Alexei Sayle: The tormented life of an entertainer

The driver is in a jam caused by a runaway circus elephant

I don't know what sort of cars I thought there'd be when I got famous but here's how I now think it goes. The life of the popular entertainer falls into two distinct parts.

In Part One there is The Career -- working all hours in the clubs, favourable reviews, TV interest, TV show with other people, solo series, unpleasant reviews, optional breakdown and/or substance abuse followed by rehab, sell-out tours in huge venues unsuitable for comedy, appearances in Hollywood movies of variable quality and superficial friendships with other stars.

In Part Two, you spend most of your time travelling in taxis to meetcamera crews at strange locations in order to appear in documentaries reminiscing about Part One. The taxi always either turns up early or two hours late. On reaching the location, a young girl whose T-shirt doesn't come anywhere near meeting the top of her trousers (we seem to be raising a generation of young women who are going to suffer from chills on their kidneys in later years due to the skimpiness of their tops, who'll be a huge drain on the NHS requiring hot water bottles permanently strapped to their backs) gets you a coffee, tells you they're "running a bit late", asks if you'd like a newspaper, then leaves you alone for an hour.

Eventually you do the interview, the associate producer tells you how great you were, then there's a long wait for the taxi to take you home -- they don't need you any more and they'd like you to go as quickly as possible, but the driver's in a traffic jam in Norwood caused by a runaway circus elephant.

I try not to do too many of these things. I avoid all those "I Love Tuesday the 9th of July 1978" programmes that feature social commentators such as DJ Stuart Maconie and children's TV presenter June Sapong pretending they remember everything about Curlywhirlys, Knight Rider and Space Hoppers. I'm undecided on BBC1's Comedy Connections which "tells the behind-the-screens stories of Britain's best and most influential comedies" and would, I'm assured, "benefit tremendously from Alexei Sayle's input".

I did take part in a documentary about the 1984 Miners Strike. I felt that this was valid since I performed at morale-lowering benefit concerts around the country.

But you have no control over the parts of your contribution that they use. In my interview, I provided a two-hour dissertation, employing flip charts, bullet points, a short radio play and an audio-visual display, affording complex analysis on socio-economic constraints in late 20th-Century de-industrialized society, but all that they used was about 30 seconds of me being snippy about the audience at a Wham concert and some footage of my 1984 novelty hit. I suppose I should be grateful that they didn't use the terrible things I said about various well-meaning figures of the time.

Next up there's a documentary featuring my recollections of the 1981 Amnesty International benefit concert, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball. I'm really worried about some terrible things I said about various well-meaning figures of the time.

Out of the corner of your eye as you leave the interview you see the next person slipping upstairs to do their dance, they are some figure from your past, a beloved friend or a hated enemy it hardly matters it's all the same now, heads down you avoid looking at each other. Once in the taxi you try to persuade the driver to take you to Bluewater in Kent and wait while you buy an expensive pair of trainers which 15 years too young for you and a new mop, but he's under strict instructions to take you to the home address and nowhere else.