It was only when Al Murray cooked for Gordon Ramsay that people started to realise that he wasn’t a rabid reactionary in love with his own foul mouth. (Murray, that is.) It wasn’t just that appearing on the first series of the culinary reality show Hell’s Kitchen took him to his biggest audience yet. It was more that we finally got to see that Al Murray was not the Pub Landlord – the reliably rude, fabulously funny character he’s played for most of his adult life.

“Hell’s Kitchen really helped,” he says. “People were going, ‘Hang on a minute, it’s an act!’ And I was [[ thinking, ‘Well of course I’m not really like that; no one’s like that. I’m on a stage; what are you after here?’”

Sitting in a gastropub near Murray’s house in Chiswick, West London – the kind of namby-pampy eaterie that would boil the blood of the Landlord, whose idea of bar food begins and ends at nuts and pork scratchings – Alastair Murray cuts a figure both imposing and inclusive. The Landlord is school of hard knocks – Murray boarded at the Bedford School. The Landlord went to the university of life – Murray, a descendant of William Makepeace Thackeray, read history at Oxford.

But he’s not, lest the preconceptions swing 180 degress, fey or particularly posh. He’s bright and forthright and – his Australian wife Amber tells him – a bit loud when drunk. “That’s our similarity. I think I’m quite normal.”

Murray’s kitchen stint led to An Audience with Al Murray, the Pub Landlord – a recently recorded follow-up goes out tonight – which led to the Saturday night chat show Al Murray’s Happy Hour. After a few false starts, he has become a properly famous TV comedian.

Yet he’s been the most consistently exciting live comedian in the land for years. His shows allude to the Landlord’s private life (a husk) and outline his professional priorities (“a pint of lager for the gentlemen and a white wine or fruit-based drink for the ladies”). He’s for Britishness, against foreignness and fanciness and political correctness: “Where would we be without rules? That’s right, France. And where would we be with too many rules? That’s right, Germany!”

When Murray first donned his short-sleeved white shirt and slacks, he was in his mid-twenties. Now he’s 39. And suddenly the Landlord appears to be making more sense. In his new book, The Pub Landlord’s Book of British Common Sense, he offers 12 examples of Bad Thinking. These range from “1) the belief that no one should win in running races at school in case anyone gets upset” to “5) the idea that we should all have carrots in our packed lunches”, from “8) hoummus” to “12) the idea that you need to drive your kids to school so that they won’t be run over by the people driving their kids to school”.

Overstated, maybe. But is there anything he doesn’t actually agree with in that list? “Well,” he says, “that last one is just a plain observation of living in Chiswick. Of walking my girls to school.” The carrots? “I think people can eat whatever they f***ing well like. Those parents who were passing burgers through the fence after that Jamie Oliver programme, good on them. This is a free country. I’ll go to Hell my own way.”

Al Murray is not the Pub Landlord, then – but nor is he his opposite. He nods in agreement. “But the Landlord will then use his platform of reasonableness to be completely unreasonable. Like saying that we need to bring back hanging for the sake of the rope industry.”

This mix of common sense and uncommon nonsense gives the Landlord his charge. It’s not just that he’s just a right-wing booby. And it’s not just that he’s a proper bloke speaking unspeakable home truths. It’s more that he’s always definite. Which is as disarming as it is ludicrous.

“I wake up in the morning,” says Murray, “and I don’t clean my teeth in a British way. Or do I? What would that British way be, anyway, and I’m sure there are some people who think they do, and immediately that’s fun, isn’t it? To draw a conclusion is obviously a stupid thing to do. So to go on stage and have loads of conclusions about lots of things is really funny and ridiculous.”

Which can lead to some audience members taking serious offence. And others applauding ironic jingoism as a good point, bravely made. “I like how confusing some of what I do is. Grey areas are fun to play with. I love it when I’ve got blokes going, ‘Yeeeah!’. You think, ‘What are you cheering here? You’re mental!’ ” The comedian Stewart Lee, his Oxford contemporary and former flatmate, jokes about Murray’s braying audience in his latest show. “But then Stewart has a rather old-fashioned view that people like that shouldn’t be allowed to go and see things,” chuckles Murray.

Murray invented his character, fast, for Harry Hill’s Pub Internationale tour in 1994. The character operated at a high comic voltage almost immediately, but it took until recently for that form to be replicated on TV. After winning the Perrier Award in 1999, the Landlord had his own sporadically funny sitcom on Sky One , Time Gentlemen Please. A late-night quiz, Fact Hunt, was OK; Union Jackass, an American pilot that took the Landlord to Santa Monica, didn’t take off.

But in his first An Audience With in 2005, he at last had enough time to serve full measures of his deceptively cartoonish character. And when he carried on the celebrity-baiting in Happy Hour – a format loosely modelled on The Dame Edna Experience – the Landlord was given the time he needed to work the room.

“It looks like a shouty skinhead bloke, but where do we end up? What’s the actual idea of it? You can’t convey that in two minutes or five. It’s a seduction not a mugging. It’s true, the first time it really really worked on TV was An Audience With, because for the first time it had time to breathe.”

Later this year, Murray will make a pilot for a sketch show.

The Landlord is barred – Murray will play about 20 new characters. But there’s another series of Happy Hour next year and a tour. If this clown wants to play Hamlet, he’s happy to do so in a brewery blazer.

“Sometimes people say, ‘It’s time to call time on the Landlord’, all that crap. But the moment I fell into writing this act I knew it was a bottomless pit.

“The Landlord fits me better now I’m older, I think. Sometimes we are very close, sometimes he’s away with the fairies. But that’s what’s fun about doing this. People still don’t know what I think.”

Another Audience With Al Murray – The Pub Landlord, tonight, ITV1, 9.05pm; The Pub Landlord’s Book of British Common Sense is published by Hodder & Stoughton; Al Murray: The Pub Landlord – Live at the Palladium is released on DVD on November 19; Al Murray plays the Birmingham Symphony Hall (0121-780 3333 www.thsh.co.uk ) on Friday. www.thepublandlord.co.uk

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