Al Murray Interview
Award-winning stand-up comedian Al Murray discusses his passion for history and why we shouldn’t fear rewriting it
On bias, rewriting history and making jokes about the past
“We’re actually living in a history book,” Al Murray exclaims as we begin to chat about his love of history and his own new book The Last 100 Years (Give Or Take) And All That. “They’re definitely going to read about us.” Chatting via video call in late-2020 demands an acknowledgement of the moment we’re in and some speculation of what’s to come. “The shelves will be groaning in 2150 and they’ll be different schools. There’ll be an intentionalist school and there will be a rationalist school, there will be a Marxist interpretation, it will be fantastic. It’s brilliant. We made it!”
If that hasn’t made it clear already, Murray has a deep affection for history and the study of history. Best known for his award-winning stand-up comedy and
Pub Landlord persona, he is also a keen historian, with podcasts and TV shows that delve into British history. We were delighted to chat with him about his love of historical study and how he went about writing his book.
First, could you tell us a little about your history background? How far did you pursue it academically?
I grew up in a family that does history. My father and my mother, that’s what they read mainly. My father, in particular, is very, very interested in Second World War histories and is actively working at a museum called the Soldiers Of Oxfordshire Museum in Woodstock. He writes for a regimental magazine and all of that sort of thing. So I grew up in a house where this is what you talked about, this was the thing that you were interested in. We didn’t go to football, we didn’t go to cricket, we went to Normandy or Waterloo.
At school I was just into it and did an O-level and an A-level and then went to do a degree in history at Oxford. That was really where the subject and I kind of parted company because I was done with study by the time I got there. When I got to uni the issue became that I wanted to study history but really only the things I was interested in, rather than having to do the Enlightenment or de Tocqueville or whatever.
I really didn’t invest in it at all in the three years I was there and it has been more that my family has kept me engaged with it. There’s nothing else to talk about with my father. That’s what’s kept me into it and I am massively fascinated in the Second World War for all sorts of reasons. As you grow older you realise that the event and the historiography of the event and its place in our culture is so massive and complex.
What role does studying history play in your life today and what do you take from it?
I do find it really rewarding to read it now, mainly because I’m getting to pick what I want to read. You’re not having to grind your way through another thing about French agriculture in the 18th century. If I want to read about the development of armoured warfare in Normandy and how the British weren’t crap at it after all then I can fill my boots doing that. My Kindle is groaning with history books, it really is.
What was your impetus to write this book?
Well, that got started because of lockdown really. I was meant to be on tour this year. I had a long history routine in the show, but I was meant to go on the road and didn’t happen, of course, so then it turns into, “Well, what am I going to do?” In the course of growing up on history, the Sellars and Yeatman book [1066 and All That] was a thing I really know well and was one of the early funny books that I was fascinated by.
The challenge of writing this kind of book was one that you sort of jump at. Only a fool would try and write another 1066 And All That, so I said yes! But right from the start it’s not going to be in their style, I’m not going to try to ape their style because I’m not a parodist, I’m not a pastichist. I tried to write a thing that did what they did, which is write something kind of like what history textbooks are like now.
How do you approach using history for humour?
I think that dealing with history with humour is actually pretty straightforward. It’s actually like writing history. You have your editorial, you have your tone, you have the things that you’re interested in, your angle. All history is written like that. No one would want to admit it quite that baldly. So I thought, “What’s the angle here?” Well, the angle is I’m going to say I’m biased. I’m
“THINGS THAT ARE LONGER AGO TEND TO BE FUNNIER”
going to say that I’m not interested in some things. I’m going to try and do some of the things that happen in history books.
