The All New Alexei Sayle Show

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The All New Alexei Sayle Show was a comedy sketch show that ran on BBC2 for a total of 12 episodes over 2 series from 1994 to 1995. The title sequence featured Alexei Sayle as an innocent, newly arrived man in London singing cheerful lyrics and dancing around Trafalgar Square in an obvious parody of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

The main difference to Stuff was the introduction of recurring characters including:

  • Scouse warm-up comic Bobby Chariot (Alexei's alter ego), who would appear on screen to fill in when the show 'broke down' for supposed technical reasons. When his catchphrase "How you Diddling? ...Bloody Sod Ya Then" failed each time to ignite the audience he would regale them in the recording breaks instead with anecdotes about his wife having left him, his drink problem and sleeping in his Jag. A gestalt old school comedian he was a mix of the worst sides of Les Dawson,Ken Dodd and Stan Boardman with a bit of Mr Sayle mixed in. He would often pick on the audience for cheap laughs then turn on them when they remained unresponsive. Often he was pictured sitting in the audience rather than standing up in front of them, pouring his heart out to some poor uninterested, bored soul. Stephen Lewis played his even more depressing and hopeless gag writer, still bashing away poor puns on a manual typewriter long after the advent of the word processor.
  • A caricature of the then Labour leader John Smith
  • Performance artists Egbert and Bill (a lampoon of real-life artists Gilbert and George)
  • The very un-PC (or overly PC depending on your viewpoint) Nancy and Spike, owners of a Hackney cycle shop called "Menstrual cycles"

There was also a serialised sketch in series one: 'Psycho Ward 11', a spoof Australian hospital soap featuring Jean Marsh and Peter O'Brien, while, in the second series, 'Drunk In Time' satirised 1960s cult sci-fi TV series The Time Tunnel and featured Peter Capaldi as Sayle's fellow drunk time-traveling companion, with Jenny Agutter and Alfred Marks as the scientists back at base.

After two series and a two-year gap, Alexei Sayle (and Bobby Chariot) returned in "Alexei Sayle's Merry-Go-Round"

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