I, Partridge: We Need To Talk About Alan

by Alan Partridge

  With me? Good. Now imagine that it’s not tofu, but a human brain. And they’re not pieces of bad news but six human thumbs. That’s what happened to me. In 2001, my brain had half a dozen thumbs pushed into it.191 I was trying to ignore these thumbs by making three television shows a day, six days a week. And like a civilian hospital targeted by a contestant on Skirmish, my brain basically exploded.

  It makes me laugh when people suggest that I’m exaggerating my psychological distress to cash in on the craze for ‘misery lit’. Actually, no, it doesn’t make me laugh. It makes me sigh. What I went through was real, and incredibly tough, and would have broken a lesser man like a gingerbread man being thwacked with a meat tenderiser. That it didn’t speaks to my fortitude and ability to bounce back.

  The naysayers who try to downplay the very real horror of chocolate addiction, or scoff at a naked man crying in the bath, or intimate that I’m some kind of wally can frankly eff off. And the suggestion that I would resort to hyperbole to sensationalise what I went through literally makes me pass out with nausea.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me take you back in time. Come. Come with me, through the fog-clad mists of time to 1987.

  We’re in the unnecessarily large studio of Our Price radio. And who’s this guy? With the strut and the swagger and the spunk? It’s a young Alan Partridge, one of the hottest broadcasters in in-store radio. He sets down his headphones, and heads for the door, high-fiving a succession of pleased staff.

  A head pops round the door. ‘Hey, great show, Alan,’ its mouth said. Alan stops in his tracks. It’s Pepsi or Shirlie from Pepsi & Shirlie. ‘Wow, thanks,’ says Alan, scarcely able to believe that an established pop star has complimented his show. She’d been in-store to promote a doomed solo single, having had a falling out with the other one from Pepsi & Shirlie.

  ‘We’re going for a quick drink, if you guys fancy it?’ says Pepsi/Shirlie.

  ‘Fancy it?’ says Alan. ‘Not half!’

  Soon after, Alan, fellow DJ Jon Boyd, a couple of producers and Pepsi or Shirlie from Pepsi & Shirlie are sat in the bar of a Marriott hotel, enjoying pints of bitter (the men) and a wine (Pepsi/Shirlie).

  Alan surveys the scene, throws his head back and laughs quietly. He’s made it. He’s really made it. He shakes his head slowly and basks in the euphoric glow of genuine happiness. And then someone nudges him.

  ‘Chocolate?’

  It’s Pepsi/Shirlie. Alan looks down to see that she’s offering him a strange and unusual confectionery. Brown in colour but lightly pebble-dashed with white flecks, it comes in centimetre-wide segments that together form a rounded pentehedron shape.

  He wouldn’t normally – even then he was prone to a fat back – but he’s in a celebratory mood and feels good. It’s a party atmosphere. A bit of fun. Sod it, why not? He takes one.

  At that moment, his life changes forever.

  (I’m going to revert to both the first person and the past tense now, because it’s quite tiring to write like that and I’ve just had a mug of hot milk.)

  At that moment, my life changed forever.

  The wallop of honey and almond nougat was the first to strike, the nutty sweetness further engorging my throbbing sense of happiness. Then came the hit of rich milk chocolate, its generous sugar content somehow taking me higher, my mind diving and soaring into a new ecstasy. I felt amazing, gold-plated, Vanden Plas.

  We finished our drinks and went our separate ways, but that sensation of deliciousness, acceptance and professional success were, on a barely conscious level, now inextricably linked with Toblerones.

  Over the years, I developed a taste for the Swiss delicacy. ‘Nothing I can’t handle,’ I’d always say. It was nothing out of the ordinary. I’d sometimes buy one of the small ones while queuing at a supermarket checkout or grab one to enjoy with a sandwich at a petrol station. I knew what I was doing. It was just a fun snack, a choc treat. After all, who doesn’t like Toblerone?

  I thought nothing of this until, several years later, I was sexually assaulted (I had my pants removed and arse exposed) by hooligans at a live Comic Relief event. With incredible selfishness, many of the people who’d pledged money to the poor of Africa were only happy to see the cash reach the needy if they could first peer at my naked anus. When I refused, I was gang-debagged.

