I, Partridge: We Need To Talk About Alan

by Alan Partridge

  235 Of course, he didn’t always get it right. Turning water into wine at a wedding isn’t just showing off, it’s irresponsible. As a miracle, it just doesn’t work on any level. Impressing people who are already drunk, by magicking up more wine to get them pissed – how is that holy? That’s what I’d ask the Pope if I met him. By the way, I’m not knocking God. He’s a powerful man. Think about the recent earthquakes and tsunamis – he really does knock Al-Qaeda for six when it comes to killing the most number of people. For that alone, he deserves a quiet respect. That’s why I never blaspheme.

  236 God, I’d love to live in Chipping Norton. Brooks, Cameron, Clarkson, a Murdoch, quaffing champers and laughing our heads off at everyone else. Brilliant.

  237 I really hadn’t wanted to do this, because I only had socks on. My assistant had taken my shoes to clean.

  238 To help you understand what I mean, imagine a place where you’d have a market, then imagine it’s very busy, or crowded.

  239 Alan Partridge.

  240 See, that’s another example of Forward Solutions™. I was stranded, bereft of hope (thanks to the lack of professionalism of Swaffham Vauxhalls). Did I spend three hours sitting on the kerb crying about it? No. A quivering lip gave way to strong, decisive action. I sought help by standing in the highway wielding a jack. There was no way she was driving past. No way.

  241 I can hear all the PC brigade: ‘Oh no, homosexuals never attack anyone, they just prance around Hampstead Heath picking flowers!’ Get real – Dennis Nilsen, Jeff Dahmer, Boy George.

  242 I’d remembered their names and kept using them again and again. It’s a devastating technique, later stolen by Nick Clegg.

  243 The publishers specifically asked me not to.

  244 And vife verfa! LOL.

  245 Thankfully the poor sound quality of the Radnor mic meant that all the audience could hear was her calling me a ‘petty little suckwit’. Which is meaningless.

  Chapter 32

  North Norfolk Digital246

  FREQUENCY MODULATION? WE’VE ALL heard of it. We all admire it. We all respect it. But what exactly is it?

  You’re the flippin’ radio expert, Partridge! You tell us!

  Well, off the top of my head: In telecommunications and signal processing, frequency modulation (FM) conveys information over a carrier wave by varying its instantaneous frequency.

  And I think I’m right in saying: This is in contrast with amplitude modulation, in which the amplitude of the carrier is varied while its frequency remains constant.

  Yes, it seems to me that: In analog applications, the difference between the instantaneous and the base frequency of the carrier is directly proportional to the instantaneous value of the input signal amplitude. Digital data can be sent by shifting the carrier’s frequency among a set of discrete values, a technique known as frequency-shift keying.

  And I’m just riffing here but: While it is an over-simplification, a baseband modulated signal may be approximated by a sinusoidal Continuous Wave signal with a frequency fm. The harmonic distribution of a sine wave carrier modulated by such a sinusoidal signal can be represented with Bessel functions – this provides a basis for a mathematical understanding of frequency modulation in the frequency domain.

  Oh, and: In radio systems, frequency modulation with sufficient bandwidth provides an advantage in cancelling naturally occurring noise.[citation needed]

  So that’s pretty much all I know. I’m sure there’s more on the subject but I’d have to look it up.

  What I think we can all say for certain is that FM was, at one time, the Gold Standard for UK radio. If you weren’t on FM, you were nothing!247 But today the opposite is true.248

  Now, FM is considered prehistoric isn’t it? If someone said they were DJing on an FM frequency, you’d think they were on pirate radio, Sad FM, or were just an absolute idiot. You’d laugh at them and you’d be right to laugh at them. No, FM had had its day. It was as tired and lifeless as Chiles’s eyes. Which is why I was so delighted when Radio North Norfolk lost its FM licence in 2006.

  Radio North Norfolk? Say whaaaat, Alan?

  Allow me to explain. It’d been a time of genuine upheaval for Radio Norwich. Since 2002, it had been a station in desperate need of stability. Which eventually arrived in the form of a steady downward trajectory of revenue and turnover.

  Whoever was to blame – be it slovenly listeners or station management – morale was at a low. I, on the other, kept insisting on air that we were a damn good radio station and that the financial figures were bang out of order. I sincerely believed that and I was vindicated when we received the following email.

