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LANDLORD HOPE AND GLORY

BY CHRIS WILSON

AL MURRAY appears in The Bistro wearing a Cossack hat and looking much taller than his 6ft 3 ins, and strides over to my table.

We are on the ground floor of a giant shed of industrial units in west London, where his production company is based. "The Bistro" is actually a canteen with pretensions: garish prints on the walls, rave music blaring out from behind the counter.

Al surveys the room. It is the sort of establishment his alter ego, the fiercely traditional Pub Landlord, would say had "gone over to the dark side".

It is four years since Murray, the 30-year-old character comedian, started performing as The Pub Landlord, the most magnetic and shocking caricature to hit British stand-up comedy since Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney.

The Landlord is a little Englander with a big mouth. In an ever-changing world, his views remain constant.

He rants against the French and the European Union and harpoons metric measures and modern jazz.

And to the last breath in his body, he will defend a lager-drinking, jingoistic, blinkered, new-town culture that is ingrained in him like the lettering in a stick of rock.

Murray has become a word-of-mouth phenomenon. Tickets for his new national tour are disappearing like free premium lager. Yet very little is known about the man behind the monster.

Without the cossack hat, in his blue fleece, V-necked shirt and black denims, Al Murray looks rather benign.

Only his shaved head suggests menace, which is dispelled by his kindly eyes and half-smile.

He speaks with a slight estuary accent, of which the Pub Landlord's coarse brogue is an exaggeration. So it is surprising to learn he was a public school boy, a boarder at Bedford School in Bedfordshire.

"I was never caned," says Murray, "but I was given the slipper for some misdemeanour. I can't recall what it was now, though it wasn't drugs.

"But some Dutch boys were thrown out for using cannabis. The school presented it as "the evil of drugs'. I imagined people with syringes."

He loathed boarding, he says. "There was bullying and I received and doled out my share of it.

"It was the usual beastliness. Bedford was a very English public school with a cadet force and honours for sport.

"I was the guy with two left feet who couldn't play rugby. A bunch of us would lie low in the Green Room beneath the theatre, and they never caught us."

Al's father, Ingram Murray, was a senior British Rail manager who advised other European railways.

His father's father, Sir Ralph Murray, was a diplomat and, probably, a spy or "spook" as Al puts it.

He was certainly the first head of the euphemistically named Information Research Department, an anti-communist propaganda unit set up by Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government, its purpose to discredit the Soviet Union.

It seems a strange gene pool for a comedian, until you discover that Sir Ralph's brother, Stephen Murray, was an entertainer who played an admiral in the classic BBC radio show The Navy Lark.

The seeds of Al's comedy career were sown as a history undergraduate at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford.

"There was a fortnightly comedy club where you had to do new material.

I performed in a sketch group, a double act and then on my tod."

Murray graduated in 1991 and came to London to play the comedy club circuit for three years with a macabre act.

"It was machine gun noises and dark humour. It was full of surreal stuff like you've chopped up your little sister and you're going to bury her in a shallow grave in the back garden and the doorbell goes, and you think, 'What do I do - bury her or get out of her dress?' That was the level, and I got sick of it."

He started working with another new comedy talent, a young doctor calling himself Harry Hill. "Harry wanted to sing," recalls Murray with a smirk, "so we put together a pub band show called Pub Internationale. He needed a compère. So two days before the Edinburgh Festival, I said I'd put on a suit and pretend to be a Cockney landlord who doesn't know he's talking to the audience."

It was July 1994 and The Pub Landlord was born.

A 70-date national tour followed and by the end of it Murray realised he had a new act.

"I never planned it. The whole thing came about totally by accident," he says.

The Pub Landlord has been compared to Warren Mitchell's celebrated bigot Alf Garnett.

But there is an important difference. The thoughts of Chairman Alf were not penned by Mitchell but by a scriptwriter, Johnny Speight, and were packaged in a television sitcom format in which Garnett was clearly the butt of the joke.

Murray writes his own scripts and stands alone, taking full responsibility for the tirades he delivers to packed venues up and down the country.

It works. He is the first stand-up since Eddie Izzard to have become a cult figure without major television exposure, although he still turns up on his old Mucker Hill's Channel 4 show.

He was short-listed for the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival three times, before eventually winning in 1999.
On stage Murray is mesmerising. Wearing a brass belt buckle that reads BEER, cheap trousers, a shirt with a clip-on tie, a loud blazer and sloshing around a pint of lager, he looks so absurd that the audience starts laughing instantly.

