Alexei Sayle: my wife thinks I'm making a big mistake Why hark back to all that now? Because Sayle, 60 later this year, is returning to the stand-up fray in the UK for the first time since 1995 (exhausted from pioneering effort, he quit altogether a year later in Perth). Taking on his erstwhile mantle of emcee, he's fronting a series of curated gigs at Soho Theatre. It turns out he got a bit lonely slogging on as a moderately successful novelist. "My idea was that if I gave up being a comic, I'd write for 10 years and they'd give me the Booker Prize - they haven't kept their side of the bargain," he deadpans. His wife Linda, who crucially spotted an ad in Private Eye announcing the Comedy Store's impending birth, thereby saving him from an inconsequential and unfulfilling existence in a Brechtian theatre troupe, thinks he should keep his trap shut and his reputation intact. She's very anti me doing this. She says I'm diluting the legacy. Her theory is that I'm so revered because nobody has ever seen me. There's some truth in that. Far from being puffed up about his seminal role in stand-up, Sayle undercuts his own natural arrogance. I'm not without vanity. I do go around insisting that I invented everything to do with comedy, that it's all down to me. I also know that that's b-------! What can we expect? Those hoping for resurrected early routines will be disappointed - it's all new stuff and, crucially, the former militancy will have mellowed. Politically, Sayle is more ambiguous than he was 30 years ago - "There are no clear monsters as there were in the Thatcher era" - although he was never a proselytiser. I used to attack the Left a lot more than the Right because they got on my nerves more and they were in the audience. Having adopted the character of a "hard-case ex-Mod" in early days - and getting so embroiled with it that he couldn't bring himself to mix with the audience for fear of spoiling the effect - a kindlier, more approachable Sayle emerged during his book readings, and he's sticking to it. "The persona was never me although he embodied aspects of me," he says. Now I'll be dealing with all the contradictions of who I am. I have a comfortable life, I do voiceovers - I'm not pretending to be someone I'm not. He didn't enjoy himself back in the day. I was so consumed with ambition, rage and envy, I'd be very keyed up. Now he intends to have fun. With six successful solo TV series under his belt, there's nothing left to prove, no particular direction he needs to take. The biggest change he has noticed on the circuit, besides the abundance and slickness of comedians, is that audiences are easier-going. "That place [the Comedy Store] was wild," he recalls. I had to dominate that room. It astonishes me how compliant they are now. They often seem to be working harder than the comics. And comedians today? He frets at the social mix ("You do see the middle classes colonising stand-up"), but in general he's tactful. He hasn't much time for Frankie Boyle, is OK with Michael McIntyre and Peter Kay - "their material is bland but they're not vile." What about the top stand-up to have emerged from Liverpool in recent years? "My big closing routine at the Comic Strip used to be about W H Auden and Christopher Isherwood," he says, with a smirk. You can't see John Bishop doing that, can you? Well, no, you can't. Maybe Sayle's comeback will help give the scene the good old-fashioned Doctor Martens boot up the backside it is sorely beginning to need. Remember these? Three Alexei Sayle jokes: I thought it was wonderful that in 1981, the Year of the Disabled, everybody supported the Social Democrats. It's great to see people with acute brain damage forming their own party. Mrs Thatcher has special compasses made with the North taken off. I'm not really foreign, you know, I just do it to appear more sophisticated. Nobody would buy Evian Water if it was called Blackburn Water, would they? Alexei Sayle is at the Soho Theatre from Tues, January 17.