It is 2021 and Alan Partridge’s career as a BBC TV presenter has come to a screeching halt. In the middle of a belligerent television discussion on BBC One’s This Time, he had gone off-script, leaving his producer apoplectic. Partridge decided to pre-empt his removal from the show by announcing his resignation. “It’s a shame to be leaving the BBC at a time when most of its senior roles are finally being given to supporters and donors of the Conservative party,” he notes. “But leave I must, or rather left I have.”
Big Beacon is the third memoir from Alan Partridge, written by Steve Coogan with longstanding collaborators Neil and Rob Gibbons. In the prologue, our protagonist explains, in excruciatingly Partridgean detail, how the book “employs a daring structure known as a dual narrative”. While one of those narratives reveals his attempts to resuscitate his career, the other sees him “spurn the world of broadcasting for a more humble life spent restoring a dilapidated lighthouse and, in doing so … tenderly breathing new life into both the abandoned seaside building and, in a funny kind of way, my own soul.” And so, after leaving Norfolk and “emigrating” to the Kent coast, Partridge goes into battle with locals outraged at his renovation plans.
Since it’s impossible to read Partridge without hearing his voice in your head, this is a book best enjoyed in audio where, courtesy of Coogan, his pompous pronouncements and warped self-analysis take flight. As ever, the writing is atrocious in the best possible way. In Big Beacon, Partridge is in his element, which is to say swimming against the tide and convinced of his reasonableness in an increasingly bewildering world.
• Big Beacon is available via Seven Dials, 7hr 53min
Further listening
Julia
Sandra Newman, Granta, 14hr 21min
Louise Brealey narrates Newman’s novel, which retells George Orwell’s landmark novel Nineteen Eighty-Four through a feminist lens.
A Spy Among Friends
Ben Macintyre, Bloomsbury, 12hr 30min
This gripping account of the Soviet mole Kim Philby who gave up British secrets during the cold war is read by Michael Tudor Barnes.