They positively guffaw as his facial muscles go into spasms of vainglorious emotion while reeling out platitudes like: "When I hear that first pint being drawn every morning, it's like hearing the first cuckoo in spring" and "A pint for the blokes, glass of wine for the ladies".

The beer glass, he adds, "goes with a man's hand like tuna and mayonnaise".

The Landlord moves swiftly from topic to topic, taking in the Magna Carta, Eurotunnel and the Millennium Dome in a seamless stream of comedy, occasionally teasing the audience with the likes of: "Who thinks the French are odd?" When they make affirmative noises, he says that is why wars start.

A major factor in his success has been his hard work.

Performing more than 300 gigs a year, he is barely at home at his flat in Maida Vale, west London.

Every day he sits at his computer for a couple of hours trying to write new material, even when he's suffering from writer's block. "I had it for four months in 1997 and got very worried," he says. But generally his writing rate is prodigious. He now has four hours of high-quality material.

His intellect is a restive one.

"I get bored very quickly, that's why I ditched the Landlord's catchphrase: 'I don't say it's right. I don't say it's wrong. It's the way things are.'

And he has taken the character into new areas; writing routines based on history, arithmetic and chaos theory.

Does Murray agree that the Pub Landlord appeals to two diametrically opposed camps of fans: those laughing at the Pub Landlord and his xenophobia; and those laughing with the Landlord at his victims?

Yes, Murray is appalled by the fact that his shows attract some genuine bigots.

"I try to make stupid ideas look stupid by presenting them stupidly, but sometimes people agree with the Landlord and cheer the xenophobia.

"Then I have to put in spoiler lines like, 'Who do the European Union think they are trying to raise our standard of living?'"

He complains that there's also a third audience group - a tiny but irascible minority - that doesn't get the joke at all and believes Murray is a bigot on tour.

"People say my act is racist, homophobic, sexist and xenophobic.

"I say to them: 'You can't have been listening.' I find it annoying because I'm careful. I never get to the point where I think, 'God, did I just say that?' Anyone can be outrageous and in the end it becomes tawdry."

Indeed when you analyse the Pub Landlord's tirades, they appear relatively inoffensive compared with Alf Garnett or Northern comics like Roy "Chubby" Brown.

Murray has no truck with the comedic rule of thumb that if a line gets a laugh, use it.

Indeed he is surprisingly politically correct. "I don't tell jokes about old people. I won't tell an audience that old people are sad and pathetic, because old age is waiting for us all and it won't be funny."

Neither does he crack gags about cancer. "And I'll never do sex jokes. They are well worn parts."

He is very conscious of the need to keep his comedy current (he did his millennium jokes a year early just to get in first) and is critical of stand-ups who take their audiences for granted.

He is disdainful of Eddie Izzard's cack-handed attempt at performing in French in a Parisian comedy club for a television documentary.

"His French was rubbish. It was typical of his over-confidence," says Murray. "I thought it was a real insult for Eddie to do his act in pidgin French in Paris and expect people to laugh."

There is, however, more of Al Murray in the Landlord than you might imagine.

He admits that he is "hawkish on foreign policy" and favoured Cruise missile attacks on Iraq.

On a more immediate level, he is upset by the behaviour of the big breweries. "The refitting and theming of pubs is the most hideous and ridiculous thing.

"Soon every pub will be the same. To the breweries, they aren't community places, but simply retail outlets for them to squeeze every last red cent out of. That's depressing." Even more upsetting is some landlords' attitude towards him - after performing at a function for them, he was astounded to be offered tenancy positions in a choice of venues.

"They really think I am a pub landlord who tells jokes," he says shaking his head.

The Pub Landlord is getting a pub in a Sky television show currently being developed with Avalon, a leading stable of stand-up talent. "I want to do a sitcom in which nothing really happens - as in Seinfeld ," says Murray. "I've written something with men talking crap in a pub. It will be somewhere like Bedford with a warehouse complex on the ring road.

"The Landlord's looking for identity, so it would be set where there isn't any."

It may also mark the debut of the Pub Landlord's twin brother, the black sheep of the family, also played by Murray.

"I like the idea of a Cain and Abel relationship," says Murray, surveying The Bistro again. "The Landlord's brother has gone over to the dark side of pub management - he runs a wine bar."

© 1999 Chris Wilson