  ‘Please read carefully,’ read the subject line, which I thought was a strong hook, and it went on to say that Radio Norwich was to be sold to a fast-growing holding company called Gordale Media. We were hot property!

  Now, that proved me emphatically right: people don’t choose to buy something if it isn’t good. It meant they liked us. We had something (or to use the corporate speak of the email, ‘assets’) that was worth buying (or ‘stripping’).

  Lots of people were concerned about what they read but the tone of the email was, to my mind, unmistakeably upbeat: ‘exciting times’, ‘improved offer’, ‘going forward’, ‘increased efficiency’.

  Those Gordale boys didn’t muck about. With little fanfare, they added Radio Norwich to their family of brands (six other stations were also in the Gordale hutch) and undertook an immediate review, making hard-headed decisions such as selling and leasing back the Radio Norwich studios and cancelling ‘waste’ such as refreshments and travel costs. And in personnel terms, did they ring the changes!249

  Dave Clifton was left to stagnate on Radio Norwich, shunted to Norfolk Nights. I was plucked for a kind of special fire-fighting role – one that removed me from Radio Norwich altogether and airdropped me into Radio North Norfolk, a sister station with a far more refined listenership but in need of a kick in the arm, in what I saw as a kind of Red Adair role. There I was (in my mind): top off, sweat dripping from my rippling torso, my glistening skin marked with soot as I strode through the burning station, salvaging a listenership here, capping the verbal diarrhoea spewing from some of the younger DJs there, while salvaging the reputation of the station, and drenching the place in a kind of radio foam made up of sodium alkyl sulfate and a crude fluorosurfactant, as onlookers watched and looked at me.

  A memo from Gordale convinced me that this was a hugely radical step, and would represent an exciting chapter in both my career and the future of Radio North Norfolk. These guys were visionaries. Gordale, it said, was ‘committed to making best use of its resources’ (love that phrase) and had decided that when the station’s FM licence came up for renewal in 2006, it would not be bidding. Instead, the station would become digital-only (only!!).

  To the best of my knowledge, I’d never broadcast in digital before and was genuinely giddy at the prospect of my speech being delivered as a binary code. It would be transmitted as a series of zeroes and ones, reforming in the ear250 as a crystal clear facsimile of my real-life voice.

  This was no half measure. Gordale passionately threw its weight behind the move, rebranding the station as North Norfolk Digital251 and spending a cool three grand on signage, mugs and t-shirts.

  There was a shake-up in the line-up too. Pop aficionado and Jonathan-King-alike Ben E. Parry was quietly moved on and I was invited to take over his post-breakfast-to-lunchtime slot.

  And while other people who’d heard about Ben were saying ‘No way’ and ‘Jesus Christ’ and ‘He used to go to my swimming baths’ and ‘Imagine his wife finding that out’ and ‘I knew there was something about him’, I was punching the air, whooping and high-fiving like Obama after he’d just scored a slam dunk on the White House court, high-fiving his staff before doing a kind of funky walk around the court, saying ‘Who da man’ to everyone’s delight.

  Out went Hits of Their Day and in came a far more cerebral show. I envisaged
it as a kind of ‘idea melting pot’, challenging but easily digestible for an audience of housewives and unemployed males. It was, I hoped, tonally equidistant between Nigel Pinsent’s In-Depth and Wally Banter’s Junk Box.252

  I devised the name ‘Alan’s Show’ as I felt that was the best name for the show. I was absolutely adamant that that’s what the show should be called because I didn’t feel that other names were as good as that one. I was fully prepared to walk if they didn’t cede to my demand. But, after a conversation with effete station controller Frank Shears, I agreed that it should not be called ‘Alan’s Show’. As Frank pointed out, the name of the show would appear on a coffee mug and people might subconsciously think of me, Alan Partridge, as some kind of ‘mug’.

  Instead, I needed to devise a new name. I locked myself in my study – and like a scene from a US movie – I put on a sweatshirt and walked around bouncing a tennis ball against a wall as I thought out loud.253 I emerged three days later, having broken a window, an angle-poise lamp and a swivel chair, still no closer to a new name.

