THE WORKERS UNITED WILL FREQUENTLY BE DEFEATED

At the age of thirty I’d finally learned to drive. Before taking my test, to practise I’d bought an ancient blue Fiat 124 from a farmer in Oxfordshire. Rob, a friend who lived in Banbury, brought it to London for us. Rob was the owner of a very badly behaved dog called Trin and when he got up to our flat he said, ‘Just to say that Trin’s damaged some of the back seat of your car a tiny bit.’ Looking down at the little square box of a vehicle twelve floors below we could clearly see the huge chunks of white foam that had been ripped out of the rear bench.

The next day, looking at it just sitting there, I decided that I’d move the car a few yards for a bit of practice. Usually I took Harry with me but on this occasion I figured I would be able to drive the short distance, from one side of the road to the other, by myself. So getting into the Fiat which smelt of foam and dog slobber I started the engine and jerkily pulled away from the kerb, managing to get it up into second gear. Unfortunately just as I was about to park again another car came up behind me so I panicked, floored the accelerator and shot off up the road. Unable to stop or turn round I reasoned my only hope was to get to the big traffic roundabout at Hammersmith a mile away, circumnavigate it and return in the direction of home. This I managed to do, travelling at about five miles an hour, and causing a huge angry queue of vehicles behind me. By the time I got back, Linda was in tears thinking I’d been killed in a crash.

After I’d passed the driving test Kenny Smith sold me his old car, a 2.5 litre Triumph with big fat tyres and no power steering, which meant it took substantial effort to change direction. One of the main reasons I bought this particular car was so I could say to Linda as I drove past my old school, ‘Look, they said in there that I’d amount to nothing but I’m driving past my old school in Triumph.’

In it I would take long drives that didn’t require much steering, up to Edinburgh for instance just for the pleasure of being on the move, unfettered and free, and as I regarded the torrent of other vehicles on the motorway I would think to myself: Probably up to twenty-one per cent of the people in those cars are vaguely aware of who I am.

Then after the success of ‘Ullo John! Gotta New Motor?’ I bought myself what I thought of as a luxury car although it was not a top-of-the-range BMW, Jaguar or Mercedes such as some other comedian might buy, and my car was only a luxury car if you thought that Harold Wilson was still the Prime Minister. In choosing what to drive I’d decided I did not want to be seen at the wheel of some rich man’s limousine which I thought would be bad for my image but rather I required something enigmatic and cool and British-made but outside the hierarchy of executive cars. So I purchased a 1970 Rover P5B coupé, a car I’d desired since seeing a black example driven by James Fox in the psychedelic gangster film Performance. Styled by Spen King and David Bache who also created the Range Rover, the P5B coupé was based on the Rover 3.5 litre saloon as driven by the Queen and Mrs Thatcher and as crashed by Princess Grace of Monaco but unlike other coupés, two-door versions of their four-door relatives, this car retained all the doors and was of the same width and length as the saloon. The main difference being that the roofline had been lowered by two and a half inches along with thinner central pillars and the addition of custom Rostyle alloy wheels, all of which gave it a sinister and sleek appearance. I bought my coupé for £5,000 from a posh Buddhist squatter called Quintus who lived in Somers Town, a dilapidated 1930s housing estate behind St Pancras Station. Then I had it sprayed black.

The first long drive I took in the Rover was up to South Yorkshire to do some shows for the striking miners. It was clear from the start of the Miners’ Strike in 1984 that this was a climactic moment. An opportunity for the Conservative government to begin the process of destroying the power of the trade unions. It also seemed clear that this strike was going to be a tougher fight than the ones that had gone before in the 1970s.

There was a girl I was friendly with at Chelsea called Nicola Clarke. Her flat was opposite the Bellman Bookshop and sometimes she’d cook me my tea after the meetings. Nicola’s father Tom wrote a brilliant Play for Today called Stocker’s Copper, broadcast in 1972, and based on events during a strike of clay miners in Cornwall in the early part of the twentieth century when a large number of specially trained Welsh policemen were billeted in the homes of the strikers. One of the coppers Herbert Griffith is sent to stay with the Stocker family and after an uneasy period Griffith and Manuel Stocker become friends.

Yet when the confrontation between the miners on the picket line and the police finally arrives the policeman Griffith, despite their friendship, batters Stocker to the ground.

The trade unions did not realise that the long golden post-war summer when they had been able to strike whenever they wanted, to stop the trains and the factories and the mines, had been the exception and we were about to return to sterner times.

To take on the miners the right changed the employment laws, co-opted the police and unleashed the reactionary press while the left deployed me and Billy Bragg. There were many large benefits I took part in including a concert over several nights at the Royal Festival Hall featuring regulars of the left-wing fund-raiser circuit such as me, Billy Bragg and The Style Council but also Wham! who were then at the height of their teen fame and unlike the rest of us taking a bit of a risk by appearing at such a political event. A section of the audience booed Wham! when they appeared, ostensibly due to the fact that during their songs George and Andrew mimed to a backing track but really I thought because they were uncomfortable with somebody so mainstream appearing at the show.

