In 1971 comedians on the working men's club circuit imagined that they would be free to go on telling their tired, racist, misogynistic gags forever, but a 19-year-old Marxist art student with a bizarre concern for the health of British manufacturing was slowly coming to meet them. Through the next decade Alexei Sayle would be a student at Chelsea Art School, a clerk in a DHSS office, one of London's bottom ten freelance illustrators, a school dinner lady and a college lecturer, before he became the original MC of the Comedy Store. 'Thatcher Stole My Trousers' is the story of Alexei's rise to fame.