As Norwich’s most famous broadcaster returns with a documentary about mental health, we chat to the team behind the man.
When Steve Coogan was filming the new Alan Partridge TV series, he arrived in his trailer to put on his costume: a blue, checked shirt. Except he was already wearing one that was identical. “It wasn’t just similar,” he says. “It was literally the same manufacturer, in the same size. I looked at it hanging up and I thought ‘so, I guess it’s happened then…’”
Still, he went through the motions of changing into the shirt to play one of Britain’s most beloved comedy characters, back on TV next month. The six-episode series, How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge), will air on BBC One on 3 October. Back in the UK after a year in Saudi Arabia, the clumsy broadcaster is working on a documentary about mental health.
“We felt like being funny with Alan again,” says Steve, at a Q&A hosted by Kirsty Young, after an exclusive screening. He is joined by collaborators Neil and Rob Gibbons, who have worked on Partridge since 2010.
“Now he’s been invented, we might as well run with it from time to time, because it’s a good conduit to talk about popular culture and things that are perhaps taboo. You can say things through the character that are potentially problematic.”
This new series sees Alan riding a jetpack, joining a book club, attempting to patch things up with Sidekick Simon (Tim Key). Felicity Montagu is back, too, as his personal assistant Lynn.
“Alan had an era where he was wearing cardigans and working for a tiny little radio station,” says Neil. “He didn’t have much money, didn't have a very good car, he was a bit of a kicked puppy. Now he's entered an era where, on the face of it, he has everything. He’s got a good house, a good car.
“He’s getting a lot of low level but quite lucrative work. And he’s got a girlfriend [Katrina, played by Katherine Kelly] who is younger than him, beautiful, clearly quite a figure in the community. But she’s an awful, awful woman. The original model for the character was Liz Truss.
“As the series goes on, you see Alan struggling with, what on paper is clearly a good deal for him, souring quite badly.”
Wardrobe aside, how much does Steve identify with the character he is known for? “Sometimes Alan says stuff that I agree with secretly, and sometimes he says stuff I find repellent,” says Steve.
“As people, we know we ought to have [certain] values, but we think things that are at odds with them. That conflict is very real, very human, and writ large with Alan.”
Overall, he has sympathy for the hapless presenter. “I don’t like him, really, but he’s not mean-spirited, he’s misguided. There are far worse people in Alan’s world, and in the real world. He’s just that sort of perennial, aspirant fool that comes up a lot in comedy.
“He’s like Malvolio in Twelfth Night: pompous and thinks he knows more than he does, but everyone knows he’s an idiot. When I was writing with Armando [Iannucci], Peter [Baynham], and Patrick [Marber], I’d always get defensive of him when they were being too cruel.”
This well-meaning blundering might also play a part in the character’s appeal to a new generation, who have been enjoying clips of Partridge on TikTok. “Alan’s first 15-20 years [thrived on people] thinking ‘there but for the grace of God go I’,” says Steve. “We see this man slipping on all the banana skins we’ve managed to avoid in our lives.”
But Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012) don’t connect with it in quite the same way; it’s not themselves they see mirrored. “Grown up children – 20 or 21 or 22 – see their parents in Partridge,” says Steve. “They see that desperation to try and be relevant, to not be square, to be on message – that struggle of trying to be hip with the kids. That’s why they get it.”
Originally created in 1991 for BBC Radio 4, the Partridge franchise now includes podcasts, memoirs and live tours, as well as a sequence of TV shows beginning in 1994 with The Day Today. What is it about the character that is so durable?
“The writing of Armando, Patrick Marber and Peter Baynham was very good and funny and had a spikiness to it,” says Steve. “But Rob and Neil are totally comfortable with poignancy or pathos and aren’t as cruel to Alan. Alan evolved under their stewardship, so you can feel compassion for him, and that’s a more humane execution of the character. That’s given it longevity. It’s multi-dimensional where it wasn’t before.”
“I think he’s a reflection of a lot of white, middle-aged, middle-class men of a certain age, where the world’s changed too fast for them, and they’re actually really scared, and they don’t really know what to do about it,” adds Rob. “He’s doing his best.”
Partridge’s complexity also gives him more mileage. “A lot of comedy characters are based on a very simple comic shtick – they’re stupid or they’re short tempered,” says Neil. “Alan’s shtick comes from something much deeper. Sometimes he can be stupid, obviously, but sometimes he’s quite smart and well-read.
“Sometimes he’s sort of metrosexual, sometimes he tries to be macho. I think it comes from him not really knowing himself. He’s often trying different versions of himself and falling short every time. But because he’s constantly trying something, he can go in any direction. You’re not stuck in one little furrow.”
Would Partridge worry about being cancelled in the current climate? “Definitely,” says Steve. “I think he feels the walls closing in, so he’s trying rapidly to think of an escape plan. It’s almost like when they escaped from Colditz by putting on a Nazi uniform. What Alan’s doing is thinking ‘I’ll put on a millennial uniform and disappear into the crowd unnoticed’.”
Routinely ranked among the greatest British comedy characters of all time, alongside Del Boy and David Brent, there is still an appetite for fresh Alan Partridge projects, 34 years after his conception.
“I can’t think of another character who the audience has been able to track throughout their whole adult life,” says Rob. “Now it feels like, well, we’ve got this far, we’ve got to keep going until Steve conks out.”
How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge) will air on BBC One and iPlayer on Friday 3 October at 9.30pm.
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