“Tape? You’re using tape?!” Al Murray the Pub Landlord bellows when you use the word but mean a digital recorder, like he’s inviting the whole pub to come over and point and laugh.
“Blimey, what year is it?”
There are two Al Murrays, of course.
The loudmouth and the comedian
The blazer-wearing, ale-loving loudmouth whose no-nonsense-and-very-little-thought opinions will assail the audience during this new Gig for Victory tour.
Then there’s Al Murray the comedian, a mild-mannered and endlessly thoughtful bloke, but still with a bit of Pub Landlord’s garrulousness.
“He always had a hankering to have a Blitz of his own to bore his grandchildren with,” says real Al of Landlord Al.
“Finally, he’s got one in the pandemic. His attitude is, this is our finest hour, and it’s truly proved our character. Integrating the audience into the show is all part of the fun, and that’s very much what’s going to happen.”
The real Al
What’s real Al’s response to the pandemic?
“It’s the first time in my life that a thing has happened to everyone in the same way,” he says. “In 2019 it was all about Brexit, but everyone had a different point of view on that. The pandemic is an extraordinary thing to have as a topic, a complete one-off.
“Dennis Norden used to say that after the Second World War, you could find common ground with every audience.
“If you talked about rationing, for example, they all knew exactly what you meant. Three years ago if I’d said AstraZeneca in my show, no-one would have known what I was on about.”
We could do with an apology
What else is on the Landlord’s mind? “Possibly the idea that we could do with an apology from the people in charge.
“The idea there’s one rule for people in government and another for everyone else. That’s definitely a theme.”
Does the Pub Landlord’s ability to at least run a p***-up in a brewery make him a contender for high office?
“Definitely, yeah. Although it seems they were trying to run a p***-up, it’s just everything else that was secondary.”
Saying the difficult things
It’s often been said that Murray gets to talk about difficult things at face value, because he’s using the Pub Landlord as a screen. He says that’s true, up to a point.
“What is the face value?” he asks. “He’s a lunatic. He’s bananas. He’s a bulls****er.
“The most interesting thing about doing a character is it means you don’t have to start from where you are.
“When he says ‘of course’ at the start of one of his arguments, you can start from anywhere, really. Comedians are about misrule and chaos and confusion.”
Murray says he has a good ‘antenna’ for what the public are thinking, partly down to interacting with his audiences.
‘Doesn’t mean it’s not mad’
He was surprised Leave didn’t win the Brexit vote by a bigger margin, for example (although “just because it was the majority view, doesn’t mean it’s not mad”).
“I’m a great believer in reading newspapers, even the ones I don’t agree with,” he says, reasonableness which the Pub Landlord would baulk at. “Otherwise you’re never going to know what’s in them, are you?
“Also, there’s a mindset in British culture that’s been around a really long time, about flicking the Vs at people. I shouldn’t have to explain that to someone Scottish.”
- Al Murray, the Pub Landlord’s Gig for Victory is at the Whitehall Theatre, Dundee, on Wednesday, June 22 and the Alhambra, Dunfermline, on Saturday June 25. thepublandlord.com
