Al Murray
Interview (Crackin' Magazine)
10am in the lobby of the Delta hotel in downtown Montreal, and the bushy-tailed PR machinery of the Just For Laughs festival is easing its buffet-breakfasted way into the day. I’m loitering with intent to meet Al Murray, aka The Pub Landlord, and he spots me on his way out of the restaurant.
“Did you enjoy the chops, then?” This carnivorous enquiry isn’t as obscure as it might seem, given that at his show the night before, I’d found myself up on stage as the ‘lucky’ recipient of the star prize in his meat raffle, held in jingoistic honour of the dear old Queen Mum. “She was like a candle in the wind,” the Landlord had lamented, “A really fat, old candle with awful teeth, but a candle nonetheless.” Near brings a tear to your eye.
We’re both more or less straight off the flight line and firmly in the grips of the lag we call jet, the previous night being the first full show that Murray had performed since arriving. So how has it been, arriving in Montreal at the greatest comedy event on the globe, the gleaming zenith of live performance, the adrenaline-fuelled rush as you take to the world stage? “Er…it’s alright.” Oh, OK. Is it stressful performing abroad, then? “Actually, there’s been less grinding of gears than I thought there would be, though I’ve performed in Australia this year, and there’s always much less adjustment than you imagine.”
In case you’ve been passed out in a cellar for the last few years, The Landlord is Murray’s grotesque Perrier award-winning creation – a comically rabid, xenophobic Little Englander who’s happy to take you up on whatever subject you like, as long as it’s having a dig at the French or the Yanks and you’re having a gender-appropriate drink – “pint for the man, white wine, or fruit-based mixer for the lady.”
Was there any worry about the act being too English? Murray doesn’t think so. “I’m a great believer in the idea of the parochial being universal, that one man’s little problems are everyone’s little problems.” So Montrealers have tuned into these universal themes? “Yeah…plus, they HATE the Americans.” My own extensive research (asking two guys next to me at the bar the previous night) had borne this out – as Canadians, they hate the Americans, and as French-Canadians, they hate the French, making this town a ready-made Landlord fan club.
This is probably a good job as a large part of the act is unabashed ridicule of the audience, usually off the back of an innocent inquiry as to what they do for a living, going onto something like, “Market analyst? So you think if you stopped analysing the market for one minute it would collapse? You DISGUST me! How do you look your children in the eye?” He’s a charmer alright. I ask if the character guise offers Al a freer reign for this sort of abuse? “Well, I AM wearing a costume. I AM trying to be foolish, “ he concedes, “But all it really does is allow me to be harder on stupid people and make idiots look like idiots. There’s no grand satirical plan.”
Since the foundations of the act are rooted in things like examining national pride, I imagine there’s been a fair amount of chin-stroking analysis by various commentators from highbrowed thinkeries? “Well one reviewer said that I’d lost my satirical edge, but I never claimed there was that edge to it.” But what about the post-ironic decontextualisation of ethnographic normatives – that kind of guff? “Well, once it’s out there, people ascribe whatever meaning they want to it. There’s nothing you can do. It dismays me when people say it’s ‘a perfect dissection of the Loaded lad culture’. I’ve never read Loaded! I don’t know what they mean!”
It seems that the Landlord has had a fairly meteoric rise – the Perrier Award, West End run Sky TV show ‘Time, Gentlemen Please’ and upcoming UK tour – but Murray is quick to point out that he’s been grinding away for eight years. “I started off a bit fringey, talking about chaos theory from the Landlord’s point of view, but then I made the decision to talk about money and mortgages and things that classic comedy is about.” Despite being billed in Montreal as part of the “on The Edge” series, this reassessment of the parameters of the Landlord have eased the slip across to the mainstream, which Murray enjoys for a particular reason: “As a result of this change, the xenophobia plays very ambiguously, and that really interests me. I want people to think ‘What is going on here?’“
There had definitely been a certain amount of that at the Centaur Theatre the previous night, and the Landlord does sometimes cruise uneasy straits in his relationship with the audience. Murray is confident, though. “I’m basically a cabaret comic who’s ended up doing a character, and the act fits the character because he WOULD talk to people and he WOULD tell them off in this lunatic manner. The thing about the Landlord is that he’s completely certain about things, but he’s also completely fucking wrong. It’s an abuse of his position on stage, but that’s part of the joke.”
Given the lunacy of the abuse he dishes out, I wondered if anyone had ever seriously taken it badly to the point of giving it back? Two funny occasions stick out: “We’d just bombed Serbia, and I had a bit about how it’s great to be back at war and that hopefully it would escalate and we could get the hatrick on the century.” Nice and inoffensive, you’d think. “Well, then I went into a gentler bit about German being just horrible noise to the Landlord, and this woman goes ‘You’re horribly anti-European!’ and I just thought – you’re challenging me NOW? Twenty minutes ago you didn’t think World War Three was disgusting! But she realised what she’d done and the sting was taken out of it.”
