WHAT a glorious year it has been for a Great British patriot like The Pub Landlord – but not so much for his creator Al Murray.

The comedian invented his alter ego more than 20 years ago as a satirical swipe against Little Englanders and small minded politics. But after Brexit and the rise of UKIP the country is arguably going back in that direction.

“That is why the show is called Let’s Go Backwards Together,” said Al, who is at the Parr Hall on Friday, February 17.

“The interesting thing is I’ve been doing this act a long time and along the way people say things like: ‘Why are you still going on about that? It’s really out of date.’ The only reason I’m doing it is because it’s right there and under the surface of a lot of things. It’s been very odd to me to see it come to the fore.

“The Leave/Remain argument was a vehicle for so many other things. I think only 10 per cent of it was about the EU.”

The referendum result went also meant that Al had to revise his act. A lot.

He told Weekend: “It didn’t so much evolve last year as had to be torn up and thrown in the bin. I had to start again completely. If I’m going to deal in boring cliché I’m a London metropolitan liberal luvvie type and from where I was looking it seemed like Remain would win.

“I wrote a show with that in mind and had to start again last year when it went the other way.”

Donald Trump’s White House victory also inevitably gets a look in. So what does The Pub Landlord make of the United States’ controversial new President who has been already been accused of everything from Islamophobia to having secret ties with Russia?

Al said: “He think it’s fantastic that the Americans have finally proven they have a sense of humour. But actually from a writing jokes point of view everything happening all at once is much better than things staying the same.

“The thing is I’ve always thought when it comes to politics and being a comic, to do your job properly you’ve got to take the mickey out of everyone. You’ve got to park what you feel about things and be prepared to have a go in all directions.

“I’ve never really had an issue with events not going the way I’d like them unless it was a world war. That would be my limit. But I’ve got shows to do. I’m not going to let that get in the way of it.”

Still, Al could not resist getting involved and turning satire into something more when he stood against Nigel Farage in the 2015 general election for the South Thanet seat.

His ‘super-patriotic’ Freedom for United Kingdom (FUKP) manifesto included revaluing the pound at 10p, so people would be better off, to put Boris Johnson on an island, to brick up the Channel Tunnel, and put a British moon on a British stick.

The idea came from the comic’s previous show about politics and social media.

He said: “I love Twitter and one of things I love about it is how bad people are at arguing about politics on it. It dumbs everything down to this sort of very, very thin gruel. With the election coming you could see that what was happening on Twitter was going to happen in the national discourse.

“I thought it was hilarious so with Farage running in South Thanet it seemed like too good an opportunity to miss for taking the mickey – which is my job. People were going: ‘Stick to comedy’. Well it was comedy. We did a comedy manifesto. Everything about it was a joke. The reaction to it was the really interesting thing – how annoyed people were.

“People have these conspiracy theories about me running and they’re quite convinced by them. That I was put up to do it, the Tories paid me to do it, the BBC paid me to do it, the EU paid me to do it and all these other theories.

“One of the things they say is if you watch that clip over and over again you can tell I knew the result in advance because it had been ‘rigged’. The truth is you do know the result in advance because they tell you backstage in case you want to demand a recount.

“The really funny thing is the people with all these amazing theories when they haven’t even bothered to find out how the thing works. I think that’s the glorious tragedy of the debates we’ve had.

“The reactions were actually a lot funnier than any of the stuff we were doing. It was a bit annoying at times actually.”

Al created The Pub Landlord in 1994 for Edinburgh Festival and the character’s first time on stage was completely improvised.

The 48-year-old added: “There was a gap in the show I was doing with Harry Hill. We were performing in bar so I said: ‘Why don’t we say the compere hasn’t turned up and the barman has offered to fill in?’ It went from there.”

So how has The Pub Landlord changed over those two decades?

Al, a keen drummer who launched Stockport’s British Drum Company, said: “I’ve given him a big head because people come to listen to what he has to say. He thinks he’s somehow a man of the people who has the solutions, mainly because I think the people who think that are ridiculous and funny.

“He think he’s some sort of common sense King Canute holding back the waves of nonsense...”