of the stories in his first collection was called 'Nic and Tob', a thinly disguised attack on Reeves and Mortimer. "Their arrival on the comedy scene had fortunately coincided with the rise of stupidity," he wrote, "the public having tired of being shouted at by a fat man about things that weren't their fault as a form of light entertainment".

"I thought their first series was great, he says, "but they are part of that lads' mag, stupid studenty thing - utterly without meaning."

He has ruled out ever returning to stand-up. "If I was to do it again, I'd have to go back to the clubs, but I don't like the life enough to do it. For me, these short stories are a big leap forward in terms of pushing myself. And both critically and sales-wise, the last collection of stories was the most successful thing I'd ever done."

The Dog Catcher by Alexei Sayle is published by Sceptre (£12 in UK