It’s the a-ha moment Alan Partridge fans have waited for. Four years on from the underwhelming This Time With Alan Partridge, and on the heels of the far superior Alan Partridge audiobook series, From the Oasthouse, the titan of chat has returned to the airwaves with the hilarious, How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge).
The gimmick is that Partridge (Steve Coogan) is exploring the 21st-century mental health crisis after suffering a personal wobble where he passed out while presenting an animal feed award show. But Coogan and his co-writers, Neil and Rob Gibbons, sensibly avoid delving too deeply into actual mental health issues and instead deliver a greatest hits of Alan-isms that brims with squirm-inducing hilarity.
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The series reintroduces his assistant Lynn Benfield (Felicity Montagu), last seen trying to help him move out of his caravan in I’m Alan Partridge and “Sidekick” Simon Denton (Tim Key), who has moved on from Partridge and now has a thriving career at North Norfolk Digital. We also meet Partridge’s semi-live-in girlfriend, Katrina (Katherine Kelly), a domineering sociopath, introduced in the Oasthouse podcasts.
Coogan has been playing Partridge since the early 1990s, and the character feels less like an alter ego than an expression of an aspect of his personality played up for the cameras. He’s also a great Polaroid snap of middle-aged malaise: a scene in a later episode in which he and an old school pal go freewheeling through their old neighbourhood on vintage bikes, brilliantly captures the tragedy of a particular strain of Gen X nostalgia.
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Actors are often ambivalent about being connected to a specific character for decades. Coogan has indeed gone back and forth about how much Partridge he wants in his life. In the first of his Trip movies, directed by Michael Winterbottom and co-starring Rob Brydon, he stands at a cliff edge, seeking to exorcise the Partridge within by yodelling “a-haaaaa” into the void.
However, with a solid screen career behind him, he seems more comfortable in Partridge’s boat shoes. Audiences will see more of him later this year when he adopts a Barnsley accent to play former Ireland soccer manager and Roy Keane nemesis Mick McCarthy in Saipan.
There aren’t any Irish gags up there with Partridge’s Mayo farmer Martin Brennan singing Come Out Ye Black and Tans in 2021 – but there is a funny segment where he attends a book club discussing Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan and feels it necessary to explain she is “no relation to Kevin”.
The mental health stuff is, as pointed out, kept in the background. But that’s fine. Rather than something high-concept or preachy, this is Partridge unfiltered and as turbocharged as a vintage Jaguar purring through the unpredestrianised sections of Norwich city centre. It’s aha-mazing to have him back.
How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge) begins on BBC One on Friday, October 3rd, at 9.30pm