  Then a brainwave! I thought back to a time of my life when I was at my most productive. When was I oozing with ideas? In what circumstances was I at my most fecund? I’d simply identify when I was at my best and then try to recreate that environment as faithfully as possible.

  Which is how I came to spend a long weekend in the Aylsham Travel Tavern, dining each morning from the breakfast buffet and speaking into a Dictaphone while my assistant wrote down everything I said, like a human back-up drive.

  We spent four days in that room together (not in an intimate way – she slept in the bathroom) until, exhausted and bleary eyed, we emerged. We (I) had devised a name that had gravitas, catchy alliteration, and was time-specific.

  The second of these features was the most crucial. I love alliteration. I love, love, love it. Alliteration just makes everything sound fantastic. I genuinely can’t think of anything with matching initials that I don’t like: Green Goddess, Hemel Hempstead, Bum Bags, Monster Mash, Krispy Kreme, Dirty Dozen, Peter Purves, Est Est Est, the SS,254 World Wide Web, Clear Cache.

  My show would combine all that was good about its alliterative brothers listed above. It was to be called ‘Daily Daytime Debate’. And as far as I was concerned that was absolutely final. I’d changed it once and I was not going to change it again.

  In the end, it was changed to ‘Mid-Morning Matters’, which was a good name because it did ‘matter’255 and, running from 10am to 2pm, occupied a time that everyone would agree was known as ‘mid-morning’.

  I decided the show would combine music and chat, which effectively meant transplanting Norfolk Nights into a new daytime slot. This was reflected in a more housewife-friendly tone of chat, subsequently described by one North Norfolk blogger256 as ‘like a feral Lorraine Kelly’ which I quite liked. Similarly, the mood of the music necessarily shifted from ‘I love you’ to ‘Let’s get things done’.257

  Having completely bought in to Gordale’s efficiency savings, I understood that there wasn’t much in the pot to spend on marketing. Instead, I dug into my savings and had Prontaprint258 make 2,500 flyers which I left in piles on the tables of Starbucks and Café Nero.

  Then I began to broadcast.

  ‘This is digital radio. Repeat: this is digital radio. Do you read me, North Norfolk? Do you read me?’

  ‘Alan, they read you,’ said a voice in my cans.

  ‘Prepare your psyche for a new listening experience. Prepare for Alan’s Show …’

  ‘It’s not called Alan’s Show.’

  ‘… for Alan’s new show: Mid-Morning Matters. It’s 10 o’clock in the morning – or is it? We want to hear from you if, like many farmers, you’re simply not joining in with British Summer Time. I know Daylight Saving plays merry hell with milking patterns, so if you’re a rebel GMT-worshipper, we want to hear from you. Also on the show, how long have you kept a fizzy drink fizzy for? Once the top’s been opened, we want to know how long you kept the fizz and how you did it. And on the texts: we always hear the downside to female circumcision, but what about the upside? Send us your views in an SMS. Now ULTRAVOX.’

  And so Mid-Morning Matters was born. And it was quickly apparent that listeners had warmed to this new Digitalan Partridge, with listening figures spiking in my first quarter by almost 2%. Why though? Just what is digital radio?

  You’re the bloomin’ expert, Alan! Out with it!

  Well, as far I know: The most common meaning is digital radio broadcasting technologies, such as the digital audio broadcasting (DAB) system, also known as Eureka 147.

  I’m pretty sure: In these systems, the analog audio signal is digitised, compressed using formats such as mp2, and transmitted using a digital modulation scheme.

  If you’re interested, I’m relatively au fait with the aim of digital radio: The aim is to increase the number of radio programs in a given spectrum, to improve the audio quality, to eliminate fading problems in mobile environments, to allow additional datacasting services, and to decrease the transmission power or the number of transmitters required to cover a region.

  But that’s all I can remember right now.

  246 North Norfolk’s best music mix.

  247 5Live would be a good example.

  248 With the exception of 5Live.

  249 Yes.

  250 Terminator 2-style.

  251 North Norfolk’s best music mix.

  252 Regular NND listeners will know EXACTLY what I mean.

  253 It should have been a baseball and pitcher’s mitt but I didn’t have one.

  254 More the font they used than what they actually did, which was pretty awful.

  255 I enjoyed the double-meaning of ‘matters’ so much I’d sometimes pronounce it as a verb, and other times as a noun, and see if anyone noticed.

