Shop locally online.
You can collect your orders
from Newham Bookshop.
NEW!
For news about our events, join our mailing list here.
@NewhamBookshop
Alexei Sayle starting the show and waiting for…
…Andy de la Tour to join him in conversation.
“What I brought to comedy was an authentic working class voice plus a threat of genuine violence — nobody in Monty Python looked like a hard case who’d kick your head in.”
In 1971 comedians on the working men’s club circuit imagined that they would be free to go on telling their tired, racist, misogynistic gags forever but their nemesis, a 19-year-old Marxist art student with a bizarre concern for the health of British manufacturing was slowly coming to meet them.
Through the next decade Alexei Sayle would be a student at Chelsea Art School, a clerk in a DHSS office (where nobody did any work), one of London’s bottom ten freelance illustrators, a school dinner lady and a college lecturer (who kidnapped his students), before he became the original MC of London’s first modern comedy club, the Comedy Store, and the landscape of British comedy was altered forever.
Thatcher Stole My Trousers chronicles a time when comedy and politics came together in electrifying ways. Recounting the opening season of the Comedy Store, Alexei’s experiences with Alternative Cabaret, the Comic Strip and the Young Ones, and his friendships with the comedians who, like him would soon become household names, this is a unique and beguiling blend of social history and memoir. Fascinating, funny, angry and entertaining, it is a story of class and comedy, politics and love, fast cars and why it’s difficult to foul a dwarf in a game of football.
Watch videos of Michael Rosen reading from his collection of poems for adults, Don’t Mention the Children.
Details of the book.
Alex Marshall, author of Republic or Death!, recently talked about his book at The Wanstead Tap, and gave a 15-minute talk on National Pride on the BBC Radio 4 series Four Thought. Click here to listen. Click here for details of the book.
Independent bookshops were recognised by Penguin Random House for their window displays and events celebrating the publication on 14 July of Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee. Newham Bookshop won the East of England award for its late-night event at The Wanstead Tap, where the 1962 film of To Kill a Mockingbird was screened before the books were sold just after midnight.