Alastair James Hay Murray (born 10 May 1968) is an English comedian.
After graduating from the University of Oxford, Murray began his comedy career working with Harry Hill for BBC Radio 4. He regularly performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, before launching his "Pub Landlord" persona. This led to the Sky One sitcom Time Gentlemen Please and the chat show Al Murray's Happy Hour for ITV.
In 2003, Murray was listed in The Observer as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy, and in 2007 he was voted the 16th greatest stand-up comic on Channel 4's 100 Greatest Stand-Ups. He continues to perform as a stand-up and is a regular on British TV and radio.
Early life and family background
Murray was born in Stewkley, Buckinghamshire. His father was a lieutenant colonel in 131 (Parachute) Regiment, Royal Engineers and worked for British Rail. A descendant of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, Murray's grandfather was the former British ambassador Sir Ralph Murray, from the Scottish aristocracy and married into the Kuenberg family, Counts of the Holy Roman Empire. His maternal grandfather was killed in action at the Battle of Dunkirk. The actor Stephen Murray was his great-uncle, who died when Murray was fourteen.
Murray was educated at Bedford School. He played percussion in the Bedfordshire County Youth Orchestra, which was based in Bedford; the orchestra played concerts with the Bedfordshire county choirs. He also performed in the Bedfordshire second youth orchestra, in Dunstable. With the orchestra he performed in Spain, France and Scotland.
Murray later said of his time at school: "When I was nine I was sent to boarding school, which I despised and the first two weeks were the most miserable of my time there. The first five years were hideous because I wanted to be at home. I guess I resented my parents a little and it put tons of distance between us. One of the things I took from boarding school is that it made me emotionally self-sufficient." By sixteen, he was comfortable with school life and fully engaged with their drama club and his studies, leaving at eighteen to read Modern History at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
On his first day, while carrying his drum kit to the college music room, he met Richard Herring and Stewart Lee who had just returned to Oxford, from performing comedy at their first Edinburgh Fringe. They introduced him to the fortnightly comedy group, the Oxford Revue, and he went on to perform in a sketch show, directed by Lee.
Having started out by touring with comedians such as Harry Hill and Frank Skinner, Murray won the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1999, after being nominated in 1996, 1997 and 1998. He started out with an act that involved sound-effect impressions, including guns, animals and a car boot. He made his first TV appearance on Channel 4's The Word in November 1991. With this act, he supported Jim Tavaré in Leeds in winter 1992.
In 1994–95, Murray was the drummer in the band Evangelista, the house band at Stewart Lee and Simon Munnery's experimental Cluub Zarathustra in London. Film maker Martin Pickles made a short film about the band in 2002. At this time the lead singer Reid said of Murray: "He's still not a household name, but anyone who's into comedy knows who Al Murray is".
Murray's principal character in performance is an English publican with conservative values and an animosity towards Germans and the French; he challenges audience members to name any country before producing some plausible instance of Britain bettering it. The character has a great love of the British rock band Queen, often getting musician(s) on his show to perform one of Queen's tunes in their own style. He has described his persona as a "know-all know-nothing blowhard who knows the answer to every question even though he hasn't been asked any of them".
The character first appeared in 1994 during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, in the show "Pub Internationale", with Harry Hill and Matthew Bradstock-Smith (who played "Little Alan" as well as the keyboards in Hill's Edinburgh, radio and TV shows). The show featured the "Pub Band", with Murray playing the drums and compering. After trying out a character deemed not to have worked, at the opening show Murray suggested saying that the compere had not made it to the show and that the barman in the venue, the Pleasance Cabaret Bar, had offered to fill in. At the Edinburgh Festival, Murray came up with "The Pub Landlord".
Murray made his first television appearances on Harry Hill in 1997 playing Harry's big brother Alan ("If it's too hard, I can't understand it!"), and subsequently featured in a short film, Pub Fiction. He made a brief appearance as the Pub Landlord in Series 2, Episode 6 of Lee and Herring's This Morning with Richard Not Judy. Murray's Pub Landlord theatre show, My Gaff, My Rules was short-listed for an Olivier Award in 2002.
The Pub Landlord is the central character in the television series Time Gentlemen Please. He has made many other television appearances, including the An Audience with... strand. He hosted three series of Al Murray's Happy Hour in a peak Saturday evening time slot for ITV in 2007–08.
The Pub Landlord has hosted television programmes including Fact Hunt, named after the fictional quiz machine of the same name from Time Gentlemen Please. In addition, the character has ghost written four books: The Pub Landlord's Book of British Common Sense, The Pub Landlord's Think Yourself British, The Pub Landlord's Great British Quiz Book and Let's Re-Great Britain.
Murray has an interest in music and is a semi-professional drummer. As a teenager, he played in the big band at Bedford School, and also played percussion in the Bedfordshire County Youth Orchestra. He plays drums for the rock covers band T-34 and appeared at the Download Festival in 2010, returning once again in 2011. Murray is a fan of the progressive rock bands Genesis, King Crimson and Yes. He appeared in the documentary Genesis: Together and Apart, and was the host of the 2019 Progressive Music Awards for Prog magazine.
Murray played in the Hampshire-located folk rock band Bemis.
In 2013, Murray guest-starred in series 5 of children's show Horrible Histories.