  256 ‘Web logger’.

  257 Essentially less Hot Chocolate and more Tears for Fears.

  258 Love the alliteration. It’s so clever!

  Chapter 33

  A Sidekick

  IN OCTOBER 2010 i broke one of the most sacred covenants of Brand Partridge. I decided to start broadcasting with the aid of a sidekick. No consultation, no forward planning. I just did it. BAM! Yet even to me his arrival – like that of a baby whose parents weren’t responsible enough to use protection, be it a condom, the coil, or whatever – was completely unexpected. So what the hell was I playing at?

  The story begins on a Tuesday night.259 Wearing flannel slacks and a tossed sweater, I’d driven over to my local hostelry. It was a warm evening and I was hungry for the 2.5 units of alcohol to which, as a driver, I was legally entitled. I locked my car by casually pointing the keys over my shoulder – boop beep260 – but before I had advanced more than a few metres something stopped me in my tracks. It was one of the loudest peals of laughter since sliced bread. And it was coming from the snug.

  It’s no exaggeration to say that it nearly blew me back against the car. It might very well have done so too, were it not for the fact that my calf muscles had recently been beefed up by a Runton to Matlask power ramble. (If you’re in the area by the way, can I urge you to drop in at The King’s Arms in Barningham? Excellent guest ales and a very welcome zero tolerance policy on dogs in the bar. And I do mean zero tolerance. If you’re blind, don’t bother.)

  I picked up the pace. The only person I’d ever heard cause such an uproar in that snug before was, well, me. Phil Shepherd had them crying with laughter in the saloon bar one night last year but, like I say, that wasn’t in the snug. I couldn’t imagine who it could be. Hmmm, I mused, curiouser and curiouser.

  As I entered the pub I instantly spotted the source of the mirth. It was a man in his early 30s wearing an ‘out there’ Hawaiian shirt and sporting a beard that was a sort of gingery browny gingery browny ginger. His name was Simon Denton and – Understatement Alert! – he was seriously funny.

  The joke he was telling when I walked in was an absolute groin-wrecker (is that a phras
e?). But it was also wholly unsuitable for publication, touching as it did on the rather delicate subjects of race, sexuality and Phil Shepherd’s mum. Me and the guys took it in the spirit in which it was intended, but if the PC Brigade saw it in print they’d have an absolute eppy. The second and third gags were just about fine, I thought, but HarperCollins disagreed so I can’t share them with you. Let’s just say that what I regarded as gentle joshing of the opposite sex, they regarded as plain hateful to women. Ditto a handful of Jew jokes. Ah well.

  But petty questions of taste and decency aside, the point is that me and Denton hit it off large-time. We were like Siamese twins separated at birth by a combination of surgery and adoption. We both enjoyed a drop of real ale. We both had the same views on artificial insemination. And we were both absolute naturals at that thing where you lean on the barstool in a way that means you’re sitting and standing at the same time.

  More than anything else, though, we were just funny guys. As I drove home that night I thought my brain was going to short circuit. Had I been a robot,261 I think it probably would have done. What the hell had just happened back there? Who was this guy? It was back at Chez Partridge later on as I drank a pint of tap water in just three gulps (a new PB) that it occurred to me. Why not invite Denton to become part of Mid-Morning Matters on North Norfolk Digital?262

  Of course! It was so obvious. Comedy was the only thing the show hadn’t nailed. Everything else was there by the bucket-load – music, guests, sound effects. We had a whole phalanx of killer features too: Alan Describes Art, A Partridge in a Pun Tree, Creed Crunch, Word Scramble, Gender Thrash.

  Yet every night in bed, there was a nagging doubt in my mind. I’d lie there absent-mindedly tossing my ball bag from one hand to the other, and I knew something was missing. What we were lacking was the truly big laughs found on, say, Bedtime with Branning or the aforementioned Wally Banter’s Junk Box.

  Not that it was my fault. I was forever bringing a wry smile to my listener’s ears, but there was only so far I could go. As one of the most trusted voices in Norfolk,263 I had a responsibility to be taken seriously. It wouldn’t do to have spent the entire show speaking like a quacking duck (which admittedly would be very funny) if I then had to read out an urgent newsflash about a dirty bomb going off in Wisbech.