Al Murray

October 2010

I’m on tour so you’ll find me going to the stage door where the bins are, I’ll do a show, come out and go for a drink in the hotel. It’s an invigorating life when you’re on tour.

Tonight I’m in Dublin, which is a bit lethal on a Friday night. I expect we will consume Guinness. I say ‘we’, that’s me and my tour manager.

Tomorrow I’ve a show in London near to where I live so that might be a quieter one.

I have kids but I’m divorced. They live at the other end of the road so it’s not a disaster. We’ll probably hang out during the day, go to town or see a movie or walk by the river.

They’re 11 and seven, both girls. My eldest is in to Facebook, for God’s sake. Like everybody. I won’t let them on Twitter, even though I’m on there.

I do go to the cinema but I get this whole ‘you look like a tall, thin Al Murray’. People think I’m short and fat because of the telly.

The last film I went to the cinema to see was Inception. It’s too long and there are too many moments where they stop and explain what’s going on. You know what, I was listening at the start, you don’t need to tell me again. It was good but it certainly wasn’t as good as The Dark Knight, which I thought was amazing.

For TV, I’m mad about Mad Men. I’m a big fan of Horrible Histories. It’s one of the funniest things on telly and bizarre and educational at the same time.

And I’m a news junkie. I’m finding the news and politics really brilliant at the moment because no-one knows what’s going on. The experts are getting it wrong every time. No-one predicated the election result, no-one predicted what this government would do... it’s all off whack. And they can’t bear it because it’s not what they’re used to.

Although I was on Hell’s Kitchen it’s always been about the eating, not the cooking. My tour manager has the Michelin Guide so we always try and eat well wherever we go. It’s a little hobby of ours. The last time we were in Nottingham it was at Hart’s restaurant, which is really nice.

That said we do go to Burger King now and again. Last year there was a moment where I snapped and went in to KFC. I remember it vividly.

To keep fit? I run up and down the stage for an hour and three quarters shouting at people. I can heartily recommend it. Either that or I’ll go for a long walk.

I’ve got an iPad so I can bring ten books on the road with me. At the moment it’s Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain, which is very good. Other than music, history is my big interest outside of comedy.

I can’t go to gigs because I do gigs. Once you become a full-time stand-up comic you have a very peculiar relationship with entertainment. You become what people do for entertainment at the weekend. I used to have this thing where I’d take a Friday off every six months, ring my mates and go ‘I’m free on Friday’. They’d say ‘so what, I’m staying in, I went out last weekend’.

So I don’t go out to as many gigs as I’d like to because I can’t.

I like playing music. It’s the same with comedy, I’m much more interested in doing it than watching it.

I play drums. I’ve played in a lot of bands. At the moment I’m in a rock ‘n’ roll covers band called T34 and we dress up as Russians. We played Download in the summer. It was ace. It rained so our tent was full.

A perfect weekend I’d be hanging out with the kids, a good movie and an Indian in the evening, a walk by the river on the Sunday morning in nice weather - and maybe half an hour playing the drums.

Al Murray’s The Pub Landlord Tour comes to the Royal Concert Hall on Saturday October 23. Tickets are £25, call 0115 989 5555. The Pub Landlord’s Great British Pub Quiz Book is available now. A DVD, Barrel of Fun, will be released November 22. Visit www.thepublandlord.co.uk for details.