Al Murray may be famed for his brash comedy alter-egos, but behind the laughs lies a sensitive history-geek nurtured during his days as an Oxford student. In new series Secrets From The Asylum he delves in to his Victorian ancestors’ struggle with mental illness. Jaine Blackman reports

Xenophobic, loutish and aggressively opinionated, it would be impossible to picture Al Murray’s most popular creation, The Pub Landlord, handling sensitive secrets from his family’s past with due delicacy.

But unlike his famous character, the 46-year-old comedian is about to show a softer side, in the new ITV family history show, Secrets From The Asylum.

In the two-part series, Murray and fellow famous faces Ray Winstone, Sue Johnston, Lesley Joseph, Claire Sweeney and Christopher Biggins, delve into their families’ pasts to find out why their ancestors spent time in a lunatic asylum.

While Sweeney goes on a journey to find out how senile dementia was treated in the Victorian age, and Winstone discovers more about his great-great-grandmother’s first husband who was committed to an asylum, Murray looks back at the life of his great-great-great-grandparents, Vanity Fair author William Thackeray and his wife Isabella.

When Thackeray was 29, Isabella, then aged 23, attempted suicide by trying to jump overboard from a ship.

Desperate to help his wife, Thackeray paid for her to stay at a private asylum in France, where she had the very Victorian sounding Moral Therapy, which involved “exercise, occupation and amusement”.

“It’s a total crisis,” says dad-of-two Murray. “His family’s fallen apart, his career isn’t established yet, it’s [the treatment] costing him a fortune, and they’re saying, ‘Well, we’ll keep her on for six or seven months of trial’; he doesn’t even know if it’s going to work.”

After five months away, Thackeray “busted” his wife out of the asylum and took her back to the UK, where he tried treatment after treatment, including hydrotherapy, where patients were togged up and encouraged to sweat before being splashed with buckets of ice-cold water in the belief that it would purify the body.

“It sounds like the sort of thing Gwyneth Paltrow would pay a lot of money to do,” adds the comedian.

Born in Buckinghamshire, Murray grew up knowing that his great-great-great-grandmother had suffered with postnatal depression. He found out a lot about his famous ancestor from his history buff great-aunt, he says. But discovering the lengths Thackeray went to in trying to help his wife, “completely reversed” his opinion of what his ancestor must have been like.

“I’d always assumed that what he’d done was put her, Victorian style, out of the way,” says Murray. “In fact, what he did was get her the very, very best care he could at the time.”

Oxford Mail:
Al standing in front of the former Royal Earlswood Asylum in Surrey

The son of a lieutenant colonel – who took the family to Venezuela for a year when Murray was a child – the keen-cricket fan has always been interested in history, even opting to study the subject at Oxford University.

Murray graduated from St Edmund Hall with the degree of MA in Modern History. At Oxford he performed in the comedy group, the Oxford Revue in a show directed by Stewart Lee, before launching himself onto the comedy circuit.

Two decades ago, he showcased his Pub Landlord character at the Edinburgh Festival, where he was asked at the last minute to compere for Harry Hill.

The character has proved such a hit that the comedian even had his own ITV chat show, Al Murray’s Happy Hour.

He’s maintained his interest in history, though, which is reflected in his 2013 book, Watching War Films With My Dad, and passing on his enthusiasm for the subject to his daughters, Scarlett and Willow, has always been important to him.

Privacy is another thing that’s always been important to Murray, who likes to keep his private life and opinions to himself, insisting that he’s “never, ever been tempted to come out with my own views”.

He can see how hard it must have been for his famous relative to support his loved ones through their very personal crisis.

“I’m thinking about what would I do in this situation,” muses Murray, who won a Perrier Award for his stand up show in 1999. “I have two girls, similar age gap [to Thackeray’s children], you’d worry about what to do about them. He’s lonely, his children are upset and his wife’s lost to him. It’s agony.”

He was affected by what he found out in the programme, and admits to being “really, really sad” to discover through Thackeray’s writing that he was longing for the days when his wife was happy.

“It’s heart-rending stuff,” he says. “Life is like that. Things pass and sometimes you wish you had the things you’d had before. He aspired to being a settled gentleman, having his wife and raising his daughters, and he lost it.

“It was taken away from him very cruelly, by Isabella losing her reason. It’s heartbreaking.”

There are further revelations about their granddaughter who suffered from a learning disability and was admitted to the Royal Earlswood Asylum.

Ever the history student, he took some valuable lessons from participating in the series.

“It was a really exciting project to be involved in. The people of the past had different decisions in front of them, and different attitudes back then,” Murray adds. “The thing to do is look at them and think, ‘I hope I don’t make a mistake like that in my life’.”

Secrets From The Asylum starts on ITV on Wednesday at 9pm. Al is featured in the second episode

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