Off my own bat I organised a tour of miners’ clubs in South Yorkshire.

Cruising through those mining villages, street after street of neat yellow brick terraces, my Rover, low, black and sinister, gave the impression that the Kray brothers were visiting Grimethorpe to attend a concert given by the famous colliery brass band.

Perhaps because the cars were cheap or maybe out of some left-wing sentiment the miners seemed to have bought a lot of cars made in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. Brown Ladas, pale white Moskvitches and rear-engined Skodas in the most depressing shade of pale blue usually reserved for the walls of a TB ward lined the roads. All these cars reminded me of some of the industrial villages I’d visited with my parents when we used to holiday in the Eastern Bloc, a feeling that was further enhanced by the police road blocks on every road in, at several of which we were aggressively questioned about our movements, and the raw feeling of tension, resentment and fear in the air.

Because of our politics and our family’s odd attitudes I had always felt like a bit of an outsider but part of me yearned to have what the miners had (at least for the moment) – they were part of a community that had known who it was and what it was for hundreds of years.

When some of the women from Armthorpe stayed with us in London they noticed in the kitchen the large jars that Linda kept lentils, split peas, beans, oats and barley in to make soups and her famous five-bean salad but they had no idea what they were or what these pulses and grains could be used for and were vaguely horrified when Linda told them. In return when we stayed with the miners in South Yorkshire they served us what they called a ‘proper miner’s meal’ which turned out to be Bird’s Eye Ranch Burgers and instant oven chips. Though I stayed silent what struck me was how thoroughly these women had been robbed of their traditional food culture. You’d have thought given that the miners were behaving as perfect consumers in enthusiastically embracing the idea that this manufactured garbage was more ‘modern’ and ‘convenient’ than proper food that capitalism might give them a break and not crush them under its iron heel but that wasn’t how it worked.

Yet a few of these women seemed to be the only ones who were getting something positive out of the strike. Because the men were not allowed to travel it fell to the wives, girlfriends and daughters to organise political lobbying and food distribution so that they began to be aware of a world outside their pit villages and to develop a real sense of purpose. It just seemed a pity that in Britain it had required such a catastrophic upheaval for these women to achieve some feelings of self-worth though I wondered if they would one day find themselves as a result of their efforts like me isolated in some kind of limbo eating five-bean salad, no longer authentically working class but not anything else either. I left South Yorkshire with a mournful sense that the strikers were likely to be beaten and that would mark the beginning of a big reduction in the power of the left.

A little while after the conflict had ended in complete defeat one of the women rang me and asked if I could come up to South Yorkshire again to do a benefit for their local rugby club which needed a new clubhouse. I felt both saddened and affronted. I wanted to say to her, ‘Don’t you understand, I was only up there because I was trying to play my part in the war between the right and the left, between oppression and freedom, between evil and good. You don’t get a big star like Alexei Sayle turning out to do a benefit for your poxy rugby club!’ But I didn’t say any of that, I just told her I was busy.

During 1984 in an era before people regularly attended big theatres to see comedians, I sold out the massive Dominion Theatre in London and returned to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for two late-night shows at the Playhouse Theatre in front of six thousand drunken, overexcited and hysterical fans. And though I felt defeated at the vanquishing of the miners I consoled myself with the thought that I was part of something profound with The Young Ones, all of us of one mind, united on a joint mission to revolutionise comedy, to kick out the old ways and build something new.

Then there was a moment during the making of series two in 1984, in the episode entitled ‘Bambi’, the one where the boys appear on University Challenge. In many ways it is my favourite episode.

I don’t play any part in the central storyline of that particular show. My role, as the train driver giving a speech to some Mexican bandits about the revolutionary biscuits of Italy, had been shot earlier in the summer in Bristol so I was not involved in the live studio that week but that didn’t stop me calling in to TV Centre to hang around during the pre-record.

They told me that Paul was off shooting some scenes around TV Centre and it took me some time to track them down. When I located the camera crew they were just inside a side entrance of the main building. Going closer I was surprised to see Mel Smith from Not the Nine O’Clock News acting the part of a BBC security guard. Then the next day in the studio his partner Griff Rhys Jones was on the set playing the role of question master Bamber Gascoigne while Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson had been cast as the team from Footlights College.

After the recording I sought out Rik, Lise and Ben in the bar. Agitated, I said to them, ‘What are all those people doing in our show? I seem to remember we agreed that all these public school Oxford and Cambridge types are the enemy, they represent systemic class oppression and the dominance of bourgeois ideology in popular culture which we have made it our mission to destroy.’

The writers all looked surprised. ‘No, that was just you. We never agreed any such thing. That was all just in your head. Didn’t you notice that we never subscribed to your demented class-war ravings? We think Mel and Griff, Hugh and Stephen and Emma are all just absolutely lovely. Mel’s going to give us a ride in his gold Rolls-Royce later, Hugh’s made us a cake and Griff’s been shouting at people to make us laugh.’