Scouse Honour
So you think you know Liverpool? Alexei Sayle begs to differ. He thinks the city has been misrepresented for long enough...
Alexei Sayle's Liverpool will be the first Tv series with my name in its title for almost exactly ten years. I was last seen in a too-tight suit, standing alone, shouting. In case you thought I'd been in hospital or prison, I've spent the intervening decade becoming a highly repsected authour and growing a pointy grey beard, which, as you can see from the photograph on this page, (photograph shown) has a personality all of its own.
Though I've done a bit of acting and presenting in that period, I was happy to be out of television. From time to time, some young documentary-maker would come to me with an idea for a series called Alexei Sayle's Favourite Fish or Alexei Sayle's Troublespot Benefits, in which I was supposed to do stand-up in front opf armed militias like the Tamil Tigers and the Taliban - but I had no trouble turning those ideas down.
Two years ago, though, when I was first offered this series, it was obviously a much more exciting proposition. I left Liverpool to go to college in London at the age of 18. (It's hard for students now to believe it but, back then, if your parents were working class, you got a full grant, all your fees paid and you were given a gold hat with a clock in it.) In those days, the city was in trouble and I thought I'd find my fortune in London, where I was convinced I'd shortly be hanging around with Sir Noel Coward and Dame Sybil Throndike as soon as I found out what pub they drank in.
It didn't quite work out like that, and my home city has continued to exert a strong pull on me - I have bene back more than 200 times. There have been family visits, benefit gigs for various causes, my own shows at the Playhouse and the Empire, and a couple of appearances on Richard and Judy's show when they were based there, so I thought Liverpool was one subject on which I was truly qualified to make a documentary series.
Liverpool is a city you can leave, but that doesn't mean Liverpool will leave you. Throughout most of my adult life I have been pursued by images of my home city, though it didn't start out this way. When I was a little kid in the 1950's, my homw town was a thriving, bustling port, streets of terraced houses, a pub on every corner and the odd Greek temple in the centre of town. Yet Liverpool didn't feature much on the national stage until things started to go awry. The city was facing the wrong way for the new trade with Europe and the docks were the only industry we had. The river had paid the way for the rest of the city like an indulgent sugar daddy, while most of us stayed in bed eating toffees and flicking through movie magazines. Now out sugar daddy was broke.
Strangely, though, about the same time as the city's economic decline began, another mythical Liverpool started to rise on our TV and cinema screens. For its size, it's the most filmed city in the world. Television series set there include Z Cars, The Liver Birds, Bread, Boys from the Blackstuff, GBH, and Brookside, while films include Violent Playground, Letter to Brezhnev, The 51st State, Gumshoe, No Surrender, and of course the 1999 movie Swing, in which I played a violent Protestant trumpeter. There was the Merseybeat and the Mersey poets, as well as strikes, a Trotskyist council, the Toxteth riots, gun crime and the Hillsborough and Heysel disasters. No wonder people got the impression that Liverpool was a weird mixture of Hollywood and the Gaza Strip.
To be honest, that image was never true, and I hope making these three one-hour films will give me an opportunity to add more balance the the cty's image. Even during the worst years there were prosperous, leafy suburbs and fine civic buildings, but, in the past ten or 15 years, Liverpool has been improving at speed. From the start of this year, that improvement has been kicked into hyperdrive by the year-long festival of the arts that goes with being named European Capital of Culture [the city shares the accolade this year with Stavanger and Sandnes in Norway].
The town centre is being virtually rebuilt and throughout this year there will be concerts, art exhibitions, plays and all manner of performance events. The BBC's major contribution to this jamboree of high culture was to send me and a film crew to work for nearly four months in the city of my birth. Over the course of the filming, it felt like we visited more or less everywhere and talked to more or less everybody on Merseyside. Indeed, if these films prove popular with some in Liverpool for their humour, perceptiveness and honestly, this effect will be more than counteracted by the number of interviewees who are enraged to discover they've been cut out of the finished programmes! So I'd like to take the opportunity to apologise to Steven Gerrard, Sir Paul McCartney, Ken Dodd, my brother-in-law and all the others right now.
Genuinely, it's been a real privelege and an unexpected pleasure to spend so much continuous time in this notorious and luminous place, and my hope is that those viewers who've never been there will get a more rounded view of the city than that generally presented by the media. If nothing else, they will be astonished at the beauty of the place, since these films are staggeringly well directed and shot, which has nothing to do with me.
hno
