“The truth is that Donald Trump is far less sophisticated than Alan Partridge,” Steve Coogan told me in 2020. “That’s a plain fact.”
Read that sentence carefully. There may be a clue as to how the East Anglian broadcaster has survived and prospered.
Next week we will see, depending on how you count these things, the 10th or 11th iteration of Alan. He was first heard, in 1991, as a sports reporter on BBC Radio 4’s news spoof On the Hour. Then on the same station’s faux chatshow Knowing Me Knowing You. Then The Day Today, essentially a telly transfer of On the Hour. And on and on, through sitcoms, movies, books and internet shorts.
Next week, still played by Coogan, he appears in a mock documentary series called How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge). The trailer leans towards the fashionable, and often obscurely defined, celebrity obsession with “mental health”.
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Spinal Tap, celebrating 40 years of pastiche in the recent Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, have been around longer, but that band haven’t remained at the front of the conversation.
When I spoke to Coogan a week or two before the pandemic moved in, he was patiently fielding questions about a newly unavoidable Partridge Doppelgänger. Just a year earlier, Martin Brennan, brought on as novelty lookalike on our hero’s early-evening magazine show This Time With Alan Partridge (an obvious nod to the BBC’s The One Show), had humiliated the fictional host – and delighted the actual Irish nation – with a robust rendition of Come Out, Ye Black and Tans.
It was kind of a miracle. I have yet to find a single viewer in Ireland who was offended by the robust depiction of an unpretentious Irish chancer. As the son of a Co Mayo woman, Coogan had both added insight and added responsibility.
“My mum was relieved that people thought it was great,” he told me. “And also there was a joke there: I wonder if we can get an Irish rebel song on prime-time television.”
I’m Alan Partridge was among the most acclaimed sitcoms of the millennial years. A decade later the hilarious Mid Morning Matters, initially launched on YouTube, made ingenious use of the newer formats. I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan, published in 2011, was a spoof biography for the ages.
Quite a list. No other comedy character has managed a career like this. Barry Humphries’ peerless Dame Edna Everage comes close. In action for nearly 70 years, she certainly beats Alan for longevity. But the Melbourne superstar didn’t wax so much with the times. She didn’t flit from one corner of prime time to the other. She was largely the same person for about four decades of that span. Partridge evolves and devolves.
“He has definitely changed. We don’t apologise for that,” Coogan told me in 2013. “He is a little Englander. But over the years he has become aware of the new consensus about things he would have thought fringe issues.”
That change is partly to do with an expansion of personality. The Partridge who appeared in On the Hour was a fairly one-dimensional figure. He was essentially a neat summation of all the negative cliches associated with sports reporters.
The listener might reasonably have assumed he had as much chance of surviving into the 21st century as Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan, Patrick Marber’s idiotic economics reporter, or Barbara Wintergreen, Rebecca Front’s idiotic American reporter. But the writers thought differently.
“We always knew he had legs,” Armando Iannucci, one of the creators of On the Hour, said in 2017. “We subconsciously decided early on not to overdo him. We bring him back every few years or so. The world will have changed. He will have changed a bit.”
Another crucial decision was to periodically invite empathy for Alan. He is a terrible person: arrogant, small-minded, philistine, petty. Like so many protagonists of British sitcoms – David Brent, Basil Fawlty, Rupert Rigsby, Captain Mainwaring – he can’t understand why he is limited to only the tiny amount of compromised power that has come his way.
But, every now and then, each of those men gets his moment of genuine pathos. We all have more Alan in us than we would like to admit.
As the years have passed Coogan has repeatedly stood up for his creation. Many thought Brexit would be Alan’s great moment. But his chief creator was not so sure. “It’s too obvious,” he said in 2020. “There is no comedy in someone being unreconstructed and unsophisticated.”
Alan Partridge returns as a unique carnival mirror for changing times. He was wrong about most things. But he was right about a few others. Who now laughs at a man for loving Abba quite so much?
How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge) begins on BBC One on Friday, October 3rd, at 9.30pm
