Partridge, Alan

by I, Partridge We Need to Talk About Alan

  63 Many was the time I’d see Nicholas Witchell sitting all alone in the canteen. It was a shame, because years later I realised we both shared a love of collecting butterflies. He has an enormous collection in his London flat. I like to imagine that after a hard day following the royals, he returns home, sits in an armchair with a mug of cocoa and waits as his entire herd of butterflies greet him by flitter-fluttering their way over and landing on his naked body. But I know for a fact this can’t happen because his entire collection is dead, each one attached to a display case with a single pin through the heart.

  Chapter 8

  A Mighty Big Fish for A Pond this Size64

  ‘WHO ARE YOU? I don’t bloody know you any more!’

  Carol was shouting at me, tears streaming down her ruddy65 cheeks, as I tried to barge past her. She grabbed at my jowls, imploring me to look at her. But she was right. This was a different Alan Partridge and he wasn’t in the mood.

  I eased her out of the way and put the takeaway menus – the glossy food-describing documents that she’d so carefully placed in my hands – back into the top drawer. It should have been second drawer down but I wasn’t thinking straight.

  She swung me around and fanned some of my breath into her nostrils. ‘Have you … been drinking??’ Her voice was shaking. I turned away. I’d had a half-bottle of wine – I don’t remember the colour – on the train back home and was out of control.

  Friday would usually have been our takeaway night, but tonight I wasn’t hungry – I’d been in the BBC club, enjoying a buffet put on to celebrate 26 years of Tomorrow’s World. (For the uninitiated, the BBC club is a subsidised bar-cum-restaurant, laid on by licence fee payers for the talent and crew of the BBC alike. It provided a public-free environment for BBC staffers to carouse and unwind, to share ideas and to complain about working conditions. It was where a star-struck Alan Partridge would buy a sandwich most days in the hope of spotting Esther Rantzen, Andy Crane, Karl Howman.)

  This was a new experience for me. I was starry-eyed, my mind addled with possibility and adventure, recognition and more adventure. Which is how I found myself seduced that night by the lure of glamour, sausage rolls and a chat with Maggie Philbin.

  Not many people had turned up to the soiree – the 25th anniversary in 1990 had been a much bigger do – but I had lost track of time, arguing with Howard Stableford about the possibility of time travel, and had missed my usual train. On the next scheduled service, I thought I’d wash down the rolls with a drink. Frig it, I said aloud, why not? I work hard, it’s Friday night and I want a glass of wine (still can’t remember the colour).

  I had some crisps as well, and the sliced potato snacks had lopped a fair bit off my appetite. I didn’t want a bloody takeaway. I wanted another slice of quiche and another half of bitter. I wanted to be back in the BBC club, the happy filling in a Kate Bellingham/Judith Hann sandwich, not sat in with Carol as she decorates her face with spare rib sauce.

  And when she handed me the menus, my response had been withering. ‘I’m not peckish. I don’t want to eat a takeaway meal tonight.’

  That’s when she shoved me and burst into uncontrollable (but still annoying) sobs. ‘Who are you? I don’t bloody know you any more!’

  Yes, reader, London had changed me. My career was going stratospheric, with millions of radio listeners hungrily eating the sound of my voice as it fed them sports-centred info. It was all so new to me. New and intoxicating and fun.

  I slumped in front of the TV and Carol sat next to me, ordering a takeaway for one. Armed with a new understanding of London broadcasting, I was able to provide a kind of Director’s Commentary on current affairs TV shows, pointing out what the presenters ordered from the BBC club, if they were taller/shorter than they appeared on TV and generally providing helpful info on the production process. Carol said nothing.

  Sue Cook appeared on screen, and in my tipsiness I began to talk in gushing terms about her. She’d always reminded me of Jeff Archer’s wife, Lady Archer. Sophisticated and demure. But having got to know her a little bit, I’d realised she had a wonderful sense of humour and had a loathing of other presenters that I found quite wonderful. I mentioned this to Carol and she ran to the bedroom, really fast and loud. I climbed into bed next to her and thought it prudent to say nothing. You really can’t win with Carol sometimes.

