Big, balding and bumptious - Alexie Sayle was once the doyen of the TV comedy and stand-up cicuit. Now he tells Viv Hardwick why he prefers the art of creating contemporary novels and book-reading tours.

OLDER comedy fans will always link stand-up comic Alexei Sayle to TV's The Young Ones in the early 1980s and the impressive portrayal of Russian landlord Jerzy Balowski and his entire family. But now he's happy not to be turning grey with his audience and has found a younger market thanks to six years of hard graft as an author.

The 52-year-old is far from finished with the stage and will be entertaining at Darlington's Arts Centre on Wednesday, October 6, with book readings, anecdotes and promises to answer questions about everything from Marx to stain removal.

He laughs when asked if he suddenly woke up one morning and decided to switch successful careers from comedy and acting to literature. "No, it was a gradual progression which I'd started around 1997-98 and I'd done my sixth TV series and I was feeling dissatisfied with what I was doing and looking for something else," explains Sayle, who had toyed with a film script and the odd piece of TV presenting.

"I just wrote a short story and that worked really well and it gradually seemed to go from there. The book readings are a pleasant contrast to the stand-up comedy, it's undemanding although more modest in its aspirations, but more friendly.

"One of the things I worried about with stand-up is that my audience would age with me and I'd end up with grey-haired, grizzled people in trousers that were too young for them. The wonderful thing about my book readings is that the audience is really young by and large."

When creating his stories is the funnyman inside still tuned to a laugh-per-page jokeometer?

"Well, I think it's one of the things you've got to be careful with when you're writing, certainly with literary fiction which I write, that you don't have too many jokes and sometimes I have to take them out. While the books have humorous content, their intention is very serious and they wouldn't work if they were chock-full of jokes."

He's pleased that his latest novel, Overtaken, has earned universal critical acclaim, although Sayle reckons that his short stories are more fun "because I'm not stuck with the same bloody people for 300 pages. A short story is like a one-night stand".

Overtaken tells the story of a man's art-loving friends who are all killed, on the way to a Frank Skinner show in Manchester, in a crash caused by an obnoxious tipper-truck driver. The hero seeks revenge not in violent retribution but in befriending the killer, educating him about culture and opening his eyes to the level of his guilt.

Liverpool-born Sayle, who was brought up in a communist household by his railway guard father while his mother worked for Littlewood Pools, has admitted that there was "nothing like five years in art college to put you off art".

His studies finished with three years at Chelsea and he says: "Modern art always seems to be about looking for a book you don't have. I wasn't a bad painter, but I didn't have the convincing chat to go with it... that's probably why I turned to comedy. Galleries are just places for tourists to go to."

On the realistic plot of his novel he adds: "With the people being killed on their way to a Frank Skinner show, I'm not being nasty about Frank, he's the sort of comedian that they would be going to see. The idea of revenge and pre-emptive strikes is a very current one and my feeling is that you can never predict how your revenge will turn out and if you act like your enemy what does it do to you? Does that make you your enemy?

"Stories are like a puzzle where you slot all the themes together and my hero's reasoning is that if he just beats the guy up or whatever the other guy never understands what he's done."

Sayle accepts that being on TV and cameo appearances in films like Gorky Park and Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade "are as big as it gets" and that it's not easy to turn your back on that kind of fame. So is he tempted to watch himself when the film is re-run on TV next week?

"Only if it's by accident, it's not as if I'm getting a cheque. I wouldn't seek myself out on TV, which is perhaps a mistake in a way because if I had watched more I might have refined my performances," he reflects.

After his latest book-reading tour he's ready for the next novel which will be created out of his environment of Bloomsbury home and Bermondsey office. He also shares a home in Spain with wife Linda.

I'd heard mention that he often scribbles story ideas in notebooks, but Sayle is adamant he wouldn't be an author at all if it wasn't for his computer. "I couldn't be doing with it, your hand would get too tired and I couldn't stand having to cross things out and starting again."

He's also aware that Darlington sits on the doorstep of the Prime Minister's constituency. He jokes: "Yes, I'll be going for tea with Tony in Sedgefield and I'm pretty sure that Cherie will be after free tickets."

* Alexei Sayle, Darlington Arts Centre, Wednesday, October 6, 8pm. Box Office: (01325) 486 555