Alexei David Sayle was born on the 7th of August 1952 the son of Molly (Malka) Sayle (née Mendelson), a pools clerk, and Joseph Henry Sayle, a railway guard. Raised in Anfield, he attended Anfield Road Junior School from 1958 to 1964, followed by Alsop High School, Walton from 1964 to 1969, although he was expelled halfway through the sixth form. Following that he took a foundation course in Art at Southport College of Art before moving south to attend Chelsea School of Art and Design in London. Unemployed for four years, he decided to attend Garnett College Roehampton, a training college for teachers in Further Education where he obtained a degree, got offered a job at the college, and did his teacher training for the first year of his career, teaching during the day and then cycling to gigs at night.
He married Linda Rawsthorn in 1974 and in 1979 he became the original MC for the Comedy Store and was also in the series 'Alexei Sayle and the Fish People' for Capital 95.8 about Alexei working as a council funded community detective on a housing estate in Stoke Newington. He and David Stafford won the Pye radio award that year and Alexie made his first TV appearance in the comedy thriller ''Repeater' (1979). It was during his time at the Edinburgh Festival in 1980 that he was contacted by Peter Richardson who wanted to move all the best acts at the Comedy Store to Raymonds Revue Bar in Soho and wanted Alexie to be the MC. The regular line-up would be Alexei, Arnold Brown, French and Saunders, Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, Nigel Planer and Peter Richardson. This would lead to a revolution in British comedy as this group presented the initial series of 'The Young Ones' and 'The Comic Strip Presents'. Next he was the compere in the TV movie ''The Comic Strip' (1981), a tongue-in-cheek 'behind the scenes' look at the Comic Strip comedy club in the early 1980s, which gave rise to 'The Comic Strip Presents'. This was to reveal Alexei as one of the UK's most enduring comedians, an integral part of the Alternative Comedy movement of the early 1980's that would take this art form to new edgy and controversial levels. There followed plenty of TV work and several movies, 'Whoops Apocalypse' (1982) in which he played Commisar Solzhenitsyn in 4 episodes, and then 'The Young Ones' (1982-84) and the movie 'Gorky Park' (1983).
He played the DJ in the 1985 'Doctor Who' story, 'Revelation of the Daleks' and then Melvin Coombes in 4 episodes of the comedy drama 'Up Line' (1987) followed by 3 episodes of the comedy 'Ratman' (1987). In 1988 he played the role of Trinculo, the King's jester, in Shakespeare's 'The Tempest', directed by Jonathan Miller at the Old Vic Theatre, London. Also in 1988 he made the first of six series for the BBC called 'Alexei Sayle's Stuff' followed by 'The All New Alexei Sayle Show' (1994-95), which differed from the first series mainly in its introduction of recurring characters .
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| In Indiana Jones |
Returning to film work, he played the Sultan in 'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade' (1989) before returning to TV to play Milcic in in the TV mini series ''The Gravy Train' (1990). The following year he was in another TV mini series 'Selling Hitler' (1991), the true story of the biggest fraud in publishing history - the Hitler diaries. In 1992 he was one of a number of newcomers in 'Carry on Columbus', playing Achmed, but this was a box office flop, being voted the 'worst British film ever made' by a 2004 poll conducted among people from the British film industry. Another TV series presented him with the main role in 'Paris' (1994), about Alain Degout, an artist living in 1920s Paris who wants to be famous, but whose work gets him nowhere. His TV work remained plentiful and included appearances in 'The Comic Strip Presents' (1988-2016) and the narrator for 'Olive The Ostrich' (2011) for 16 episodes.
see also :- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2024/01/a-history-of-liverpool-thespians-graham.html
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