Landlord Of All He Surveys

If you’re at some stand-up this winter and the brash, bald chap with a maroon jacket and belt emblazoned with a ‘BEER’ buckle asks you for money, you might want to keep your hand in your pocket. This is no joke.

“We’re supposed to be mischief makers,” stresses Al Murray, the approachable, considered 45-year-old behind the Pub Landlord buffoon. “I do a thing in the show currently where I take money off people in the front couple of rows. As it happens, it goes to my charity, but I get people going ‘he took our money!’ Yeah, I’m a fucking comic! We’re supposed to be chaotic and mischievous and all those things. Don’t expect, if you give me money, to get it back! I mean, really!”
Expectations are something Murray has to deal with on a regular basis. He returns to Vicar Street still being asked if he’s going to tone down his ‘Rule Britannia’ schtick for Irish audiences. Of course, it’s those nights with a little edge that Murray relishes the most.
“The first reason is, well why would I (alter his act)? The second reason is that audiences know if you’re holding back and they feel disrespected. They don’t like it if you tiptoe around things, you’re much better taking them on. If it goes wrong, at least you’ve done the elephant in the room. After all, British and Irish people pride themselves supposedly on being able to laugh at themselves.”
They also pride themselves, generally whilst disparaging their Yank cousins, on having a firm grasp of irony. And yet every Al Murray piece suggests that a decent percentage of his audience don’t realise they’re watching an onstage alter ego. You’d imagine, and hope, that is not the case.
“People tell me this with great confidence: ‘half your audience don’t know what’s going on’. I simply don’t believe it. Even if it was half the audience, I’d think that’s hilarious! I get people saying it to me like I’m doing something wrong or I’m encouraging the wrong people. If there are people who think it’s real, it’s like the joke’s on them twice over.”
Nothing less than they deserve if they can’t wrap their head around the fact the man on stage might be a parody. Murray, of course, grew up in leafy Buckinghamshire and read Modern History at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. The world of comedy opened up to him when he was carrying his drums down to the music room on his first day of college and came across Stewart Lee and Richard Herring planning routines. In 1994, the right-wing Landlord emerged when Murray played the publican ‘standing in at short notice’ for the drummer in Harry Hill’s opening act and the gag stuck. The mind boggles.
“Yeah, it’s almost like no one’s ever heard of acting!” he exclaims with accompanying machine-gun cackle. “Fucking hell!”
Reading up on his beginnings in the town of Stewkley, it transpires that the whole place was nearly demolished when Murray was an infant to make way for an airport, which is very Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy indeed.
“There was a big resistance movement at the time to the airport. It was really interesting – one of the villagers sent a letter bomb to someone over it! It was in the ‘60s so he could basically send a letter bomb and get away with it. Nowadays he’d have gotten years and years and years for it. Really strange, all that period.”
Oh for the good old days when people took explosive packages in their stride.
“Yeah, the golden age where you could send a letter bomb and nothing came of it!” he laughs.
Murray’s father was an intelligent, tolerant lieutenant colonel – with a playful side. Al’s chosen career finds him essentially continuing his family’s proud tradition of being a bunch of wind-up merchants.
“At lunch, if my mates were there, he’d throw out something like this: ‘I think we need a three strikes and you’re out legal system’. He said that would just stop everything, if you knew for the third crime you’d be strung up, there’d be no more crime. He’d say that, obviously, as a joke and everyone would sit there looking horrified thinking, ‘Jesus, you’re dad’s some kind of lunatic fascist!’”
Speaking of which, you could argue that the Pub Landlord’s time is now. In an era of rising tensions, UKIP and a Britain in the doldrums, the fading comedy character he lampooned in the ‘90s seems resurgent in real life.
“Well, we have UKIP, yeah! Some are respectable and are genuinely concerned about Europe and sovereign powers and banking and all of that, but some of them are sincerely concerned about the fact they can’t bear the French as well! What’s been weird has been watching some of what the Pub Landlord was saying 15 years ago pop into the mainstream. Have we all gone completely mad? Maybe we have.”
How does he feel when he sees his creation called “a British institution”?
“That makes me sound like a crumbling building. Or like I’m about to be privatised!”
Of late, he’s been leasing his talents out to radio. He loves the “instantaneous nature” of it, hosting on Planet Rock and BBC 2, and occasionally standing in for Simon Mayo on the BBC Radio 5 Live’s flagship film programme, bouncing refreshingly off critic Mark Kermode.
This summer, he interviewed Armando Iannucci for the same show. Throughout it all, did he have at the back of his mind: ‘they’ve just done Alpha Papa with Alan Partridge... it might be the Pub Landlord’s time to shine on the silver screen’?
“Oh, absolutely! During that interview I was resisting the urge to say ‘make my movie please!’ C’mon Armando, it’ll be great!’ There is a script for a Pub Landlord film pinging around actually. Or a treatment, rather. What we’d do is send him on a mythic quest to find the Holy Grail. Which of course would be a pint glass... There have been landlords, or barmen at least, at most historic occasions. There’s always been someone stood to one side, listening to the conversation, waiting to refill someone’s glass. At The Last Supper, at the Round Table – certainly at all events in Irish politics! We have this idea that they’re like the Knights Templar, but real.”
Steve Coogan has admitted that he made Partridge more sympathetic in Alpha Papa because he realised he was essentially becoming him. In Murray’s persona, too, there are moments where he comes over a bit ‘Landlord-y’ and has to catch himself.
“Well I have a teenage daughter, so yeah! You find yourself saying things because she’s a teenager and then think, ‘oh my God, who on Earth have I turned into?’”
The flip side is that he’s reaching a point where he can inhabit the nostalgic, set-in-his-ways character with greater believability.
“There’s a great deal to recommend it,” he says of aging. “Especially for men playing characters, because they don’t have to care about youthful baggage or pretend they’re in touch with anything anymore. Dame Edna is retiring next year and Barry Humphries has been doing that character since 1956, so I don’t really have any worries about the longevity issue.”

Al Murray plays Vicar St. on November 15th