In the middle of one of his short ‘cyclogeography’ videos on YouTube, Alexei Sayle cites Gustave Flaubert’s advice for radical writers. ‘Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.’ As his bike drifts past the canal paths, grassy verges, and suburban houses of Milton Keynes, he agrees: ‘this has to a degree been my own inclination. I’m a boring twat.’

In the sudden turn from intense information saturation and hyperactive ‘experience’ to unbelievable boredom that has characterised the last eighteen months, sometimes the best thing to do has been to just lean into the tedium and let things drift. Accordingly, the new artwork I’ve probably most enjoyed since the pandemic started is a YouTube channel that mostly consists of an old man on a bike talking to himself.

Alexei Sayle is extremely unusual among the ‘alternative comedians’ of the 1980s and 1990s for never abandoning his politics; although he’s always mocked the hardline Stalinism of his parents, he’s always remained a Marxist, and one fully able to take the piss out of Marxists. His sections in The Young Ones were always the funniest—as landlord Jerzy Balowski and his family, most memorably as a singer basically identical to himself named ‘Alexei Yuri Gagarin Siege of Stalingrad Glorious Five Year Plan Sputnik Tractor Moscow Dynamo Back-Four Balowski – my mother was a bit of a Communist, yunno what I mean’—but I don’t mean it to sound like an insult that he’s always been most interesting when he’s not trying to be funny, but is just relaxing and being extremely odd instead.

TV series like Stuff and Merry Go-Round wouldn’t always make you laugh, especially when going for gags, but when they just settled for being elliptical and strange, they were wonderful, something that’s also true of his short story collections. His YouTube channel, far from the world of ratings and canned laughter, runs with this.

Half of it is a podcast, where Sayle and guests like Omid Djalili talk about politics and philosophy, but the other half consists of him on a bike, with both a camera from his own point of view and another camera mounted on the handlebars so that we can see him as he mutters and tells stories about the places he’s cycling through. They started last December, with a series of ‘Lockdown Bike Rides’ around London, starting with his own manor around Clerkenwell and Kings Cross, often along the canals that run through the area.

He started doing these, after several years of not cycling, at the start of the pandemic, which he found ‘an ecstatic experience’ with most of the traffic suddenly disappearing. He’s lyrical about cycling—’the closest thing to flying is cycling drunk. Not blind drunk, but slightly tipsy. It’s a delightful experience’—but most of the fun of these is the vicarious drift through the streets, with other cyclists and walkers often seen doing what was pretty much the only permitted urban activity. There’s several of these in London, with an especially memorable episode involving a ride around the pompous imperial edifices of Westminster, but my favourites are the three recent clips where he rides his bike around the largest, most popular, and most mocked new town, Milton Keynes.

He seems to be unsure exactly why he’s picked this town after London – a mix of it being somewhere he had fond memories of from visits when it was still new and futuristic in the 1980s, and the fact it has probably the most extensive cycle network in the country, running on ‘redways’ for miles and miles through its notoriously anti-urban grid. Milton Keynes was based on the idea of almost hiding a city amongst nature—no building was at first allowed to be taller than the tallest tree—and from the road, each of its suburbs is shielded from its traffic-light-free roads by dense trees. It also has a branch of the canal network running through it.

At first, he’s obviously a bit alarmed by the place, with its Mies van der Rohe glass and steel cubes, underpasses, empty spaces, stop-start cycle lanes, and car parking everywhere. It’s a long long way from Clerkenwell, and there’s hardly anybody walking on the streets – or cyclists, as he soon realises, using the abundantly provided cycle lanes, with more cyclists seen struggling along a London main road than in miles of lush, leaf-dappled paths. In the second episode, he seems to be starting to enjoy it, despite the terrible weather, with the eighties Postmodernist houses on the canals and lakes. ‘It’s not the National Theatre,’ he points out, that you get to look at as you cycle along the redways: ‘it’s a bloke with a strimmer, though maybe that’s the point. Rather than over-stimulate yourself, learn to appreciate a bloke with a strimmer.’

In the third episode, without wanting to throw in a spoiler, there’s a sudden moment where after drifting through the grey, muggy weather and an increasingly characterless landscape of trees, trees, trees, underpasses, roads, and not much else, he comes across a man-made intelligence on one of the canal bridges. This sort of surreal and totally accidental encounter was what the Situationists, the original psychogeographers—before that term came to mean just walking around in London—meant when they talked of the derive, or drift.

Nothing much will happen, the rhythms of an urban life will gradually slow down, and then something will happen, something completely unexpected. But Sayle doesn’t draw attention to this radicalism, it just quietly emerges from the clips. As he says at one of the episodes, ‘if you liked this shit, why not subscribe to the Patreon, for some more shit like this shit.’