I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan - review

10 April 2012

I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan

Aha! This fictional memoir by Steve Coogan's most successful comic creation could be the antidote to the celeb biographies that clog the Christmas book market. It's as acute a spoof of the publishing sub-genre as the Alan Partridge character is of a whole tranche of crassly opinionated lowbrow broadcasters, the kind of people who crank out such tomes for cash. That Coogan and his collaborator and co-writer Armando Iannucci can't escape the monster they created 20 years ago, and have been compelled to revisit him yet again, adds a little bittersweet irony to the mix.

Who, as the man himself might say, is Alan Partridge? He's Norfolk's second most famous son after Bernard Matthews, having risen from sports reporting on local radio to the dizzy heights of his own Abba-themed TV chat show, which ended when he accidentally shot and killed a guest. His subsequent divorce, homelessness and Toblerone addiction were charted in the TV mock-doc I'm Alan Partridge. Here, the story is retold in Alan's peerlessly oafish style, with a bit of exaggerated childhood anguish thrown in as he tries to grab a slice of the misery-lit market, and a lot more detail on his personal hygiene.

Wisely, the writers (four in total) brush lightly over the best gags from the TV and radio series. But in a way, Partridge works better on the page than on the air, as his pitiful lack of self-awareness is given even fuller rein. The book comes with a "mandatory" soundtrack of MOR bilge, hilariously rambling footnotes and name-checks of beautifully judged mediocrity (Bill Oddie, Des Lynam). We get the full extent of his feelings about his ex-wife Carol and his put-upon Baptist assistant Lynn, plus spasms of racism and protest-too-much homophobia. He talks about meeting the broadcasting heroes he used to watch while eating dinner and goes on to list them: the dinners, not the people. A crying fit while he has a cold produces a "mucal tsunami". In a chapter entitled My Drink and Drugs Heck he notes that his addiction to Swiss chocolate "had taken me to places I never wanted to go. Mainly Dundee".

Yet for all its brilliantly sustained wit this is, in a sense, just another showbiz biog, telling a tale we know well in a self-serving voice that is all too familiar. While I admire the horrible vividness and comic dominance of Alan Partridge, I don't think he shows Coogan or Iannucci at their best (that would be The Trip and The Thick of It, respectively). Partridge completists, I'm sure, will love it.

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