ALAN PARTRIDGE
I t’s more than two decades since Alan Partridge took to the airwaves, i rst as a sports presenter in On The Hour and The Day Today, then through his own chat show, Knowing Me Knowing You. The tragi-comic creation of Steve Coogan and Armando Iannucci, Partridge has survived many indignities, demoted i rst to an under- repair Travelodge and then a caravan. Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa is a new feature i lm, with returning talent including writer Peter Baynham and executive producer Iannucci, pitching the hapless presenter into a siege in Radio Norfolk.
For real-life broadcasters, Alan Partridge might be imagined sitting on their shoulders like the medieval spectre of Titivillus, a demon lurking maliciously by the printing press in order to force their hand into embarrassing errors.While Partridge might have initially seemed a specii c parody of a gormless light entertainment BBC Pebble Mill at One-type presenter, the development of his darker side skewers much that is careless, crass, self-serving and narcissistic about media folk.
In the spirit of ‘good chat’, we invited three prominent broadcasters to weigh in on why Coogan’s most popular character has endured, how true the Partridge stereotype is to their own experience of broadcasting, and whether they’ve ever thought any real life colleagues deserve comparison with Alan Partridge…
JANICE FORSYTH Host of BBC Scotland’s The Culture Studio
With my job, with music as part of the show, there is more opportunity to i ll the space within the records with what might be called ‘banter’, and I’m sure people who listen regularly to me will feel ‘please don’t refer to him again’ because I often feel that Alan Partridge is just above me, hovering on a cloud. Every so often, and we can all do it, a broadcaster can just go into a horrible cliché mode. I’m fully aware when I do it, there’s a big klaxon warning
which goes off when I hear myself say, ‘And now, T’Pau.’ I absolutely loved Knowing Me Knowing You; I think the writing is great and Steve Coogan is a master. I like Alan Partridge particularly when it goes to the dark side, like Basil Fawlty: it’s a study of a middle-aged man having a breakdown to huge comic effect. I love the one where he’s having these strange ‘l ashes’ while he’s trying to keep up the persona, and he ends up in a sleazy club wearing very tight pants of a shiny nature, gyrating his crotch.
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11 Jul–22 Aug 2013 THE LIST 13