Al Murray The Pub Landlord: Let’s Go Backwards Together

Alhambra, Dunfermline, March 24

For almost a quarter of a century, Al Murray has been sending out his Pub Landlord character to patronise women, absent-mindedly pour beer over his front rows and mercilessly mock our European partners.

The fact that Brexit is steadily becoming a reality gives Murray a golden opportunity to allow history to catch up with his monstrous creation.

“When I started doing the act, Eurolunacy was reassuringly not mainstream,” Murray recalls.

“It was something a bit bonkers that you could challenge quite easily.

“There’s this core hallucination at the heart of it that people are still fighting the Second World War, treating our closest trading partners and allies and people we have so much in common with as though they are the enemy.

“When I started in the 90s, all that was on the fringes but now it’s in the mainstream, so finally my act is speaking truth to power.”

While you’d imagine the Pub Landlord to be gleeful the Leave campaign was victorious last June (though in actuality, parts of the new touring show Let’s Go Backwards Together suggests he’s adopted a more nuanced attitude towards a Brexitshaped Britain), the man who pulls the strings of this numbskulled bigot is aghast at the EU referendum result – though not, perhaps, for reasons you’d have imagined.

“I’ve got a company in Manchester that makes drums,” states Murray.

“We’re the British Drum Company and we’ve been going a year and a half.

“Interestingly, if you express an opinion about Brexit, you immediately have people going “well, you’re an arty lefty liberal” and all that.

“But I’m coming from it as someone who part owns a small manufacturing company that relies on the import of some materials and export of our goods, and not because I’m on the telly a bit.

“That gives me a different angle, so it’s not just ‘isn’t Nigel Farage awful?’, it’s ‘why are you playing roulette with the economy?’”

Of course, another leave/remain ballot is on the agenda in Scotland as the Pub Landlord prepares to wax comical on his attitudes towards Nicola Sturgeon and her independence-chasing government.

He has stomped roughshod through the debate over Yes/No before (in his 2012 show, The Only Way Is Epic) but it’s time to confront this topic once more.

“I’d not be doing my job properly if I refused to tackle it,” insists Murray.

“One of the things I’ve learned is that if you pussyfoot around when playing Scotland, people smell it a mile off.

“And also, people need to be able to laugh at things or we’d just all go mad.”