  Badly shaken, I began to drive home. I was deeply embarrassed by what had happened and felt small, unappreciated and cheap. I wanted to eat a Toblerone. So I stopped into an Esso garage and ate a Toblerone. I felt a lot better and should have begun to wonder if there was some subconscious link between my self-confidence and the consumption of some Toblerone. Should have, but didn’t. That’s what addiction does – it makes you focus on little beyond the next fix.

  Unwilling to confront my demons, I became steadily more keen on the chocolate snack, silently measuring any hardships I encountered in segments of Toblerone. Argument with Carol? Three slabs and I’ll be fine. Disparaging remark from passer-by? Two should do it. My assistant is being an idiot? Three, maybe four – but she really is pushing her luck.

  But as my personal problems began to mount, so did my intake. After Carol left, I’d sometimes get up in the night and eat a whole Toblerone to myself. And I’m not talking about a small one – I mean a medium-sized one. On another occasion, I remember ruining a colleague’s birthday meal by eating a third of a Toblerone before joining them for dinner. Sated by the snack, I was unable to finish the lasagne she’d cooked and only had a small amount of dessert. Selfish, yes – but as a very real addict, I was consumed by my own desires. More and more, I ate.

  After the death of newly installed BBC commissioner Chris Feather, and a mean-spirited and unnecessary investigation by the BBC, my second series was snatched from my grasp. My reaction? Banging on the door of a BP garage at 2am, pleading for the hit of Toblerone (and getting it – it was open 24 hours. Also, my friend worked there). I was, by some distance, the most depressed and troubled man in the UK. Probably a lot worse than this sounds.

  In retrosight, I guess the BBC snub was the real sickener. Until then, I’d been on a fairly even keel. Sure, I had had my share of ups and downs. That’s Partridge. Comes with the territory. But the unjustness of the BBC stopping me being on the television saw me shrink into a dark cranny of fed-upness.

  And that’s when I really began to behave differently. I’d watch endless repeats of Birds of a Feather, a programme which I quite rightly despised. My assistant says I stopped checking her expense claims for some time – which really should not have happened – and all the while, of course, I was eating quite a bit of Toblerone. The self-destruction should by now be leaping off the page.

  The upshot was that I gained a lot of weight. I mean, that’s science. I’m not denigrating the food – at all. But it’s just human physiology. Lethargy plus Toblerone equals obesity. Even the guys at Kraft can’t argue with that. I’m not having a pop at them or anything.

  All of this made me very unhappy. In my mind, I was living in an old hill croft atop the Cuillin on the Isle of Skye. But I was no ‘wee bonnie boat like a bird on the wing’ over the sea to Skye.192

  I was a big bonnie man. And if I was a kind of bird, it would be a turkey about to be incapacitated by one of Bernard Matthews’s henchmen for some poor family to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.

  I sometimes thought the kindest thing would be to put me out of my misery, chop my head off, gut, truss and baste me, then cook me on gas mark 5 or 190C for three hours – check after two hours – and then place me centre table for a Christmas feast. In death at least, I’d be able to feed an extended family of say 20, what with me then weighing in at 230 pounds. Even allowing for shrinkage, I’m going to have had a cooked weight of the best part of 190lbs – easily enough to feed 20–30 guests with sandwiches lasting through to the Epiphany, aka the 12th day of Christmas.

  And so, inexorably fatter and more housebound, I saw myself turning into a third bird of a feather, although
others routinely mistook me for Eamonn Holmes. Routinely. Even my voice – once so agile and clear – was, like Eamonn’s, now muffled and cramped by throat fat.

  And then one day, I lost control. It wasn’t a single trigger, but an accumulation of minor incidents. How to explain it? It was as if I was carrying a lot of straw on my back. And people kept adding another piece of straw and another piece until I couldn’t carry any more because my back had broken. One piece on its own seems harmless, doesn’t it? But when added to loads of other pieces of straw, it adds up – until one piece of straw crosses the divide between ‘can carry’ and ‘can’t carry, sorry’. That’s how I explain it anyway.193

  I lost control. I lost control and I ended up driving to Dundee in bare feet.

