Doing well in exams, which is what parents always want for their children (or at least have done since it began to matter to any degree to middle and working class kids), has always been under threat from the kind of other interest that sometimes kicks in around the mid-teens.

Sometimes it’s football, more often music, even girls (or boys). With comedian/actor/writer Alexei Sayle it was not football (even though he lived in Anfield) but politics – radical left-wing politics. If Alexei’s parents had been good Irish Catholics, or even Orange Tories, this might have been a satisfactory piece of defiance. As they were both communists, their son’s rebellion had to take a slightly different form: so he opted for the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) – the one that backed the Albanians after their split with China. (As Wikipedia helpfully stresses, this party “should not be confused with the Communist Party of Britain, the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain [Marxist-Leninist], nor with the Communist Party of Great Britain [Marxist-Leninist]”.

All of that was of course a long time ago. But Sayle is to publish this week a memoir of his childhood and youth in Liverpool whose title, I am sure, will not be trumped this year. Stalin Ate My Homework is published by Sceptre on September 2nd.