lager than life

reviewed al murray: who dares winespavilion theatre, glasgowtouring Until december 6HHH Al Murray's pub landlord routine - chauvinistic, xenophobic; the bellowing, ridiculous voice of Old England turned up so loud that it turns in on itself - is now pretty famous and very popular. Too popular, the Nobel-minded judges of the Edinburgh Fringe's Perrier Award decided in 1999. Murray had already been nominated more times than anyone else, and they disqualified him until the uproar made them relent and give him the prize. He won an Olivier Award this year too, and was commissioned for another series of the TV spin-off Time Gentlemen Please, which broadens and flattens the character into a simplified neo-Alf Garnett.

There are some good and healthy reasons for this popularity. Irony, caricature and the Daily Mail mentality may be over-used tools and easy targets right now, but Murray is fast and accurate enough to punch laughs out of you with them.

"The Queen Mum," he sobs. "Cruelly taken before her time. She was like a candle in the wind. A big fat candle that never goes out." And so on.

But when you start thinking about the width of his audience, you open a tricky can of worms. There's a strong argument that the only real difference between Murray and repugnant right-wing comedians of old is that they meant it and Murray doesn't. That's a significant difference but, without wanting to patronise any of the thickos in the crowd, it's more than probable that critics and fellow self- satisfied sophisticates laugh because they see each joke as a negative, the opposite of itself, while others are taking all this at face value. At what point does the casual subversion of a particular sensibility become a celebration of it, like Ali G did? Does it matter that lads in the crowd jeer along to the mock-sexist or homophobic asides? Maybe. Dunno.

"Drink don't think," is Murray's motto, and he argues his case with surprising rigour. The pub landlord shtick is pretty thinly sketched - more a voicebox than a three-dimensional character - and Murray's intelligence often comes frothing through. This is a boarding-school kid who studied modern history at Oxford. In the first half of the show he works the audience with the easy stuff about national and regional differences - the French, the Geordies, ho ho ho - and makes good use of the sparky banter between his English bigot and a room full of "Jocks". One goonish agitator taunts him about Bannockburn and he just scoffs.

"I believe the last time we met in battle was Culloden," he fires back. "It's not the heats that count, mate. It's the final." Pow.

But after the intermission, Murray comes back with a powerful, cosmological defence of drunkenness, using blinkered logic to deconstruct religious and scientific notions of fate and independence, and argue that only booze can open up the possibilities for free will and unpredictability we're looking for. Then it's back to earth for an inane, no-brain, audience-participation pub quiz. In that sense, he traces the trajectory of the pissed - one minute you're off on an inspired, hilarious reverie, the next you're going for the lazy laughs.

Copyright 2002
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