Comedian Al Murray on the origins of The Pub Landlord and why he performs for only £5 at the Edinburgh Fringe

Al Murray in London’s Soho last week

In this blog a couple of days ago, comedian Al Murray was talking about the Second World War. And yesterday he was talking about a book he is writing on medieval fools. This is the third and last part of the conversation we had last week.

“You’re actually writing two books simultaneously?” I asked.

“I’m trying to write everything all at once, yes.” he replied, “I’ve got another chunk of World War Two to deal with – Why has it stuck to us culturally? Although it’s beginning to fade: there’s now a whole generation of people who don’t know what Two World Wars and One World Cup means, which is brilliant – and healthy.”

“And,” I said, “you’re also preparing your new live stand-up comedy show as The Pub Landlord.”

“Yes, I’m trying to lay down the stuff that will be in the new show at the end of the year,” explained Al. “I always try to work well in advance so I can bed it in properly. I’m touring from September to Christmas, which means final previews at the Edinburgh Fringe in August, which means knowing in July what’s going to be in the show, which means writing it in June, which means thinking about it in April and May.

“The last few years,” I said, “you have performed in £5 shows at the Edinburgh Fringe…”

“That’s me trying out new material,” said Al.

“But why £5?” I asked. “You’re an established star.”

“I’ve always thought,” replied Al, “that, if you get to the… erm… the level I’m at, you should not to go to the Fringe and play massive venues for £25. You should go and play a small venue for £5.”

“Why?”

“Because the point of the Fringe is for people starting out and trying to figure themselves out and creating what they’re doing rather than audiences and money being sucked-off to bigger shows. At £5, it’s not taking a lot of money out of the system and normally I play somewhere small in the afternoon so I’m not in anyone’s way. Twenty years ago, when I was doing the Fringe, if someone had turned up and played a big venue for a long period at high prices, I’d have thought You fucking cunt!”

“The Pub Landlord started at the Fringe, didn’t he?” I asked.

“Harry Hill and I met writing on Week Ending for BBC Radio 4,” said Al, “back when they had a non-commissioned writing thing, and we hit it off and shared a flat in Edinburgh. He was getting me to do voices and bits and pieces in his Fringe show and I was also performing with Guns ’n’ Moses that year, so I had my drum kit up in Edinburgh and Harry’s mate Matt had brought his keyboards and we started playing together in the flat with Harry singing. I said Well, let’s do a gig at the Fringe Club. We did. It went really well. So we said: Alright, next year we’ll come back and do a show with this band in it at the end of the show. 

Publicity photo for Avalon Enteetainment’s Comedy Zone show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1992 with (from left) Andre Vincent, Brenda Gilhooly, Al Murray and Harry Hill.

“That’s what we planned to do. And I wanted to do a character act – like a sort of entertainer who’s shit – but I couldn’t make it work. So, on the opening night in Edinburgh, we were in the Pleasance Cabaret Bar and Harry said: We still haven’t figured out how we’re going to link this show together. What do you want to do?

“I said How about we say the compere hasn’t shown up and the bar manager has offered to fill in and cover the gaps? and Harry went Yeah, OK, whatever and I went on and did that and it worked. By the end of a fortnight, I knew how The Pub Landlord spoke and, when we went on tour at the end of it, I had an hour’s material.”

“Ridiculous, isn’t it,” I said. “Just one throwaway idea and a career gets built out of it.”

“Tell me about it,” said Al. “In a way, that’s one reason I’m so fond of The Pub Landlord, because it came out of nowhere. I never planned it. The first year in Edinburgh when it was getting reviewed, they said It’s a dissection of this, that and the other and he’s put in this-and-that and I thought Really? OK. If you say so. I’ll run with that, then.”

“You changed the act to fit the reviews?”

“No, no. I just thought: Oh, I suppose that IS what I’m doing.”

“And now you are consciously putting in all the intelligent, intellectual things.”

“Yeah.”

“Before, you mentioned the frustrations of television – commissioning editors changing and all that. What do you want to do that the TV people haven’t let you do?”

“Basically everything!” laughed Al. “Well, the talk show I did as The Pub Landlord (Al Murray’s Happy Hour)… that came to an end at the very moment I thought I was getting really good at it – That was very frustrating. It was a thing I really loved doing. We were not doing a normal chat show. We didn’t tell the guests what we were going to talk about. So they were having to react, rather than go through their glib stories.”

“You could do an Edinburgh Fringe chat show,” I suggested.

