Al Murray, The Pub Landlord seizes his moment as he Digs For Victory at Portsmouth Guildhall | Interview

So when your main character as a comic is a pub landlord – nay, The Pub Landlord, it’s a bit of a double whammy.

But Al Murray, who is the UK’s most famous licensee, is back with a new show – Gig For Victory.

And as the dust settles from the past couple of years and we emerge blinking from it, the men and women of this great country will need answers.

When that moment comes, who better to show the way, to provide those answers, than the people’s man of the people, the Pub Landlord? Steeped in the deep and ancient barroom wisdom of countless lock-ins, the Pub Landlord is there to show the way.

At Portsmouth Guildhall he will be offering people thirsty for common sense a full pint of the good stuff.

As Al tells The Guide: ‘The idea is to try and capture a sense of the fact that we're exiting the last two years of calamity and confusion. And also this sense that we all went through something together, we all had to pull together, which is actually, weirdly true. That's not like a conceit I had to come up with – that actually happened – which makes a change, to be honest, when you're writing about stuff, that the central premise is basically not BS. It's quite refreshing,’ he chuckles.

‘Pubs were the first to close and last to reopen, really. It’s been an extremely difficult time. Where I live there was a place around the corner where the landlord was super enterprising in making sure that he could keep going, within whatever rules there were – it was amazing, the will to survive that that pub had.

‘For the landlord's trade it's been a disaster.’

So how have the events of the past two years affected his landlord’s psyche?

‘The one thing he's always wanted is a national emergency on a par with the Second World War, and this is as near as dammit! He sees it as his Blitz.

‘When it started a lot of people were making those sorts of comparisons, so it's not beyond the realms of imaginings that that's what someone might think.’

Like so many others, Al was due to tour in spring 2020 – he’d already done a few warm-up gigs, and was even meant to tour in the far east that April.

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Al recalls: ‘It [Covid-19] starts going through the far east, and I remember saying to my agent: “Is that still happening?” “Yeah, yeah, the promoter's confident that it will go ahead". “Are you sure?”

‘And then the next thing you know, it’s: “Do we really want to be doing the warm-up gigs in tiny rooms? What if turns out we're spreading it?” Blah, blah, blah, and the tour got put into this very strange sort of suspended animation which didn't actually resolve itself until autumn last year.

‘What we could do of that tour we did at the end of last year. The last gig we did last autumn I said: “Thanks very much and welcome to the last gig of the 2019 tour”.

‘It was very odd.’

But for Al the husband and father, not the comic creation, lockdown was a chance for a change of pace. At first, at least.

‘I tour a lot and I said to myself, this is great, I didn't have to go up and down the motorway any more. I don't have to eat terrible sandwiches from service stations. I can be at home, which is a novelty. I said to myself that I don't need the laughter of strangers to make myself feel good.

‘That lasted about three months and then I got quite needy, let's put it that way!

‘I can't speak for anyone else, but a lot of people get into stand-up because they're show-offs, it's an important part of how they make them feel good about themselves. So to be cut off from that was kind of strange, but it's been brilliant to be at home as much as I have. I never thought, unless I retired, that that would happen.’

And he got to see more of his children.

‘They otherwise don't see much of me – so that was quite a nice change to be honest. It sounds quite basic, but it was a revelation to be at home as much as I was.

‘It was swings and roundabouts in every aspect with the pandemic.’

As a result, Al was unsurprisingly a keen adopter of the online/Zoom gig.

‘I did do quite a lot,’ he says, ‘and it was quite interesting because they evolved.

‘The first few were basically staring down a web cam to no response and thinking, is this thing even on? ‘Then during the second lockdown, one club in particular, ABC Comedy, I did a quiz every Monday night for them, which was really good fun. You ended up with 150 people who would always come on, it was often the same faces, and it would end up as one big in-joke, and it was fun for it.

‘The weird thing about it was that you'd have people all over the country watching that, rather than the people in the room in front of you.

‘Again the weird swings and roundabouts of it all – not being able to gig, but being able to gig in a completely different way. It was actually quite exciting, once it all worked, once the technical side of things was figured out.

‘I'd be able to say to my wife: "I'm just going to do a gig in in Galway, I'll be back in half an hour”, and I’d go upstairs. That was all quite agreeable. It's as close to teleportation as we're ever going to get.’

When restrictions allowed in summer 2020, Al came down and performed a set for local comic and promoter James Alderson at one of his socially distanced Comedy Under The Stars shows in the beer garden of The Farmer Inn, Catherington.

It was a fitting venue for the Pub Landlord.

‘That was great fun – he got that really well organised. The pandemic was very tough for some people, but here was this absurd idea – you're in a field on a balmy summer's evening with everyone sat around with waiter service, all in their little chairs and making themselves comfortable. The idea that this was some sort of national emergency or dystopian future was quite hard to reconcile with what we were all doing. The juxtaposition was pretty funny – the idea that everything had gone to crap and actually everyone was having a rather agreeable time of it...’

Al also wrote and had released a book, The Last 100 Years (Give or Take) and All That, during the pandemic. However, the stand-up star actually found it harder to write during lockdown than usual.

‘I found to be pretty tricky. And you’d think, why's that? You've got no distractions, you're stuck at home, you've got nowhere to go – but those are the reasons I found it so difficult. It was quite an uninspiring tempo to live at to get stuff done. I like being busy and then you squeeze stuff into the gaps – it's that idea that if you want to get something done, get a busy person to do it.

‘I slowed down to suspended animation speed during the pandemic, and found it very difficult to put pen to paper.

‘Luckily that was meant to be a comedy book. I'm finishing another book which I started during the pandemic, and that's a proper history book which I've found very hard to write, really for the same reasons.

‘It's not necessarily in my comfort zone, and that business of being inspired and stimulated is so difficult when every day is identical.

‘I don't know about you, but I remember the pandemic quite unevenly – there's whole bits of it that are basically absent because every day was the same.’

One thing close to Al’s heart is music – he is a talented drummer and is co-founder and MD of The British Drum Company. ‘We've gone from being two people to 20 – we've got Nicko from Iron Maiden playing them, Ian from Kasabian, Sam from Blossoms, all sorts of people playing our gear. I've been involved in keeping the company going when things were being really weird.’

Music was also something he could keep in the family.

‘One of my daughters, Willow is a singer, we wrote a ton of music, and we did a couple of gigs online with her singing and me drumming and doing music we'd written together. She is actually really good – I'm not an X Factor parent – she is actually really quite brilliant.

‘That was one of the things we were able to dig into during the pandemic, there wouldn't be time usually. With “normal” school and “normal” work, we wouldn't have hung out for the 18 months we were able to devote to that, which has been nice.

‘There's stuff on YouTube, if you put in Willow May, you'll find her soon enough.’

Al Murray: Gig For Victory at Portsmouth Guildhall on Thursday, April 21, doors 7pm. Tickets £33.90. Go to portsmouthguildhall.org.uk.