  I muttered something about heading off early the next morning to test drive the new Rover 800 with Gary who directs the Superdrug commercials and she just looked at me.

  ‘Don’t you know what day it is?’

  I mentally rifled through the roller deck of red-letter days: birthdays, anniversaries, deaths. And then it hit me. I stumbled into the bathroom, splashing my face with water so cold it made me go ‘Ah! Ah!’ with each splash.

  Tomorrow was the day of the Royal Norfolk Show, and we were to man the Elizabethan craft fair in period dress. This was a Partridge family fixture, absolutely utterly unmissable. And not just out of duty – we always had a really great day, adding ‘–eth’ to our words to sound more Elizabethan and having a bloody good laugh about it.

  Carol was right. What had I become? A Royal Norfolk Fair-forgetting ogre of a man. I slumped into the shower (which was just a curtained-off area at one end of the bath), decided not to turn it on and sobbed.66

  If you’d told me in the late 80s that one day my local branch of Tandy would shut its doors to the public so that Alan Partridge could browse its electricals in peace, I’d have thought you were mad. If you’d told me that they would do this at the height of the Christmas shopping period, I’d probably have spat on your back. Yet in December 1993 and December 1994 and December 1995, this is exactly what happened. The question of course, is how …

  There was no doubt about it, Carol was on the money. I had become a monster. It was as if I was one kind of person in my London life (not a monster) and an altogether different type in my Norwich life (a monster). And I’d guess that the transition between the two would have taken place somewhere in between. Let’s say Manningtree if I was on the train and Newmarket if I was driving, defaulting to Silverley if I’d plumped for the B-roads.

  In London I may have been just another face in an already star-studded media landscape, but in Norwich I was now a seriously big dog. I was receiving more sexual advances than ever before, many of them from women. Every time I entered a wine bar heads would turn. Or alternatively people would just swivel their stools round so they didn’t have to strain their necks.

  If I’d been a philanderer, this period in my life would have been a turkey shoot. I could have gone out for a drink in any bar in Norwich and left with at least a dozen middle-aged woman plucked, gutted, and slung over my shoulder. With sex at my place to follow.

  Of course the local men-folk didn’t like this. Even my old Our Price buddy Paul Stubbs seemed to have his nose put out of joint. He ambled over to me one night as I was picking through some bar snacks.

  ‘What size are your feet, Alan?’

  ‘I’m an 11,’ I replied, tossing an olive sky-ward.

  ‘Well I suggest you buy some 12s.’

  ‘Oh yeah? How come?’

  ‘Because you’re getting too big for your boots!’

  Even accounting for the fact that I never wore boots, this was a good line. And as he ran up and down the wine bar high-fiving a random selection of other jealous males, Stubbs knew it. As I caught the olive – which admittedly had been in the air for a long time – in my mouth, I knew this had been a shot across the bows. But like so many others, it was a warning I chose to ignore.

  But my newfound clout in Norfolk was probably most noticeable in my voiceover work. For years I’d played second fiddle to Pete Farley. Now this guy was good. Name any of the major advertising campaigns from ’86 through to ’91 (Dunfield Carpets, CDA Automotive, Arlo Wholefoods) and Farley was always there or thereabouts. All the rest of us got were the crumbs off his table.

  It’s not even like we could go foraging into
Suffolk for scraps. Because Farley had it sewn up there too. The first of a new breed, he was truly pan-Anglian. Rumour had it that his tentacles even stretched up the fens to Cambridge. The guy was bullet-proof.

  Once in every while me and the rest of the boys would meet up for a few pints. As the guest ale flowed, we’d plot how to bring him to his knees. It was nothing sinister (we weren’t like that), we just wanted a fair shot at the big jobs. The exception to this – and he’ll chuckle when he reads this – was fellow voiceover artist Vic Noden (think ‘Asprey Motors – stunning vehicles, stunning prices’).

  Now Noden would really do a number on Farley. By 9pm he’d have wished every terminal illness under the sun on him. By 10pm, and with us all the worse for wear, he’d have infected the wife too. And by closing time, well, let’s just say Farley’s kids weren’t long for this world either! We’d all be crying with laughter.

