Alexei Sayle: I could never make things up

I was looking through some of my old interviews and reviews the other day.

I was looking through some of my old interviews and reviews the other day. I was searching for a particularly fabulous review of one of my books that I remember getting; but I never did find it, and it was a depressing experience. Not because I couldn't find the review, but because I recall giving a lot of those interviews and I definitely recollect thinking at the time that I was being witty, interesting and charming, but on re-reading the cuttings, to my horror, I found that I come across as surly, rude, emotionally detached and plain odd.

There can be only one explanation for this - it's clearly bad journalism. The journalists have obviously failed to capture my innate magnetism, humour and charisma, and they all need to be fired from their newspapers right away.

There was one feature of those interviews, though, that I couldn't avoid noticing: that I talked about the same things over and over again; I mentioned the same events, gave the same insights, reminisced over the same incidents, used the same metaphors. I had to admit this couldn't be the interviewer's fault. My conclusion with regard to the events and the incidents is simply that I haven't done much. Looking back on my life, it occurs to me that really only eight things have ever happened to me, and of those, two are the subject of gagging orders in the United States and one is still a crime in some parts of the EU.

This might be a problem in that I am supposed to write a column about things that have happened to me in cars, or my thoughts concerning cars, and I have nearly run out of both.

However, others have encountered the same problem. About 20 or 30 years ago, travel writing changed considerably; instead of being about missions up the Orinoco or finding the North West Passage, it became much more rooted in real life, more anecdotal. I used to be a keen reader of this modern travel writing. What was particularly impressive was all the incredible things that had happened to these intrepid travellers, the unusual places they visited, the interesting people they met there, and the exciting insights that these people gave them.

Whenever I've travelled, I've only ever met a man from Northampton who collected those triangular plastic sandwich boxes (twice).

Recently, I met a publisher who had produced a lot of this type of travel writing. When I told him how impressed I was by his authors, he snorted at me. "Don't you realise," he said "that often travel writers set out on their trips and meet nobody at all, except oddly that man from Northampton who collects those triangular plastic boxes that sandwich come in?

"However, these writers have taken a fat advance from their publishers, so they have to produce a book. Do you know what they do? They make it up! They dream up idiosyncratic little hotels with eccentric but wise owners, they invent all manner of quirky fellow travellers who unveil all sorts of profundities about Turkey or the Amazon or Croydon, and they devise all kinds of unusual incidents that prove their own sagacity and bravery, simply to fill up the empty pages."

Well, I was deeply shocked; my respect for all these travel writers evaporated, and I suddenly felt much better about myself and the few things that had happened to me in my life. I also thought how despicable these fraudulent authors were and congratulated myself that, of course, I would never do anything like that, and The Independent wouldn't countenance something so unethical.

So, I guess I'm afraid I'm just going to have to soldier on with my tiny store of life experiences. The week after next, I'll tell you the story of how I went for a flight over the Middle East in a rocket-propelled car with Steven Tyler, the lead singer of Aerosmith, Ronnie Corbett's wife and General Musharraf of Pakistan.

Re-reading this column, I realise that though it's been about travel and travel writing, it hasn't really been about cars, and this is, after all, a car supplement, so... erm... I quite like the pictures I've seen of the new Suzuki Swift; it looks a bit better than the last one.

motoring@independent.co.uk