GOT a ticket for One Man, One Guvnor at the Tivoli Theatre in Wimborne on Thursday? Well you’re lucky then, aren’t you?

Because Al Murray’s shows tend to sell out within days or even hours of their dates being announced. The Wimborne date is no different.

Amazingly, his comic creation the leering-but-loveable Pub Landlord has lasted two blockbusting decades: “Twenty years at the lager top,” as he puts it, and it’s a routine he referenced in a show at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe – as well as breaking in this tour before it went UK-wide in the late summer.

Fans will know the Guv’s act inside out – from the regulation monstering of the front row to the Lesson, with plenty of sidetracking into the issues de nos jours. Not that the Landlord would use such a poncey French phrase, of course.

Murray has taken plenty of flak for his act, mainly from liberals troubled, as a critic from The Guardian newspaper put it, “That the audience is laughing with rather than at him”.

“Sometimes the Pub Landlord will say something that you agree with completely, or something that seems reasonable, until he completely drives it into the ground,” Murray told a newspaper.

“I think the people who are sympathetic to him may well be enjoying laughing at themselves, which is a thing people are allowed to do as well.

“When people say ‘you shouldn’t be doing this act because you’re encouraging a certain way of thinking’, I think don’t be daft, everyone’s a grown-up around here.”

Taking it to another level, Al Murray has recently said that he intends to stand for Parliament at the general election in his guise as The Pub Landlord – against UKIP leader Nigel Farage.

The comedian – whose creation is famed for extolling the joys of all things British – plans to stand in Thanet South, Kent, for his newly-formed Free United Kingdom Party.

Explaining his decision to stand, he said: “It seems to me that the UK is ready for a bloke waving a pint around, offering common sense solutions.”

His comment will not be lost on many of those familiar with Farage, who is often pictured during impromptu lunchtime photocalls with a drink in his hand in a pub.

Oxford-educated Murray has created an action plan in the guise of his patriotic character, in which he promises: “I pledge that the UK will leave Europe by 2025 and the edge of the Solar System by 2050.”

A website he has set up for his campaign, carries the slogan: “Other parties offer the moon on a stick. We’ll do better than that: a British moon on a British stick.”

Other proposals include his pledge on law and order: “Unemployment causes crime: I propose to lock up the unemployed. Common sense.”

And on the hot topic of immigration, he says: “Of course the reason they are coming here is because this is the greatest country in the world.

“The only way to stop them is for a government to change that and make things a whole lot worse. Look no further.

“However, in the meantime, we brick up the Channel Tunnel. With British bricks. Probably have to get some Poles in to do it. Common sense.”

The party’s logo features an upturned pound sign, in a clear parody of the UKIP symbol.

Politics aside, anyone who follows Murray knows, the war is one of his other abiding interests – he’s fronted a number of programmes around it and his latest project away from the stage has been ‘Watching War Films With My Dad’, a memoir/ travelogue and platform for Murray to discuss his opinions about much that has been written or reported about the conflict.

Many of the reviews have expressed surprise that his knowledge is so deep but why wouldn’t it be from someone who studied history at Oxford? Murray’s take is blunter.

“I do take the stand-up very seriously, but I have run into this thing of, ‘You play the Pub Landlord, he’s a bloody idiot, how could you possibly be clever?’ It always amuses me that people get stuck there.”

The sold–out show One Man, One Guvnor is on at the Tivoli Theatre in Wimborne on Thursday.