He was recently in Bristol to read from his new novel, Overtaken, and to talk about writing in general and the BBC End of Story competition in particular.

Read our interview with Alexei Sayle

I have the edge on most of the audience, as I got hold of a review copy of Overtaken a few weeks ago.

It is a surprisingly dark and powerful novel, especially coming from a man whom most people still remember as "that fat bloke who played the landlord in The Young Ones."

It tells the story of Kelvin, a successful Liverpudlian builder, and his small circle of friends.

The first twist comes early on: by the end of chapter two, all of Kelvin's friends are dead, killed in a car crash caused by the despicable Sidney Maxton-Brown, haulier and small-time crook - an illiterate fly-tipper of a villain.

The car crash is the starting point for both major threads of the novel. One flashes backwards in time, tracing Kelvin's relationships with his dead friends from start to finish.

The second details Kelvin's life from the accident onwards.

Wrapping and counterpointing the main revenge plot is the love story between Kelvin and Florence, a performer from the "cirKuss" - a parody of modern avant-garde circus, where all the performers come from eastern European countries which have experienced genocide.

Straightforward humour

"That's my kind of humour", says Sayle, deadpan.

And it is exactly Sayle's kind of humour which sparkles throughout the novel, giving the gloss to the blackness of the subject matter.

Sayle's observational comedy is as sharp now as it ever was.

The cirKuss music, for example, sounds "like the Schizophrenia National Anthem".

And characters are well-drawn, even the walk-ons.

Klinky Poon, senior counsellor, is "an enormously fat woman dressed in what looked like a Mongolian yurt".

We later find out that she has a huge bag of Fun Sized Bounty Bars hidden under her desk at the drugs rehabilitation centre.

Hand in hand with the more straightforward humour, the increasing surrealism of Kelvin's revenge against Sidney Maxton-Brown does the work of pointing out the pointlessness of revenge itself.

Probably the highlight of this savage-yet-civilised revenge is Kelvin's staging of the Howard Brenton play Christie In Love, which he arranges to be directed especially for Maxton-Brown, in order to try to touch his sense of humanity.

Tangents

Sayle starts the Bristol talk by reading the prologue of the book, which foreshadows the turning upside down of Kelvin's world by describing how his attitude to "those comments books that they have on a little side table in churches, hotels and restaurants" has changed.

This is followed by readings from the first chapter, the real turning point of Kelvin's life, where he first meets Florence at the cirKuss, and where he throws away the imaginary ball of the sinister clown, Valery.

It is this action that seems to curse Kelvin's life.

These readings take about half an hour, not because the excerpts are long, but because Sayle keeps heading off at his trademark tangents to reality.

In these asides, he turns into a kind of bearded random surrealism generator, taking any smallest hint of an idea and turning it into a little comic riff.

Distracted by a child with a rattle, we're treated to the image of Martin Amis in a pram, being pushed about the shop by A. S. Byatt.

Talking about the novel's theme of provincialism, he describes how his nephew came down to London with two friends, and only wanted to see David Blane.

"If you want to see a man doing next to nothing in a perspex box," he told them, "Just go to any London Post Office."

For the second half of the event, Sayle answered questions.

We learn a lot about his writing process.

He enjoys the freedom and control that simple fiction writing gives him: it's less of a committee process than writing for television, and he knows that he can do exactly what he wants without argument.

It also encourages him to try harder. "I used to think, sometimes, 'well, when Julie Walters says that line, she'll make it funny. That'll do.' You can't do that with a novel. The words are everything."

He used to write at home, with UK Gold on in the background, running old episodes of The Bill and Casualty.

"So I'd like to say how excited I am to be here in Holby."

Now he has an office which overlooks the Millennium Dome at Greenwich, but he writes in a tiny room at the back which only looks out onto the heating ducts, because the Thames view was too distracting.

He talks for a while about End of Story, the BBC competition where eight authors, including Sayle, have written the first half of a short story, for the public to finish.

He's thrilled to be involved, as he's found it difficult, coming from another discipline, to get recognition as a writer.

"'Proper' authors hate celebrity authors," he says. "I was doing the Oxford Festival a couple of years ago with Michael Palin.

"We were sitting in one corner, and there were all the other 'real' authors sitting in the other corner: it was a bit like the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story.

"Quite rightly, in some ways, they hate us hogging all the limelight."

Sayle sees it as a real seal of approval to be ranked alongside the other End of Story writers.

It's not the first time that he's been surprised by his success.

"I used to say in press interviews that I was the best-selling short story writer in Britain since the war.

"After a while I actually checked it out, and it was true! That absolutely amazed me."

The closing questions cover Sayle's Liverpudlian background.

"My parents were in the Communist party. I had a very strange upbringing. They used to tell me it was Lenin that came down the chimney at Christmas."

Sayle finishes by reminiscing about the last time he was at the Colston Hall, and a local man came to the stage door after the show and asked him, in all seriousness, to give him a head-butt as a souvenir.

Perhaps he's right: "You don't have to make things up when you're an author, you just have to lead an interesting life."

A long line forms to buy copies of Overtaken for him to sign. I think they're in for a treat.

With the majority of comedians-turned-author, the wonder isn't in how good the novel is, it's that it's been published at all.

That is absolutely not the case with this book.

Keeping lonely company with Stephen Fry's novels, it stands in its own right as a worthwhile and often brilliant work.