“Well,” said Al, “what Tim Vine’s done with his chat show in Edinburgh means there’s no point doing it. What he’s done is so brilliant. He’s a brilliant interviewer and he is so sharp.”

“So you’ve shown all your talents, haven’t you?” I said. “You’re a historian, you’re a comedian, a chat show host. What have you not shown? What don’t I know you can do?”

“The thing I would like to try to do is some acting,” said Al. “I haven’t really done any, so it would be nice to find out if I could do it. That was why I did stand-up in the first place: to see if I could do it and it looked like a lot of fun and it might be really interesting. Though there was a big bit of me which also thought It would mean I don’t have to get up in the morning. The dilettante in me was coming out. The other attraction of acting is you don’t have to write it; you don’t have to originate it.”

Comedian Al Murray has a chat about his Pub Landlord character, TV satire and mentally sub-normal medieval fools

Guns ’n’ Moses (from left) Mike Cosgrave, Al Murray, Dave Cohen and Jim Tavaré

In yesterday’s blog, Al Murray talked about his interest in history, Britishness and World Wars.

“You were also a drummer in the group Guns ’n’ Moses with Dave Cohen and Jim Tavaré,” I said when I met him last week. “But you’re not a frustrated drummer and a frustrated historian. You must be rolling in dosh. So you’re not thinking I should have taken a different career path?”

“No,” said Al. “I remember on a school report a very long time ago they called me a dilettante and I had to ask my dad what it meant. He said It means someone who dabbles in different things and doesn’t really specialise and I remember thinking That sounds brilliant! That sounds like a good job option.”

“Polymath might sound better,” I suggested. “You’re in an ideal position now. I imagine you don’t desperately need to work.”

“Yes and no,” replied Al. “I really love doing the stand-up side. This is the 20th year I’ve been doing the Pub Landlord character. Each time I sit down to write a new show, which is what I’m doing right now, I always realise there’s a whole load of things I could do with it which I haven’t explored yet. The character is the same but, if you watch the shows, they’re all very different from each other, with different textures.”

“With Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part,” I said, “I thought maybe he was a role model for people who agreed with his bigoted views. I never believed he would change people’s views.”

“The problem is,” said Al, “if you go too far along that road, you start to argue against irony. The opposite of irony is everything being taken literally. If you’re going to be literal about everything, you’re gonna have to have figurative paintings; you can’t have Impressionism… The thing that’s happening in stand-up comedy at the moment is you’re supposed to be sincere. Why?”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because it’s prescriptive,” said Al, “and art suffers when you get prescriptive. On stage, I don’t talk about me – ever – because I’m not interested and I’m not interested in anyone else being interested. I’d rather talk about the world or ideas. If people really do agree with what the Pub Landlord says then they’re mental, so there’s nothing I can do about them. And isn’t it like a cosmic prank? If people think he’s real, that’s fucking hilarious. I think our job as comics is to be pranksters. We’re not supposed to agree. We’re supposed to cause confusion.”

ITV publicity for Al Murray’s Multiple Personality  Disorder

“In 2009,” I said, “you did do an ITV show Multiple Personality Disorder in which you played lots of different characters and I genuinely thought the range of characters was wonderful and…”

“ITV didn’t think that!” laughed Al. “Dealing with TV people! The guy who had been championing me went elsewhere, so we ended up with someone new as commissioner. I loved making that programme. The fun was doing different things and seeing if they’d work. But, for stand-up, the Pub Landlord is… I’ve got him… When people say Why don’t you do something else? I say Alright, I’ll do that when Jack Dee does his ‘I’m Not Grumpy Any More’ show or Harry Hill does observational comedy or Michael McIntyre talks about American foreign policy.”

“So,” I said, “your two big interests are, let’s say, history and comedy. And they come together in this book you’re writing about fools.”

Will Sommers, a fool to the Tudors

“Well, I’m trying to write it,” said Al. “I’m trying to draw the stuff together and see if I can make it cohere. I found out about Henry VIII’s fool Will Sommers. He survived as a fool through Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and through to Elizabeth I. He survived all four reigns in court.

“The traditional reading of that period is it’s a roller coaster politically and religiously. So how did he survive? The answer is either he wasn’t saying anything dangerous at all OR that having him there saying awkward things at the right moment was SO important you could not get rid of him. The Tudor fools were the last of the classic old-fashioned fools.”

“You mean men with funny hats?” I asked.

