I had a moment of profound self-realisation while listening to the most recent series of Alan Partridge’s podcast, From the Oasthouse. In the episode Tinned Meat, Alan reels off supermarket shopping tips, such as arriving just before closing to secure “discounts on meat that’s not on the turn but is a cigarette paper away from gone off”. This is something I’ve been advising friends to do for years, calling it “yellow sticker cruising”. It marked the moment of my final oneness with the sometime North Norfolk Digital radio presenter. I celebrated by sitting down to the none-more-Partridge dinner of a frozen pie and Bisto gravy while watching a 1985 BBC documentary about the brutal training regime of an elite unit of the Royal Marines.
For those unfamiliar with Norwich’s greatest export since Colman’s mustard, Alan Partridge, played by the actor Steve Coogan, first appeared in 1991 as the sports commentator on BBC Radio 4’s satirical current affairs show On the Hour and then on TV in Chris Morris’s The Day Today. Coogan has always been guarded on the inspiration for Partridge, admitting there are similarities to daytime telly stalwart Richard Madeley, but preferring to say he’s a composite. He was given his own chatshow, Knowing Me, Knowing You, in 1994, lost it after shooting a guest live on air, and since then his life and broadcast career have been on the skids. We’ve watched his fortunes fluctuate via further TV series, the 2013 film Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa, memoirs (the third, Big Beacon, was published this week) and the three series of From the Oasthouse.
The process of accepting my inner Partridge has been a gradual one. When I sent the draft of my memoir Out of the Woods to a writer friend to read, she suggested that I remove a reference to my childhood love of my dad’s vinyl copy of Queen’s Greatest Hits, saying it was “too Partridge”. I didn’t follow her advice, for while the book is in part about shame and sexuality, I realised that I had no shame about that. Since then, those feelings have only intensified, my “accidental Partridge” moments and deployment of the “Alan Partridge shrug gif” on social media becoming ever more frequent. I suspect I am not alone.
This has been a two-way process as Alan has also moved towards us. His age is as elastic as the waistband of his cotton mix trousers (no doubt purchased in the summer sale at Jarrolds, Norwich) and while Alan ought to be in his 70s by now, Coogan plays him as closer to his own current age – he turns 58 this week. The line between the character and his creator has blurred as their ages have converged, something that Coogan once appeared to resent, but now seems to embrace. It is in part what gives Partridge a more authentic humanity.
Partridge has also become more sympathetic since brothers Neil and Rob Gibbons joined the writing team. Like me they’re now in their mid-40s, and I imagine writing him is a way of dealing with their own inner Alans as they move into middle age – how lucky they are to be paid for a dream job that is also free therapy. In their hands, we get closer to Partridge through his irritation at the minutiae of modern life, while they also affectionately satirise subjects they’re clearly deeply familiar with, perhaps even love. It’d be impossible to skewer the nature writing genre as brilliantly and regularly as they do if you didn’t read a lot of it and enjoy a ramble in a goose-down gilet. The same goes for Partridge’s interest in military history. After finishing my book Men at War, about masculinity and sexuality between 1939 and 1945, I read it back to myself in his accent to gauge the level of Partridge in the text – there needs to be just the right amount, never too much.
Keeping an eye on your Partridge tendency is especially important when it comes to his politics. He’s superficially a small-c conservative, from the friendship with Grant Shapps to the whiff of Brexit, as in the episode of This Time in which he swoops over Dover’s white cliffs in a Spitfire, saying over the roaring Merlin engine, “Up here, you can be proud to be British, where no leftwing people can tut at you.” As a queer, lefty, Guardian writer (just the sort of person who Partridge is frequently rude about), surely I ought to find his rhetoric offensive. Yet the genius of Coogan and the Gibbons brothers’ scriptwriting is in its discomfort: at one moment we laugh with Alan and his understandable bewilderment with fast-moving moral codes; the next at the bitterness and self-delusion that are at the root of his prejudices. When he approaches the limits of acceptability, Alan becomes a warning of our own potential reactionary future.
Alan Partridge has therefore become an everyman of ageing, having to navigate new societal rules just as his physical form declines; at times the embodiment of British male self-repression, at others bracingly frank. He has a neurotic relationship with his own body, be that his back fat, verrucas, bowel issues or Toblerone addiction. He can obsess over personal hygiene, has a furtive interest in sex and pornography, and his fascination with homosexuality is all too revealing. In Alan we see the inner and outer turmoil of so many men struggling to be honest with themselves about their physical and mental health, or a sexuality that is more fluid than our culture allows them to be. Through him we can work through our failures and insecurities, but he also gives us hope.
Alan is at his most inspiring when still somehow carrying valiantly on against the odds in a life haunted by – and haunting – Travel Taverns, nocturnal petrol station counters and Norwich’s pedestrianised city centre; when finding escape in drunkenly commentating on the coronation in From the Oasthouse; or in the infamous scene in series one of I’m Alan Partridge where he performs a kinky lapdance in tiny leather shorts and a traffic cone bra. He might snort over his 12in breakfast buffet plate at the term, but for many of us, Alan Partridge is our safe space.
Luke Turner is a writer, editor and the author of two books, Men at War and the Wainwright prize-shortlisted Out of the Woods
