Alexei Sayle: Driving lessons? Far too sensible

As a celebrity, I naturally get a huge number of calls on my time (though I admit that some of these are from people asking: "Alexei, will you please fuck off?").

As a celebrity, I naturally get a huge number of calls on my time (though I admit that some of these are from people asking: "Alexei, will you please fuck off?"). Nevertheless, one of the other ones comes from a man who has written to me a couple of times asking me to write about my first car for a charity book entitled My First Car that he thinks he is going to get published.

Well, that ain't going to happen, but then it occurred to me that if I wrote about my first car here, he could cut out this column and stick it in his book, and then everybody's happy. (Apart, perhaps, from you the reader.)

Alexei Sayle: My First Car

The first car I actually bought was a dark blue Fiat 124 - the vehicle that changed its name to the Lada Riva when it defected to the Soviet Union a few years later. I was rather fond of the shape of this car - it was, to my mind, the classic "three box" design, in that it really did look like three boxes stuck together.

When I paid a farmer in Oxfordshire £100 for it, I must have been about 28 and didn't actually have a driving licence. For a long time when I was young in Liverpool, the thought of ever owning a car seemed an impossibility. Nobody in our street did; they seemed as rare and distant as owning your own helicopter or a jewel-encrusted elephant.

As I began to have some success as a comedian, however, the notion of one day obtaining a driving licence began to seem more like a possibility. The sensible thing to do next would have been to have some driving lessons, but that would have been too easy in those crazee 1970s times, when our minds were as flared as our trousers. Instead, my idea was to buy a cheap car that I would drive around while friends who already possessed driving licences sat with me as I learnt.

Of course, once I'd bought the Fiat I couldn't actually drive it back to Fulham where I lived, but instead arranged to have it delivered by a friend who owned a very badly behaved dog. When he got up to our flat, the friend said: "Ermm... on the drive up, Trin had a bit of a go at your back seat." The place we lived in was on the 12th floor of a council tower-block, but even from that height looking down on the 124 parked at the base of the block, we could clearly see the huge gouts of yellow foam that had been torn from the rear bench.

But I was still excited to own a car, so I said to my wife that I'd just go down and put the car in a better parking space. Starting it up and pulling out slightly, a car came up behind me and hooted. In a panic, I drove into the road and, with the other car pursuing me, headed off up the street.

Although I just about knew how to drive straight ahead in second gear, I didn't know how to change down or up, stop without stalling, or turn around. In a terrified sweat, I hatched a plan, figuring that if I could just get to Hammersmith roundabout, a mile and a half away, without stopping and go all the way round it, I would then be heading back to my house. I was away for over two hours, with my wife going frantic and reports coming in over the radio of huge traffic jams all over west London that were being caused by a particularly slow-moving vehicle.

After that I felt that my relationship with the Fiat 124 had soured somewhat. Also, there appeared to be a distinct shortage of friends who wanted to go for pointless seven-mile-an-hour drives with me in a car with torn seats covered in dog slobber around the South-east of England. In the end, I gave the car to a musician friend of mine, who didn't want it and left it in a car park in Lewisham. And then I did the sensible thing and booked myself in for some proper driving lessons.