A public figure

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Al Murray’s comic alter ego is an oafish and outspoken landlord of questionable opinions, says Richard Fitzpatrick

AL MURRAY, known for his show The Pub Landlord, is bringing his innkeeper banter to Irish audiences next weekend at the Vodafone Comedy Festival in Dublin’s Iveagh Gardens.

Murray is one of the UK’s most popular comedians (and one of its tallest, at 6ft 3in). He won a coveted Perrier Award at Edinburgh’s Fringe festival in 1999, having being shortlisted four years in a row, and figures in the top quartet of Channel 4’s occasional 100 ‘greatest stand-ups’ polls.

Murray has had no grand plan. “There’s a joke, a pun about the similarity between the words ‘career’ and ‘careering,’ as in careering off the side of the road. I know what it means,” he says.

Murray came to prominence as a stand-up in 1994 when he first debuted his alter-ego, the chummy, bordering-on-vulgar, jingoistic British pub landlord, at Edinburgh’s Fringe. Murray has been travelling with his alter ego since and, of course, has used him to good effect for ancillary projects, including his own sitcom, Time, Gentlemen, Please, which he co-wrote with Richard Herring.

Murray, Herring and Stewart Lee are part of a gilded English comedy generation. The three Oxford University students (Murray studied history) sprung from the vaunted Oxford Revue at the same time. Murray lived with Lee, the laconic voice of disaffected English culture, for a couple of years.

“Stewart has always been very serious. He’s always been right,” says Murray. “He’s a lovely, charming fellow. He’s a very sweet man. He’s very clever and is now in an interesting position where everyone’s listening to him. They never did,” he says, allowing himself a hearty chuckle. “It might drive him insane.”

The ‘pub landlord’ would admire Murray’s lineage. He was born in May, 1968, the son of a former paratrooper, and boarded at a public school, Bedford College. His grandfather was Ralph Murray, a distinguished diplomat, who was posted in Cairo as second-in-command at the British embassy during the Suez Crisis in 1956, when his government in London botched a military attempt at regime change.

“He knew President Nasser, from being one of the British guys on the ground,” says Murray. “I think he wasn’t that keen on what happened, but I’m not sure, because it’s shrouded in mystery depending on which account you read. He’s either for the Suez intervention or against it — I can’t work it out.

“He never spoke to us about any of it. He was very old school. It was all secret and official and government business. He wouldn’t talk about it — certainly not to us kids. He was more interested in taking us for walks.”

Another ancestor, his great great great grandfather, the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, walked around much of Ireland just before the Great Famine, peregrinations which he recorded in a bestseller.

“He wrote two very successful travel books — The Irish Sketch Book,” says Murray, “and another one called Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, where he went to Egypt on a steamer, I think, which at the time was highly risky because they used to blow up easily.”

Murray has inherited Thackeray’s satirical view of the world. ‘The pub landlord’ is an interesting creation. He’s full of bluff catchphrases like “all hail the ale”, a master at hectoring his audience and he has an hilarious, schoolboy way of accidently dousing front-row members with beer while shaking their hands.

On the surface, he’s an unreconstructed, oafish xenophobe with chauvinistic tendencies, but you can never be quite sure if he’s celebrating (or sending up) all things British.

“Pint for the fella, glass of white wine, fruit-based drink for the lady — those are the rules,” he says on stage. “If we didn’t have rules where would we be? France! If we had too many rules where would we be? Germany!”

His stage persona likes nothing better than sending up the old enemy across the channel: “The French aren’t here to defend themselves. And we know how good they are at that.”

Murray turned eastwards towards Germany, however, for a couple of his most interesting side shows. In 2004, he made a documentary with the Discovery Channel that retraced the last phases of World War Two, and included an episode about Operation Market Garden, the failed Allied attempt to enter Germany by air in 1944. For Murray’s re-enactment, he parachuted with veterans from the original airborne operation.

Murray followed the series with Al Murray’s German Adventure. His remit was to debunk a few myths about the Germans. The two biggest misconceptions, he says, are that the Germans are organised and that they don’t have a sense of humour. He says they’re not especially good at organisation; it’s more a case of other nationalities being highly disorganised.

When it comes to reading, Murray says he enjoys history books and biographies, even those of dodgy pop bands from the 1980s.

“One of the guys in Bros wrote a really, really funny autobiography about his time in Bros, but I don’t think he sat down to write a funny book. It just came out that way — how pricelessly clueless they were as they were being turned over by the music business.

“You could tell in the book that he hadn’t still quite got his head around what had happened and how he ended up with no money. There’s a very funny story towards the end. He’s obsessed with cars. He’s saying, ‘I’m running out of money. I should stop buying cars.’ He buys a Jag and then drives it into a fjord crossing, not a Ford car, and floods the car and destroys it.

“You just think, ‘well, that’s the story of your life, mate, idn’t it’? You get the keys for something very expensive and you drown it,” Murray says.

* Al Murray performs at the Vodafone Comedy Festival.

Highlights of the festival

* Seeing Tim Key in a tent in the leafy environs of Iveagh Gardens should be a highlight for festivalgoers at this year’s Vodafone Comedy Festival. Key is a performance poet. It would be hard to find a droller artist. He trades in deadpan delivery of the cleverest, most anarchic verse. “This one tackles the thorny issue of dew,” starts a typically ludicrous digression.

* The American Reginald D Hunter is one of the other international names to seek out. Few on the UK comedy circuit deliver such good, crafted, provocative patter. * For more whimsical palates, there’s Josh Widdicombe, a nominee for best newcomer at last year’s Ediinburgh Comedy Festival, and Milton Jones, a rare treat when he hits the mark, which is often, with his zany flights of fancy.

* The beatbox artist Reggie Watts is trucking over from the US while seven of Ireland’s favourites — Tommy Tiernan, David O’Doherty, Jason Byrne, Neil Delamere, PJ Gallagher, Ardal O’Hanlon and David McSavage — are on the bill.

* The Vodafone Comedy Festival takes place in Iveagh Gardens, Dublin, on Saturday, and Sunday. * www.vodafonecomedy.comHome