Two months later he founded Alternative Cabaret with Alexei Sayle and ran a regular "Alt Cab" Club night in the back bar of the Elgin pub on Ladbroke Grove in London.

In the late 1980s, he was a founder member of Green Wedge, and performed in a series of one-off benefit gigs as MC/support to, among others, John Martyn, Osibisa and Joe Strummer's Latino Rockabilly War.

In 1990, Allen toured extensively with his solo show "Sold Out", about an Amazonian tribal shaman who understands both the workings of the futures exchange and the logic of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

Economics, viewed as a bogus science for scam artists causing both personal and planetary debt, was one of the subjects tackled in his full-length stand-up Edinburgh show "Final Demand – The Grim Repo Man is at the Door" in 1993.

His last solo show before semi-retirement was "The End is Nigh", a mischievous piece of panic-mongering about the Y2K bug which took the form of a public meeting, and had its final performance, pertinently, at Speakers' Corner in October 1999, before he went to live in the hills of Cumbria for a year.

"[10] Rough Theatre sometimes performed at a squatting venue called the Charlie Pig Dog Club, occasionally sharing the bill there with Joe Strummer's pub pock band, the 101ers.

Allen continued writing columns for radical journals, the most recent being "Lofty Tone" in the late 1990s DIY activist rag, Squall.

With his writing partner Max Handley (1945–1990) Allen was occasional script-writer for many TV and radio shows such as Spitting Image, Naked Video, Week Ending and Alas Smith and Jones.

Of particular interest were a 24-page graphic documentary with artist Dave Hine about events leading to the Tiananmen Square massacre, and an 11-page strip called "Didn't You Love My Brother" that fictionalised an encounter with a heckler that Allen experienced whilst on tour with the anarchist punk band Poison Girls.

In 1989 and 1990, Allen and Caron Keating co-presented the Granada TV/Channel 4 science-based programme Fourth Dimension, which included performing (and co-writing with Handley) a weekly five-minute piece to camera, plus other filmed journalism.

They were incapable or unwilling to even point out the fire exits... they popped the balloons they were meant to be selling, they threw people's change on the floor, they even went up to random members of the public and licked their ice creams...