The All New Alexei Sayle Show

The All New Alexei Sayle Show is a comedy sketch show broadcast on BBC2 television for a total of twelve episodes, over two series in 1994 and 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.

It was the successor to Alexei Sayle's Stuff, and predecessor of Alexei Sayle's Merry-Go-Round. A then-unknown Christoph Waltz appeared in a sketch during its run.

Recurring characters

The show differed from Alexei Sayle's Stuff mainly in its introduction of recurring characters who included:

• Alexei's alter ego, Bobby Chariot. Bobby was a Scouse warm-up comic who appeared during breaks when the show had supposedly 'broken down' for technical reasons. His catchphrase "How you diddling?" would invariably fail to ignite the audience, prompting the reply, ". . . Bloody sod you, then." He would then regale them with anecdotes about his wife having left him, his drink problem, and sleeping in his Jaguar car. He was an archetypal 'old school' comedian who combined the least politically correct sides of Les Dawson, Ken Dodd and Stan Boardman with a bit of Mr Sayle. He would often pick on the audience for cheap laughs, then turn on them when they remained unresponsive. Often, rather than being seen in front of the audience, he was pictured sitting among them, pouring his heart out to some poor uninterested, bored soul. Bobby also featured in the later show Alexei Sayle's Merry-Go-Round.
• Bobby's even more depressing and hopeless gag writer, played by Stephen Lewis, still bashing out bad puns on a manual typewriter long after the advent of the word processor.
• a caricature of John Smith, who was leader of the Labour Party at the time.
• performance artists Egbert and Bill (a lampoon of real-life artists Gilbert and George), performed together with John Sparkes.
• Nancy and Spike. Depending on viewpoint, these were either the very un-PC or the overly PC owners of a Hackney cycle shop called "Menstrual cycles".

Running sketches

Both series of the show included running sketches.

• Psycho Ward 11 in Series 1 was a spoof Australian hospital soap featuring Jean Marsh and Peter O'Brien.
• Drunk In Time in Series 2 satirised the 1960s cult sci-fi TV series The Time Tunnel. It featured Peter Capaldi as Sayle's fellow drunk time-traveling companion, and Jenny Agutter and Alfred Marks as the scientists back at the base.

Sources

• The All New Alexei Sayle Show (1994) at the Internet Movie Database
• Johnson RK, British TV Show Reviews
• "UK Comedy" on Memorable TV