“No,” said Al. “There’s fools and there’s jesters. Jesters are people pretending to be fools. Fools were – although it’s unpalatable for us – essentially people with behavioural and learning difficulties. In the medieval theology of the time, if that was your intellectual capacity, you were regarded as ‘innocent before God’ because you couldn’t understand theology. So you had a Get Out of Jail card. Literally.”

“You’re an idiot, so we won’t burn you at the stake,” I said.

“Exactly,” agreed Al. “So you could say what you liked. Most of the fools were called ‘naturals’ and they fitted this mental category. Then, separately, you had jesters – ‘artificials’ – who were pretending to be like that and they’re the people who get in the shit because everyone knows they’re pretending – so, when they say the terrible thing that shouldn’t be said, the assumption is You knew what you were saying so you’re for the chop.

“A lot of what we think fools were comes at us through art and stage plays. So we think fools were like the fool in King Lear, but that’s Shakespeare’s dramatisation of what their function was. In fact, you had these people essentially gigging up and down the country and there was a circuit. If you were a man of status, you would have your own fool saying stupid things or juggling or farting. Farting was very big in the 12th century.”

Al Murray writing new ideas in Soho last week

“And there was a circuit?” I asked.

“And a career structure,” added Al. “This was an era when mentally ill people were not locked away. That didn’t happen until the 18th century. Before that, you had ‘village idiots’ and everyone knew who they were and what their problems were and they had a role. And they were innocent before God.

“In the Domesday Book, there’s a fool who was probably one of Edward The Confessor’s fools who has retired out to the Welsh Marches who has a big estate – so he’s really rich. But he’s been removed or exiled because he’s a previous king’s jester and we need a new one for the Normans.”

“Do you think fools were mentally sub-normal,” I asked, “or might they have been autistic, where there’s a mixture of high intelligence and social awkwardness?”

“That whole spectrum,” said Al. “Different people with different problems. I think we would now be incredibly uncomfortable about laughing at them. You only have to look at the response to Ricky Gervais’ TV show Derek where he’s pretending to be someone who would have had a role as a fool… The response to that is super-uncomfortable for a lot of people.

“Fools were very important, because they spoke the truth. There are examples of them giving the king bad news because no-one else dared. The fool had a licence to speak truth to the powerful.”

“Nowadays,” I said, “I suppose we have satirists.”

“Well,” said Al, “there’s this preposterous idea that people in the 1960s invented satire. They did it on TV and what was unusual about them was they were people who could have been in the Establishment taking the piss out of the Establishment. The Goon Show was a satire of Britain in the 1950s, but Spike Milligan was blue collar, so he doesn’t get that elevation as a great satirist because he’s not from the Establishment. He had not rejected something in becoming a satirist.”

“Is he a satirist or a surrealist?” I asked.

“Well,” said Al. “The Goon Show had the absurdities of National Service, was about rationing, was about Class. It’s all in there, but Spike Milligan dressed it up as something else. The 1960s satire boom, though, was… It’s a bit like me… My grandfather (Sir Ralph Murray) was a diplomat, my dad worked in management at British Rail, so he was a sort of civil servant and that’s where I was heading – or a lawyer or something. To do comedy was a bit of a departure.”

“You’ve got no showbiz background?”

The Navy Lark with (on left) Stephen Murray

“My great uncle Stephen Murray was an actor. I never knew him. He was in The Navy Lark on radio when his serious actor career mis-fired a little. But that was always like Your great uncle Stephen’s an actor… Phoah! That’s really weird!”

“I remember Stephen Murray always played authority figures,” I said.

“Which is what his brother was,” said Al. “His brother was an ambassador.”

(Al did not mention to me that he is a great-great-great-great-great-grandson of John Murray, 3rd Duke of Atholl nor that his great-great-great-grandfather was author William Makepeace Thackeray.)

“Most satire,” I suggested, “is sort of elitist, whereas what you’re doing with the Pub Landlord is populist. Are you sneaking in under the radar?”

“Maybe,” said Al. “Whenever there’s a round-up of what’s going on in satire, I always think: Why am I not on this list?”

“Maybe,” I suggested, “because you are appealing to Joe Public in general and not exclusively to Guardian readers?”

“Maybe,” said Al. “It always makes me laugh. I think Oh, come on! At least give me a mention! Or at least print ‘some people say it is but it isn’t’ .”