  Except when we’d all bid each other good night, jumped in our cars and driven home, the same conclusion had always been reached. Farley could not be toppled.

  And then one day along came On the Hour. All of a sudden, Alan Gordon Partridge was box office (in Norwich). No longer a quiet little mouse, now I would roar like a lion.67 Gone were the days of doing second-tier work for a few shekels here and there. Now some of the biggest names in corporate Norfolk were wangling four-figure deals in my face like a large willy. And believe me, it felt good.

  The other day I pulled out my 1992 diary. I dusted it down, buffed it off and allowed myself a peek inside at the companies I’d lent my voice to. It read like a Who’s Who of the companies I’d done work for in ’92.

  Work literally rolled in that year – most of it enjoyable. There was the odd engagement that I found unsettling, but you take the rough with the smooth. One spring evening, for example, I provided commentary over the PA for a private greyhound racing event for a group of local businessmen, at a track I’m not able to name. I was well paid and given unlimited buffet access but only realised at the last minute that the dogs were chasing an actual rabbit. And by then, I’d already committed to doing the commentary.

  I fulfilled the commitment to the best of my abilities, consoling myself at the end of each race with the knowledge that I was being given a small window into what it would have been like in medieval times to be hung, drawn and quartered.

  Yes, it was a busy time for me. To manage my affairs and also because I deserved one, I took on a personal assistant, a local spinster who lived with her mother. She’d worked in a very junior capacity at Radio Broadland in Great Yarmouth during my six months there, and while I wasn’t exactly blown away by her ability or attitude, I noticed that she was affordable.

  But it wasn’t just in my VO work that things were changing. I was receiving the kind of countywide exposure that few of the Norfolk alumni had ever experienced. Okay, I wasn’t yet in Delia Smith’s league but I was certainly in Bernard Matthews territory. And when you’re being spoken of in the same breath as the country’s leading farmyard-to-table strategist, how could you not become a monster?

  As the months rolled by, keeping my feet on the ground was becoming ever harder. I remember picking up the post from the mat one day and just standing there, stunned. I’d opened an innocuous-looking envelope to find – and I’m shaking just to think about it – a Burton’s Gold Card. The grand-daddy of all high-street store cards, it not only came with a complimentary shoe horn, but also entitled the bearer to free alterations on every suit purchased.

  Yet something wasn’t adding up. I hadn’t even come close to hitting the £500 annual spending threshold required to ‘go gold’. And they knew it. I just couldn’t get my head around it. It couldn’t be real. It was probably just an admin error or a cruel wheeze dreamt up by some of the lads at Radio Norwich. But the more I looked at it, the more I realised it was the real deal. No, there was no getting away from it. Someone very senior at BHQ (Burton Headquarters) had decided that, just to curry favour with Alan Partridge, it was worth breaking one of the most non-negotiable rules in UK retailing.

  I felt my legs start to buckle beneath me and reached out to steady myself on the bannister. I had dreamt of this moment for years. I tried to call out to Carol and the kids, but my voice failed. All that came out was a strangled whisper: ‘Guys, I’ve gone gold.’

  And with that, I lost consciousness.

  I remember boarding a Norwich-to-London train one Friday morning in late 1991 when something extraordinary happened. On the platform I’d come across a young man who’d just returned from fighting in Gulf War One. He’d lost both his legs after being on the receiving end of a roadside bomb and (probably quite rightly) had been decorated with every award for bravery. As the train came in we got aboard and sat down next to one another. Naturally I couldn’t wait to start quizzing him about the almost comical mismatch between the domestically-built T-72 tanks used by the Iraqis and the far superior M1 Abrams and Challenger 1s under the command of the Americans and British respectively. (I’d even heard impressive reports about the Kuwait M-84AB.) But I would never get the chance.

