Jenny Booth Talks Panto With Comedian Al Murray

The comedian Al Murray is doing Christmas panto for the first time this year, bringing his ranty, sexist but well-loved persona of the pub landlord to Wimbledon.

It’s brilliant news, and on panto launch morning there was keen anticipation among the journalists waiting outside the Windmill Museum on Wimbledon Common for Murray to come out for his photos.

Photo Credit: New Wimbledon Theatre

Tall and lanky, Murray looked at home in his Jack and the Beanstalk costume as tavern-keeper Idle Al, and gurned for the camera as if he had been doing panto for years. It helped, he said, to be alongside his old colleague Clive Rowe, one of Britain’s top dames.

Rowe, who plays Jack and Idle Al’s mother, emerged looking coquettish in a yellow frock and got into character by ordering everyone around. The pair posed with a cow, behind a giant cog, and among some agricultural mannequins who looked like the Amish Beatles.

Photo Credit: New Wimbledon Theatre

A glass of white wine for the lady

How well will the pub landlord fit in? Panto is a family show, and Murray’s character is a gargoyle, swearing and being rude to his customers, and going on about the empire and immigrants and a woman’s place. Will Murray tone him down?

“When he’s on telly before the watershed he can’t curse, so he doesn’t. And this is panto, so this will be a panto refraction of it,” says Murray.

It’s strange how a character intended to be repellent when he was invented 20 years ago has become almost loveable, a human version of the Churchill dog.

“He was meant to be horrible!” says Murray, with a landlord-like bark of laughter.

“If people are fond of him now it’s because I think they know where the joke sits.

“I haven’t softened him much. I don’t think so. The really interesting thing is that the stuff he used to bang on about, is now all mainstream. That’s what’s amazing. To the point that we ended up in the 2015 general election, running in Thanet against Mr Farage. Life imitating art, imitating art imitating life – I don’t know where that ends, it’s a Mobius strip.”

The 318 people who voted for him didn’t know where it ended either, I say.

“Yeah. It’s great, though,” Murray chortles. He was so pleased at getting actual votes that he changed his Twitter handle to @the318, and only changed it back a couple of months ago.

Photo Credit: New Wimbledon Theatre

He’s behind you!

Murray has been offered panto before, but has always been too busy. This year however he’d decided to give winter touring a break, and when the Qdos production company approached him, his sons, aged 14 and 18, put him under pressure to agree.

“Last year I went to Wimbledon to see Tim Vine in panto. I absolutely love Tim and my kids love Tim, and afterwards they said: ‘If you’re offered it, you have to say yes because it looks like he’s having lots of fun’,” said Murray.

“My kids are savvy teens, and they have seen an awful lot of comedy, because of me, and they know what they like. It’s funny, I trust their judgement, so when they say, ‘Have a go at that, we think you’ll enjoy it,’ [I listen].”

Seeing Rowe’s name already on Qdos’s cast list was the decider, Murray added. Rowe has been nominated for an Olivier for his panto work. “It was like, of course I’ll do it. It’s my first one and I’m in the safest pair of hands imaginable.”

“We know one another because 20 years ago Clive and I were both in The Harry Hill Show,” said Murray.

“When we met this morning, it was like, ‘Oh, we were in that thing together, weren’t we?’ It’s strange [we haven’t run into each other since], because we’ve loads of mutual friends.”

A sneak preview

The comic lead and the dame are a double act that drives the panto along. Murray says that he “won’t have to be so front foot” with the pub landlord’s outspoken views because the gags will be bouncing off Rowe.

There may be trouble ahead over the script. When I talked to Rowe later he was insistent on sticking to the book to keep the show on track, while Murray says he has already been writing new bits for Idle Al.

“Without sounding like an idiot -– I mean, we’re not going to workshop it, workshop is a word that is not going to go with pantomime – but basically we’re going to thrash it out and change the bits to fit, you know,” said Murray.

The pair let drop a few details in a tantalising sneak preview of the show. It’s going to be set in Mootown, and the cow will allegedly be called Aretha. Of course, that might all be a joke.

Rowe is a great singer, and has just finished a run of cabaret at Crazy Coqs. Murray starts rehearsals this week for his ITV Christmas special, and will be in a festive mood by the time he starts the panto. It’s all looking very promising. Oh, yes, it is.