I wanted it to be a bit inside out and have some of the workings on show, but for humorous reasons. Then also, the First World
War is fascinating as the event that sets [up] everything. Where we are right now is completely set in motion by the First World War. If you want to prove the idea of chaos theory, that if a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil it causes a typhoon in China, it’s Gavrilo Princip shooting the archduke. He never imagined that three years later the Soviet Union would come into existence or that Australia via the Gallipoli campaign would experience birth-of-a-nation growing pains or a telegram to Mexico would draw America into a war. It’s bananas. Just those four years set in motion what would happen for the next 20, which causes the Second World War and we’re still living in this country, just about, in a post-second World War polity. If you don’t know how that arrived, you’ll never understand why it works the way it does now. So you think, “Alright, but where are the laughs?” And the laughs are the Black Hand’s attempts to assassinate the archduke; it’s really funny. The first guy gets it wrong, tries to kill himself by taking cyanide, the cyanide doesn’t work, he throws himself into a river and it’s two inches deep so he can’t drown… it’s funny. It’s funnier because it’s more than 100 years ago as well. Happening right now it wouldn’t be that funny. That’s one of the licenses you have, that things that are longer ago tend to be funnier.
Are there any historical subjects that you feel could never be made funny?
Well, yeah. I mean, there are historical subjects that I think that
I can’t make funny, but other people can. Inevitably people talk about the Holocaust as the centre point of an argument like this. Some people have been able to tell funny jokes about that. I can’t do it and so I’m not going to waste my time or anyone else’s trying. You almost get into an intersectional argument about who can tell jokes about what that comedians would rather we didn’t end up in, because you end up being shut down and not able to joke about anything. Hitler, for instance, is an interesting thing to be making jokes about, because a lot of people think you shouldn’t joke about him at all. But then how do we tackle someone like that who in lots of ways is, face value, ridiculous? Especially if you’re trying to write a funny book. Often the discourse around him is ridiculous. In an awful lot of history you’re writing about the discourse around someone rather than who they are, what they are, what they represent and what they mean to people instead of what they even did. That’s where your funnies come in.
Tell us how you feel about the idea of learning lessons from history?
People who aren’t particularly interested in history will ask what are the lessons of history? History is far more interesting than just some sort of fables. History isn’t Aesop and it’s far more interesting when it isn’t Aesop. It’s far more interesting when it’s complex. You’ll learn much, much more about humanity and people and how societies work and what governments can achieve and are capable of and all of those sorts of things.
What are the lessons of history? Well, all year we’ve had the Covid pandemic being compared, mainly in the newspapers, to the Second World War. This is mainly because the only two bits of history people know in popular terms are the Blitz and the six wives of Henry VIII and you can’t compare the Covid pandemic to the six wives of Henry VIII, so you’ve got to go Blitz on it. We have had Brexit, which has been compared to the Blitz or Henry VIII’S break with Rome. There have been more events in the last 500 years than those two moments! 1536 and 1940, yes, but plenty else has happened in the intervening years, for God’s sake!
When you look at people complaining about wearing a mask and complaining about vaccinations and complaining about limits of power, a great deal of the public discourse in 1939 and 1940 was about the blackout. Conscription had been brought in and had been a massively hot potato, because after all Appeasement wasn’t even cold by the time that the actual world crisis, the strategic earthquake, happened in 1940. One of the lessons you could look at from history is not that in the Blitz we all pulled together, but that in the Blitz everyone argued with everyone and there was an incredibly robust and diverse discourse even though the newspapers were much more buttoned down than they are now. So maybe we’re not that different in that respect rather than we’re not that different because we just do as we’re told and we’re the Brits and we’re the best at sweating our way through a crisis. It’s much more interesting than that pop lesson that people want to learn.
Do you imagine that in the history of 2020 they’ll say we all came together for Brexit and the pandemic?
Maybe that will be the story we tell. After all, that version of the Blitz is the story we’re telling about ourselves and when you tell stories about yourself you’re never in the wrong, you’re the hero of the event. “My divorce had nothing to do with me, I was completely reasonable throughout” – it’s like that. A lot of national history, which very often isn’t history at all, which is national storytelling or national self-image, is about telling yourself the comforting story rather than necessarily the truth. One of the things that we’ve really got into in the podcast that we talk about a lot is the Battle of Britain. If you investigate the idea of poor little noble plucky Britain on its own defending itself with just a few fighter planes, it falls apart very, very quickly. I’d rather say I was the underdog. I would rather say that I defeated the evil rolling Nazi war machine by being plucky and gritty rather than having prepared for exactly this event, having the systems in place, having better manufacturing, having a home advantage, the enemy being chaotically disorganised and unfocused and all of the things that actually explain the outcome. What do you want? Do you want history or do you want the cute story about yourself? And all too often people are so beguiled by the latter that they think that’s history.
