Alexei Sayle

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. This is Alexei Sayle’s first standup show since 1996. Now 61, he can be forgiven for looking back. “A lot has changed since I invented alternative comedy,” he says.

And with such wry faux pomposity, Sayle hauls his hour from a sepia nostalgia-fest to an urgent piece of work. With his tales of Christmas in a Communist household he is like left-wing comedy’s Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who was trapped on an island and didn’t realise the Second World War had ended, returned to the mainland 29 years later, and discovered he’d lost.

The old battle between socialism and capitalism may be over, with everyone now funnelled into the bland consensus of coalition and the X Factor, but Sayle has more than a few things to say.

He harangues comedy panel shows not for their power to regress all comedians to the mean, but for rehabilitating war criminals such as New Labour’s Alastair Campbell. The changes in tuition fees, the Labour party, the publishing industry and Lenny Henry’s career are all targets for his ire.

Familiar material, yes, but coming from a veteran it's unusually exciting stuff. There is gravitas here amidst the physical buffoonery (although when he accidentally splits his trousers it yields one of the biggest laughs). His energy and smarts make his brand of nostalgia infectious. You too will yearn for a time when comedians could make Alexander Solzhenitsyn funny.

But when Sayle complains that no one does political comedy any more, he is wrong of course. Plenty do. It’s just that they’re not as good as this.