  I’d heard of addicts blacking out, but thought it was just one of the things people say to get attention. Yet so complete was my mental collapse, I remember literally nothing of my journey to Scotland. Not a flicker of memory, other than the fact it was A11 to Thetford, continuing to Ipswich on the A146, before a short hop on the A140 saw me join the A47 and later the A17, pretty much until the A1. It was A1 and A1(M) including a quick pit stop at Wetherby Services for petrol, more Toblerones and a face wash. Then on the A66 via Scotch Corner and on to the M6 which, after the Scottish border, became the A74. Then it went M74, M73, M80, M9, A9, M90, and then the A90.

  It was only after arriving in Dundee and pulling up in the middle of a municipal football pitch to unwrap another Toblerone that I came around, pretty much at the point where this chapter started. So now I’m going to carry on from the point where I stopped and started talking about tofu. I will do that now.

  I didn’t feel up to the drive home – not least because I had no shoes and felt daft. So I contacted my assistant, who travelled overnight while I lay across the generously proportioned back seat of the Vectra finishing the last of the Toblerones and using the verdant shrubbery as an improvised toilet as and when. My assistant doesn’t own a car and the train was, I felt, too expensive, so she’d taken a National Express coach, clutching my best shoes in a plastic carrier bag.

  She told me she’d sat next to the coach’s chemical toilet and I was concerned that my shoes might smell of human waste, so I lost my temper at her a little bit, but was mollified when I smelt the shoes and they didn’t smell of human waste.

  She quickly washed and shod me and then began the drive home with the hosepipe dangling from the exhaust like the tail of a giant mouse.194 But, for such a bird-like woman, she was far too hard on the clutch, so after a few hundred metres I took over and drove home myself. I gave her a lift as well.

  Little was spoken on the way back. She could tell from my body language that referring to ‘the open arms of Christianity’ was inadvisable, so she listed some of the times when I’d either done something well in my professional life or said something spontaneously witty in company. Afterwards, she used the light from her mobile phone to read aloud from Prima magazine but quickly fell asleep.

  I got home and had a can of bitter and a sleeping tablet.195 I subsequently made a number of changes to my life, which resulted in me getting better.196

  I’d done it. I’d bounced back. The doubters could shut their faces because I’d done it. And so with fewer work commitments, a slimmer physique, fresher breath,197 less clutter on my desk, and a blanket ban on Toblerones, I felt like a new man.

  Quite a turnaround then.198 Yep, it’s a tale of incomprehensible pain and hardship, of bravery and backbone, of me and my success. One that could easily be stretched out into a film or novella – if only because that kind of addiction’s not really been done before and would therefore feel fresher to a reader or viewer. Just a thought!199

  The other addictions grab all the column inches – let them! It’s not a grief competition. I don’t know why they think they have something to prove. And sure, maybe there’s something glamorous about a boozeman swigging whiskey on a sidewalk or junkie ‘chasing the dinosaur’ in a squat, but take it from someone who knows: both physically and mentally, confectionery addiction is the worst kind of addiction there is. Nothing comes close to the shame, desperation and unsightly weight gain of chocoholism.

  So who’s to blame? Me? Society? Kraft Foods? The Government? Pepsi or Shirlie out of Pepsi & Shirlie? In all honesty, it’s probably a combination of them all, with a slight weighting towards Pepsi or Shirlie from Pepsi & Shirlie. You don’t go pushing something as powerful as Toblerone on someone you’ve only just met. It’s utterly irresponsible, and I’m absolutely furious with her. She could have bloody killed me.

  190 You might like to actually do this.

  191 Editor – can you check this metaphor? I’ve lost track a bit.

  192 Not least because if I was to journey to Skye a boat would be unnecessary because of the quite elegant road bridge.

  193 © Partridge.

  194 Oh, I should have said – this was for a suicide bid which I didn’t get round to.

  195 The drink and drugs of the chapter title.

  196 This paragraph is an edited version of a much longer passage, which the publishers felt borrowed too heavily from Bouncing Back (2002), available in second-hand bookshops in and around Norfolk.

  197 This would have made more sense if the previous paragraph hadn’t been edited.

  198 It certainly is, Alan.

  199 © Partridge.

