CAN you believe it?
Al Murray, The Pub Landlord, hasn’t pulled a pint in York since June 2006, when he sped on stage on board a motorised bar, trailing a plume of dry ice.
He has been dishing out his bar-room philosophy to posh neighbour Harrogate instead since then, but is rectifying his errant ways on June 16, the night he plays the Grand Opera House on his extended Barrel Of Fun Tour. Quickly forgiven by York, the Murray show has sold out in a hurry.
“York audiences are lovely. No, seriously, they’re really, really good, and the idea of this tour is to go to places I’ve not been to for a while or I like or I’ve not been to before, so it has a touch of nostalgia or magical mystery tour about it,” says the Guv’nor, who is back on the nation’s television screens in Al Murray’s Compete For The Meat quiz show on the Dave channel.
What will be the meaty subjects on his mind on June 16?
“There’s some Royal Wedding and bin Laden stuff getting woven into the show – and Broken Britain is no longer being broken. The Tories went on and on about it before, but now they don’t think it is,” says Al.
“There’s all that stuff in the show, but the first half is all improvised. I’ve always improvised but never done a full half until now, and I just thought I should give myself the challenge of doing it, though it can be hair-raising.
“What you do is keep moving, keep working your way around the room, because there’s always something that comes up.”
Al’s drive for topicality means the other part of the show is completely different from last autumn’s tour dates. “If you came to it then, you wouldn’t recognise it now,” he says.
That said, his focus before the resumption of his tour this spring was on his new television series. “We just finished it three days before this tour started… but when you’re doing telly, you wish you were doing live shows and vice versa, because once you’ve finished the TV show, that’s it; there’s nothing more you can do.
“But on the road, you can change the show each night… but when you’re doing the TV shows, you’re not going up and down the motorway, which has been the bane of my life – and I’ve been doing this for 18 years now.”
In that time, Al Murray, The Pub Landlord, has never stopped accelerating. “Don’t ask me why. I’ve no idea,” says Al. “I’ve really no idea why the momentum keeps growing, as I never set out to have such momentum. It was never planned but equally I never felt it would stop after four years.
“I was thinking, ‘Let’s see how far this can go’, and my ambition was to quit having to do 20-minute slots on comedy bills. What I like is being able to paint my own picture, my own world.”
Al Murray is outwardly the little Englander with the big ideas and the even bigger mouth, but that is before you step back and smell the irony. “I really like the confusion, but some people admonish me for it. I’ve no idea why. You get people saying, ‘You do realise half your audience doesn’t get that it’s irony’, and I say, ‘You do realise that makes it a glorious practical joke’,” says Al.
“A lot of things the Pub Landlord says, you can sort of agree with, but then you start thinking about them, and you think, ‘Actually, I don’t agree with that’, but that’s why it’s reactionary. You react to it!”
• Al Murray, The Pub Landlord, plays Grand Opera House, York, on his Barrel Of Fun Extra Tour on June 16 at 8pm. SOLD OUT.
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