As Al Murray, Pub Landlord he’s a sneering, lager-worshipping, xenophobic Little Englander in a maroon brewery-issue jacket.

But as plain Al Murray he’s a polite, friendly intelligent, history-loving Oxford graduate.

As the Pub Landlord, Al sends up bigotry and small-mindedness, representing “decent, hard-working, tax-paying normal people who hate the French and don’t want to pay speeding fines”.

From behind his bar, he rants about subjects close to his heart, like backsliding, treachery and ‘how it used to feel to be British’.

And next year he’s back in Bradford, serving up a heady brew of British Thinking and Common Sense Reasoning.

Is the Landlord based on any particular licensee?

“He’s based on a bloke I met once travelling back from a gig,” says Al. “He went into this sad speech about his marriage break-up and although it was tragic there was something hilarious in the way he was talking in cliches. I filed it away.”

Like Alf Garnett, the Landlord is a long-running gag and fans of Al’s hit ITV show will be pleased to hear he’s in it for the long haul.

“I’ve been doing him for ten years and I’ve never run out of material – let’s face it, he can rant about anything. There’ll always be issues to tackle, the Landlord’s got solutions for everything,” says Al, adding that the act wouldn’t work without a live audience. “When you’re in character you improvise with the audience, it allows you to be rude. I can tell a woman I love her job as a receptionist because ‘you don’t claim to know anything, God bless you’.”

While the Landlord is rude, crass and stupid, Al is a history graduate whose grandfather, Sir Ralph Murray, was a top Government diplomat and great-great-great-grandfather was William Makepeace Thackeray.

Al started performing comedy at Oxford and in 1994 created the Pub Landlord as a compere for Harry Hill’s Edinburgh Festival show, later winning the Perrier Award. Al performs across the world and has even taken the Landlord to America. “The Americans completely understand him, they have redneck equivalents who do all they can to prevent change. He’s universal, everyone has met a xenophobic fool like him,” he says. “I performed to a Eurocrat audience in Brussels and when I said: ‘There are some Italians here, I’m amazed they turned up,’ the Italians laughed louder than anyone. They knew that’s what an English idiot would think.”

Some of Al’s audience agree with the Landlord. Like the bloke who, during a gig in Bradford I went to, shouted “Go on, Al!” after every bigoted rant.

“There’ll always be a lunatic element who gets it but is confused,” he laughs. “One thing I can’t come to terms with is how many people think he’s real. I get people having a go at me saying: ‘You really shouldn’t be saying that stuff about foreigners, you know.’ I just think how can people be so thick?”

Al Murray is at St George’s Hall on Tuesday, February 24. Ring (01274) 432000.