  Chapter 27

  Chin Up

  I TOOK SOME TIME out after Dundee. People were very nice. Sue Cook called and offered to take me to the zoo one day. She never actually turned up but then she never does. That’s just Sue, as she always says.

  Bill Oddie was a real rock too. When he found out Sue had let me down, he swiftly agreed to come along in her place. We had a nice drive over there (he uses one of those booster seats so he can see over the steering wheel) but later in the day, when we went into the aviary, he seemed to tense up. A cloud seemed to descend. I pressed him on it.

  ‘Are you alright, Bill?’ I asked, as a bird of paradise landed on my head.

  ‘Fine,’ he grunted unconvincingly, as I shoved it away again.

  ‘Well you don’t seem fine,’ I retorted, swirling my arms around my hand to try to keep the bird at bay.

  He looked me in the eye. ‘All these people watching birds without using binoculars.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘It’s cheating.’ And with that, the bird-mad Goodie strode off, partly because he was angry and partly because he only had five minutes to get over to the other side of the zoo for the seal performance.

  Other people were there for me too. My assistant would pop round to the house every day to drop off food, do the dishes, flush the loo (I tended to forget). At my lowest point, she also offered to help me shower. But even with my swimming trunks on I think that would have been a bit weird.

  Although technically my employee, I knew that she was doing all this as a friend, and that meant a lot. She came round so often, I’m surprised she had time to get any actual work done, and I think it was that as much as anything else that forced me to drop her down to a part-time wage for a while.

  I did a lot of crying as well. I’m not ashamed to say that now, but at the time I found ways to hide it. Mainly by doing the bulk of it in the shower. That way people can’t say what’s tears and what’s just hot water. Same applies in the bath. Just hold your breath, stick your head under and let the grief flood out. You’d be surprised how much better you feel.

  To this day I still use Short-Burst Underwater Crying for all sorts of problems. I wouldn’t cry at, say, an unexpectedly large MOT bill. But if I’d received an unexpectedly large MOT bill, combined with the death of a good friend, plus I hadn’t eaten that day, then I might well weep.

  I developed a complementary technique called Controlled Anger-Release Splashing, though it should only be used as a measure of last resort, and you will need to mop up afterwards.

  Against the express wishes of Bill Oddie, I also t
ried therapy. It wasn’t for me though. I didn’t want someone to pick and prod at my troubled mind like a shopper fingering a piece of fruit in the supermarket. I wanted something that would allow my soul to heal in its own sweet time. And that’s why I took up pony-trekking.200

  It all stemmed from someone telling me I’d feel better if I exercised. They’d suggested jogging, but what appealed about pony-trekking was that you were basically in charge of a vehicle/being. Also, horses don’t complain. They don’t criticise you about viewing figures, play hard-ball over budgets or fail to re-commission your show. Plus they’re grateful for a sugar cube.

  I’d had a little experience of horses previously, not least on Knowing Me Knowing You. Show-jumper Sue Lewis had been a guest and had come on the show with her horse (see picture section). And I must say it made for pretty pleasing television until she shat on the floor (the horse).

  But yes, clambering aboard my horse, Treacle, really was just what the Doc ordered. Mottled grey and measuring a good 15 hands, you could tell that she just ‘got’ me. I truly found peace in the gentle side-to-side bob of her trot, the quiet swoosh of her tail and the tender plippety-plop-plop of her shit hitting the dirt.

  It wasn’t all plain-sailing, though. Probably my lowest ever equine moment was when we were out one day and I fell badly off the pace. Soon I was totally lost. I began to panic. In an effort to relocate the rest of the riders I’d taken a short-cut across a dual carriageway. But it was then, as we tried to hurdle the central reservation, that something terrible happened. Treacle stood on a nail. On another day, she might have got away with it, but with the quite extraordinary weight of me on her back the rusty nail just slid through the hoof like a knife through hoof.

  Over the roar of the onrushing traffic, I heard her whinny. But because I hadn’t seen the incident, and because I knew almost nothing about horses, I assumed she was just laughing. The poor girl. By the time we got back to the stable her hoof looked like a split sausage.