Were there any particular events that you were determined to make sure were included?
Well, yes. It’s not really an event, but there’s a chapter about the invention of sex in the 20th century. I was a teenager in the 1980s and in the 1980s you were absolutely relentlessly culturally bombarded with the idea you had missed out because you hadn’t been a teenager during the 1960s. You’d missed out. Nothing was ever going to be that exciting anymore and, my God, everyone started having sex. Philip Larkin’s joking when he says ‘sex for me began in 1963 after the Beatles’ [in his poem Annus Mirabilis]. He was joking obviously, because it is quite absurd, this idea. The more you push back into history, the more you look at the history
“IN THE BLITZ EVERYONE ARGUED WITH EVERYONE AND THERE WAS AN INCREDIBLY ROBUST AND DIVERSE DISCOURSE”
of mores and morals and families and relationships and all that. Again it’s far more complex than simply people got married until they died; it’s far more interesting than that. Far more complex. Again, far more like us. So that was the thing that I really wanted to write was that chapter where you’re saying, “as far as historians can tell, there was no sexual intercourse before the 1960s. People talked about doing it during the 1920s, but then fortunately the Second World War interrupted them and stopped them from having any sex.” I wanted to write a take on that because to be honest it’s always been a thing that’s completely mystified me that people have bought that idea.
So much of our understanding of the world comes from the story previous generations told themselves, such as the prudish late-victorian age.
Absolutely. And after all, the Victorian era is an imperial project here at home as much as it is anywhere else. They’re inventing this idea of themselves as imperial overlords who are somehow contained and they’re emotionally trammelled and all of that sort of thing, because they need to be because they’re in charge and they’ve got to make calm decisions. But also, the fact that they’re endlessly talking about how they’re not interested in having sex suggests one thing. I think that’s a really interesting thing to consider.
You mentioned earlier on about being open about your bias in the book. Could you talk a little about how you wrestled with that?
The bias that the book has is it’s a British history, which means it elides over a whole load of things. Bias is an inevitable thing and when I remember studying history at Oxford you do start to look at that. One of the first things you do is you get introduced properly to the idea of historiography rather than history and then you realise “Oh my God, this is a bigger subject arguably than history itself.” The events are one thing, it’s all the ink that’s been spilt over them that’s the other. But also how important that is because politicians often tool up on history and use it to inform their world view. Politics is certainly informed by perceptions of history. I always used to envy the people who could be as certain as Marxists, because I tend to agree with the last person I spoke to, I don’t hold any firm views. It always used to amaze me that you could do the English Civil War like Christopher Hill, that you could turn the handle and feed the English Civil War in and you would get your bourgeois coming out of the mincer. I used to think that was amazing.
I think it’s a crucial part of the historical debate that people have biases, because otherwise there’s no debate. This of course has been a massive argument this past year, about rewriting history, the absurd idea that you shouldn’t rewrite history.
History is in a permanent state of rewriting. After all, look at the English Civil War: Paul Lay’s books this year, Providence Lost, is a history of the protectorate and is told in a way that when I last had to trouble myself with the English Civil War 30 years ago doesn’t bear any resemblance to the way he’s writing about it. He’s writing about it, you could argue, post-9/11 where we understand religious fundamentalism is a thing. It’s real and when it expresses itself politically you can understand why people behave in ways that if you just try to look at them politically they don’t make any sense of all. The sense of providence that they had, there was a guiding thing that they were predestined and when anything went well it was because they were the elect. If you feed that into the English Civil Wars or Wars of the Three Kingdoms or whatever you call it, it’s a completely different thing. That’s not rewriting history, that’s going, “Hang on a minute, they were serious about the Bible the way we’re not.” Just because we don’t understand religion in the way they did, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a think about that because they really did believe there were demons in the way we really know there aren’t.
So you can’t have history without bias. It’s impossible.