… CONTINUED HERE …

 

In a Soho coffee bar comic Al Murray – no longer as The Pub Landlord – gets serious about British wars and Germans

Al Murray was writing at Bar Italia this week

When I first saw Al Murray’s comedy act, many years ago last century, during the reign of the middle-aged Queen, it was an audio act. He came on, a slim young chap, and made the sounds of assembling and dismantling Army automatic rifles and suchlike.

For the last twenty years, he has been performing comedy as the bigoted Pub Landlord.

When I arrived at Bar Italia in Soho to talk to him this week, he was writing down some comedy ideas. Or maybe not. They might have been some Pub Landlord ideas. Or maybe not. I forgot to ask. I have a bad memory. What can I say?

“So,” I said to Al, “you’re an intelligent, sophisticated man.”

“Yes,” he said.

“But,” I continued, “everyone thinks you’re a thick East End or Essex barman. You’re a young Alf Garnett.”

“Yes, isn’t that fantastic?” he replied. (He must have been asked the question hundreds of times.) “I get to be who I really am off-stage, no-one knows who I really am and I get to talk about the things I want to talk about elliptically. I think that gives me great freedom.”

“Though, as yourself,” I said, “you get to do TV documentaries on the Second World War like Road To Berlin. Was that a difficult sell to the TV company?”

Al’s ten-episode 2004 documentary series

“I was on Frank Skinner’s TV show,” explained Al, “and he said Oh, you’re really interested in World War Two and the woman commissioning programmes at the Discovery Channel saw it. It was a long time ago and I haven’t done one since. In TV, there’s this thing that the person who commissioned your programme moves on and you’re left high and dry and that happened then. We went back to Discovery saying We wanna do Road To Rome next, the desert campaign and then up through Italy – and the new commissioning editor said Oh, I think the whole World War Two party’s over.”

“We’re British,” I said. “It’s never going to be over.”

“Exactly,” laughed Al. “For you the War is over! – It couldn’t be any the less true. We like to think we won it.”

“Did I miss something?” I asked. “I thought we did win it?”

“With a little help from our friends,” said Al. “Obviously The Pub Landlord thinks we won it on our own with no-one else.”

“Well, we almost lost the Battle of Waterloo,” I said. “It was the Prussians who won that.”

“No, no, no,” said Al. “Wellington only fought it when and where he did because he knew the Prussians were turning up at teatime. That was the bigger thinking that was going on which, essentially, Napoleon fell for.

The iconic charge of the Scots Greys at the Battle of Waterloo. (But did the Prussians really win? It depends what you read.)

“Historically, that’s a real bone of contention. If you read German history, that IS what happened: the Prussians won the battle. But, if you read our history… although our army at Waterloo was probably 60% made up of German soldiers anyway…”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Al. “It was a multi-national army. Soldiers from Nassau, Hanovarians, people from all over Germany, Dutch soldiers, everything. It was a coalition army against Napoleon.”

“Culloden,” I said, “fascinates me, being Scottish, because it wasn’t a battle between Scotland and England, it was a battle between Catholics and Protestants; and Highlanders versus Lowlanders and the English and their Hanovarian royal family.”

“And it was a Franco-German dust-up,” said Al. “The French Germans versus the Scots Germans.”

“And the best fighters on Bonnie Prince Charlie’s side,” I said, “were the Wild Geese, who were Irish.”

“Yeah,” said Al. “These are the kind of conversations I can have all day, to be honest.”

“And you wrote a book about…”

Al’s book about growing up in the 1970s

“It was a book,” said Al, “about growing up in a family where this sort of stuff got talked about a lot, where it was regarded as interesting and important. And, at the same time, about growing up in the 1970s when it’s Action Man toys, Airfix models and Where Eagles Dare type films. That very post-War part of our entertainment culture. And realising that the thing which you think is a big adventure when you’re a boy is actually a vile, disgusting thing, but nevertheless fascinating.”

“It could be argued,” I said, “that the Second World War is the only totally justifiable war – concentration camps and all that.”

“But that’s not why we went to war in 1939,” said Al. “It’s interesting now there’s this current debate about whether the First World War was justified or not. In fact, the Germans invading Belgium (in 1914) is a better traditional British casus belli than the Germans invading Poland (in 1939)… Poland is a lot further away from here and the Belgian coastline is close. Though the 1939 Germans were bigger bad guys than the 1914 ones. Arguably. It’s all very complicated. There’s a way we need to see it and there’s what probably really happened.”

“So what’s the way we feel we need to see it?” I asked.