Another time was slightly more vitriolic and even more ridiculous: “Someone just stood up and started shouting, ‘You ARE the National Front! You are the same!’ She got booed down. I mean, how over the top do I have to be? How much beer do I have to spill? What does she think? It’s not real! Does she go to plays?! Hamlet – it’s an actor! Calm down!” The flip side can be just as much of disorienting experience though. “What interests me is when I get a gig and there are people there who think they agree with the Landlord,” says Al, “They end up having a really bumpy evening in the end because he’s such a complete loony and a wreck.”
The Landlord would play the rest of the week out in Montreal, heading back to England for a few hours before striking out for a gig that’s a bit beyond thirty minutes at Jongleurs, entertaining our boys in The Falklands. In a fit of journalistic brilliance, I ask him why he’s bothering going back at all, apparently imagining some well-used charter plane going from Montreal to Port Stanley. “Yeah, you have to fly out from the UK with the military. You can’t just hop on the Falklands shag plane.”
Ahem…moving swiftly on, then. What’s next for the Landlord? Any more episodes of ‘Time Gents’? “Maybe more TV. You never know. Even when they say ‘yes’, you never know. We’ve already done 37 and no-one has the nerve to do that any more. People watch two episodes and say ‘I don’t like this’, whereas in the US they give things a chance. They made shedloads of things like Dad’s Army and no-one remembers the plots, just the characters. Sitcom is a bad name because the situation is the last thing that’s funny about it. It should be called comsit. Or something.”
Most people would be hard pressed to call ‘Gents’ a sitcom, though – as a vehicle for the Landlord character, it was a bit more garish than most sitcoms; in a good way, I mean. “There’s been so much mumbly comedy recently,” Murray agrees, “UK sitcom used to not be afraid of stepping up. We wanted to be loud and embarrassing. Though it CAN look as though we’re all on really bad speed. But it worked with the character as he HAD to be grotesque, or he’d end up sounding like a softly-spoken Dutch fascist. And THEN you’re in trouble.”
And so to the national tour, which looms like a big looming 56-date gig around the nation. Sounds like hard work. “I’ve not even looked at the list of dates,” he says. “The tour will be fun, as I’ve never done one. This one’s got ads in the paper, plus I’ve got an official laminate, so I think that qualifies it as a proper tour. Access all areas. Though that does imply teams of roadies working through the night to construct the set of…a bar.” The set the night before had seemed to go well because of its intimacy – did taking the show to larger venues work quite as effectively? “Yes. As long as I can improvise and mess it up, it creates a unique evening. I know what’s going to happen, but the people thrown in the random element. In the end, a big grumpy room is a nightmare, and a big happy room is amazing. Either way, I just follow the same pattern – insult them for 45 minutes and then be philosophical for the second half.”
As with other character-driven acts, such as Ali G, say, or Jon Shuttleworth, the pressure must come after a while to come up with something new. I ask Al if he has other things in development. He’s quite adamant that the Landlord has no shelf-life. “As long as I can keep writing. It’s not like Loadsamoney where he perfectly caught the moment. I’m less time-specific. I’ve found this thing and it works well and has a resonance. It works here. It works in Australia. So…why…would you…ditch that?” And it’s not like there aren’t people who have done quite well with a single alter-ego – why should you be forced to come up with alternatives to something that has so much obvious appeal? “I’m so jealous of people like Lilly Savage on Blankety Blank,” Murray goes on, “No-one ever says to HIM, ‘When are you going to find something else?’ Dame Edna, too.”
The truth is that the Landlord DOES work incredibly well, because, like all the best comic heroes, he’s a misinformed idiot who’s not afraid to express himself in the loudest possible terms, and Al Murray mixes in such intelligence that it’s possible to go anywhere with it. One of the best-received bits of the show is the theory that foreigners always take split-second longer to reply to things, because they have to translate from the English in their brain into their native language, and the Germans take longer than anyone because their grammar is so hard. And it’s delivered with such painful vitriol but such a knowing smile that even the most pro-Euro-minded liberal would be hard-pressed to take any offence.
We go on to talk about the genius of Jerry Sadowitz and the cringeworthy horrorshow of the new Queen musical, which is blatant journalistic shorthand for saying that my Dictaphone ran out of tape. Festival organiser Bruce Hills swings by to congratulate Al on last night’s set, and I, in a magnanimous act of patriotic loyalty, dob him in for breaking his mic. And then he’s whisked off to go go-carting. But what DID happen to the chops? Well, I gave them away to the market analyst in the end. Never get them through customs anyway. And besides, they weren’t British.