'BRING back hanging for the sake of the rope industry". So champions Al Murray, the Pub Landlord.
His creator, 42-year-old Alastair James Hay Murray, to give him his full title, is thankfully less dogmatic.
"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!'," says the comedian, who has been playing his cheerfully belligerent bar-room philosopher for 15 years now.
A father of two, the real Murray, who you will find listed in Burke's Peerage, is nothing like his comic creation. A direct descendant of William Makepeace Thackeray, he was born in Stewkley, Buckinghamshire, the son of a Lieutenant Colonel with the Royal Engineers. Which brings us back to that opening line.
"At Sunday lunch, if I had friends round, my dad would propose the return of hanging," explains Murray.
"There was one lunch when he came up with a 'three strikes and you're out' criminal justice scheme. After the third offence, no matter what it was, you'd go to the gallows. My friends would sit there going, 'Bloody hell, his dad's Hitler'."
Murray laughs, as he adds, "It wasn't until I was older that I realised he was winding us up. My mum told me that in the officer's mess he'd go the other way and propose nationalising everything. They all thought he was some sort of Soviet spy."
In much the same way, it has taken some sections of the public time to realise that the Pub Landlord, too is an act, a character far removed from its creator, who was educated at Bedford Public School and read history at Oxford University.
Indeed, the misconception that he could ever be like the Pub Landlord, is one Murray finds "wearisome".
"The Landlord talks s*** about lots of things. The concept is he's as stupid as he can possibly be. That incorporates being self-defeatingly sexist and xenophobic. I get worn out when people say I do jokes about the French. I also have jokes on particle physics."
Murray created the Pub Landlord in 1994 for Harry Hill's Pub Internationale tour. Five years later his Edinburgh Fringe show won him the Perrier Award. TV followed, the sitcom on Sky One Time Gentlemen Please, a late-night quiz, Fact Hunt, Union Jackass, an unsuccessful American pilot that took his creation to Santa Monica and, in 2005, the first An Audience With . . .
However, it wasn't until his appearance on Hell's Kitchen in 2007 that audiences began to dissociate the character from its creator.
"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'."
That Hell's Kitchen stint led to the chat show, Al Murray's Happy Hour, DVD sales in excess of 200,000 and four sell-out stand-up tours, the latest of which brings him to the Festival Theatre tomorrow.
Al Murray – The Pub Landlord's Beautiful British Tour finds The Guv back in his brewery blazer, short-sleeved white shirt and slacks, dispensing his patriotic wisdom with all the subtleness of a sledge-hammer – an approach which has proved popular.
Explaining that approach, he says, "I wake up in the morning 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?
"The Pub Landlord is 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.'
"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."
So successful has the character proved that it is easy to forget the Pub Landlord is but one character in Murray's repertoire – although some people still need convincing
Recently, when Murray played a bad-mannered shop assistant with a goatee for a sketch in his TV show Al Murray's Multiple Personality Disorder, filming was disrupted when a group of youths heard that Murray was there.
"They weren't going away, so I went out to say hello," he says. "They said, 'You're not him. Where is he?'
"I said, 'I am him – this is a fake beard.' But they said, 'No, you sound different.' One of them refused to have her picture taken with me because I wasn't Al Murray." So might he one day rest the jovial host in favour of those other creations?
"Sometimes people say, 'It's time to call time on the Landlord', and 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."
Al Murray – The Pub Landlord's Beautiful British Tour, Festival Theatre, Nicolson Street, tomorrow, 7.30pm, £25, 0131-529 6000 