“That we were fighting the evil nasty Nazis. What really happened in the politics of the late 1930s was the collapse of diplomacy – again – and Britain being run ragged too many times and, on a raw level, a loss of face and prestige and Britain having to do something about that. I reckon. But what do I know? I am but a humble comic.”

“But…” I prompted.

“Well, I was talking about this the other night,” said Al. “I’d managed to inveigle my way into dinner with a couple of real historians and they were saying, in Europe, World War II is regarded as the most gigantic calamity, a hideous thing… whereas we seem to regard it as character forming and it gave us all sorts of good things.”

“Well,” I said, “we’ve always been at war. There’s that statistic that, in the last 100 – or is it 150 now? – years, there’s only been one year…”

“…only one year,” said Al, “supposedly 1968, when no British soldier has been killed on active service.”

“You studied History at Oxford University,” I said. “So really you wanted to be a historian…”

Al as the Pub Landlord

“No, no, no no,” said Al. “When I got to Uni I was thinking What the hell am I gonna do? History was the subject I found easiest. But, once I got there, my academic career became very dismal very quickly, because I got involved in doing comedy.

“I thought I was going to end up playing in bands and I remember unpacking my drum kit on my first day at Uni in a music room in my college and Stewart Lee and Richard Herring were in there planning their sketch show that they were going to do the following week.

“They had been at the Edinburgh Fringe that summer and they didn’t tell anyone their sketch group had sometimes outnumbered the audience, so they came back to Oxford University in great glory and did a big sell-out run and I remember thinking This is the thing I’m looking for – doing comedy. It had never occurred to me before…”

… CONTINUED HERE ..

Kevin Bishop – consolidating a career combining comedy and ‘proper’ acting

Kevin Bishop seems to be consolidating his showbiz career by overlapping comedy and ‘proper’ acting rather well, without getting any distracting Russell Brand front page coverage.

Channel 4’s Star Stories got him attention in 2006 and The Kevin Bishop Show got him even more profile in 2008-2009. But he had already paid his dues. He started his showbiz career in that by-now almost classic training ground of BBC TV kids’ series Grange Hill and his first movie role had been as Jim Hawkins in Muppet Treasure Island back in 1996, when he was only 16 years old.

This week, he started filming a new comedy movie May I Kill U? about the recent London riots and, two nights ago, I was at the first recording of his new BBC Radio series Les Kelly’s Britain, produced by Bill Dare and written by Bill Dare & Julian Dutton

The show was interesting for several reasons.

One interesting thing was that, during the recording, there were two heckles from the audience, which I hope stay in after the edit. I have to admit I have not seen that many radio recordings, but I think I can say that heckles are not that common and Kevin dealt with them so smoothly that I actually wondered if they had been set-up… though I think they were genuine.

Unusually, Kevin did not use a stand microphone. He had one of those little headset mikes with a thin strip coming down the cheek of the type that Madonna and other singers have so they can strut freely around the stage.

This allowed him to wander the stage and to come down into the audience while the other four performers used traditional stand mikes.

The show was notable for excellent casting of the four supporting actors and for two spot-on Scots accents from them, one of which got laughs from me and from the cast themselves just for the accent itself – it was a rather oily Gordon Brown accent – you had to be there.

The show’s producer/co-writer Bill Dare has a long pedigree in comedy – including The Mary Whitehouse Experience, Dead Ringers, The Now Show and ITV’s Spitting Image 1990-1993. He is also, to me rather startlingly, the son of actor Peter Jones who, to my generation, was star of The Rag Trade and, to a later generation, was the voice of The Book in the original BBC Radio version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

There is a slight problem with Les Kelly’s Britain in that the basic comedy situation is that a show is being presented by a radio host who lacks self-awareness and Alan Partridge has explored and carved out that territory already.

So, although Les Kelly is a distinct character, it is a dodgy creative proposition.

The publicity says Les Kelly is like “the love child of Jeremy Kyle and Jeremy Clarkson” and “the natural heir to classic comic creations Alan Partridge, The Pub Landlord and Count Arthur Strong” which is fair enough, though the inclusion of Count Arthur Strong mystifies me.

The show sounds as if it might be slightly un-original but, in fact, that is misleading. The Les Kelly script, superbly delivered by all five performers when I saw it, has some genuinely wonderful surreal moments and occasional dark humour – it managed to fit in a joke about the wartime bombing of Dresden, though one of the re-takes at the end was, according to Bill Dare, “in case we need to cut the cancer joke”.

I hope they keep it in and that Les Kelly’s Britain prospers.