  I’d only been sat down a matter of seconds when a hush descended over the carriage. People were looking my way. Suddenly, like a scene from a very good movie, one passenger started clapping. Then another and another until, soon, the entire carriage had joined in the applause. Some people were shouting the word ‘hero’ or ‘thank you’. It was as if all my years of selfless commitment to the Norfolk community were being recognised in this one spontaneous outpouring of emotion. Not by the mealy-mouthed critics or the slippery commissioners but by the most important people of all – the normal, everyday man on the street/train. I just sat there motionless, allowing myself to be sprayed in the face and body with a high-pressure jet of public appreciation. Never before have I felt so humbled.

  If there was one disappointing aspect to this, it was that the young soldier next to me was the only person not to applaud. I know he’d lost both his legs, but you don’t clap with your feet. I thought about taking it up with him but thought better of it. No, I said to myself, be the bigger man, let it slide. He may have publicly humiliated you, but look at it this way – if you ever needed to go head-to-head with him in an impromptu limb audit, there would only be one winner. And with that thought, the train pulled away.

  It was a full week later that I realised my mistake. They’d been clapping for the military amputee. Every man jack of them. And there I’d been, drunk on the ale of celebrity, arrogantly assuming that their thanks and praise had been heaped at me.

  I felt ashamed. In an act of contrition, I grounded myself for a week and denied myself access to the BBC club. If I could have given my legs to that soldier, after being killed in a car accident perhaps, I definitely would have done.

  In the end, I just got my assistant to leave a box of chocolates on a cenotaph. I was going to leave a card with it, but I thought it would look a bit too much like the Milk Tray man – which would have rubbed salt in their wounds, given their mobility issues.

  I felt so stupid because, without exception, those guys out there – whether they’re disabling landmines, driving tanks or photographing inmates – are all heroes.

  64 Press play on Track 14.

  65 This isn’t swearing. Her cheeks were host to several burst blood vessels.

  66 Press play on Track 15.

  67 Literally in the case of Fairview Ride-On Lawnmowers. ‘Fairview, we’re kings of the jungle. Rooooaaaarrrrr!!!!’

  Chapter 9

  The Move to TV

  AND THEN CAME THE news that the programme was to be transferred to BBC television.68 Our editor Steven Eastwood had found out at noon and busily set about sharing the good news. But these, don’t forget, were the days before mobile phones. And I wasn’t in the office. I was in Ealing. I’d heard that BP had done a pretty awesome job on the refurb of one of their garages, so I’d driven over to take a look.

  I was not disappointed. Things got off to a flying start before I’
d even turned my engine off. What a forecourt. Crisp new signage, beautifully re-laid tarmac, they’d even installed the new generation of pumps I’d read so much about. With 20% more nozzle pressure, the petrol just flew into the tank. Apparently as you filled up you could actually feel the power of the gush through the handle.

  And the shop! It was like a newsagents, a supermarket and a Halfords all rolled into one. For the hungry driver in particular, the pickings were rich. My eyes darted across the chill cabinets. Microwave pasties, reheat-and-eat pies, packaged sandwiches – the choice of perishables was truly humbling. As I stood there drinking in the whole incredible experience, one thing was abundantly clear to me: I was witnessing the start of a whole new era of petrol station excellence. And so it turned out to be69.70

  To some of you it might seem weird that I was so damn buzzed up by a petrol station. But all I can say is that I must have sensed something in the air. And sure enough, when I got back to the office, Eastwood told me about our impending transfer from wireless to goggle-box.

  ‘Alan, the show’s moving to TV!’

  ‘OMG,’ I spluttered, inadvertently inventing the now-popular acronym.

  ‘We found out this morning but you weren’t around,’ he went on. ‘I’d have phoned you but mobile phones haven’t yet reached mainstream adoption,’ his shrug seemed to add.

  I didn’t mind, though, because there was only one thought in my mind – my career was about to go megastrophic.

  Soon enough, launch day arrived. And right from the off, things just clicked. They say a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Yet from Christopher Morris (anchor) to Rosie May (environment) to Ted Maul (replacing Kev Smear as roving reporter) to Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan (economics editor) to yours truly (sport) there simply was no weak link.

  In fact, the consensus was that the show – renamed The Day Today – worked even better on telly. Viewers said they preferred it, because now they could see us, whereas before they had to make up what we looked like in their heads. By way of example, a lot of folks said they expected me to have far nicer eyes.