Alexei Sayle’s Strangers on a Train
BBC radio 4

It must be all of 40 years since Alexei Sayle (pictured) first launched himself as an angry young alternative comedian making sarcastic jokes about the members of Mrs Thatcher’s first Cabinet. Found making his way from Cardiff to Portsmouth in the opening segment of Alexei Sayle’s Strangers on a Train (10 July, continues until 21 August), he seemed the meekest of benign old presences: acerbity was as remote from the proceedings as the advent of the ticket collector.