Partridge, Alan

by I, Partridge We Need to Talk About Alan

  I also insisted on doing my studio reports with the word ‘sport’ in massive letters behind me (see picture section). Some people thought this was ego. In fact it was a savvy move designed to keep the deaf on-side.

  The Day Today was a plum job, though, and I knew it. Okay, I wasn’t especially chummy with my colleagues but that was alright by me. I wasn’t invited to Rosie May’s birthday drinks, Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan’s summer BBQ or the funeral of Ted Maul’s little girl (though to be fair, neither was anyone else). But who cares/cared? Not me! You don’t have to be best buddies with your work-mates to enjoy your job. And I certainly wasn’t (best buddies), but certainly did (enjoy job).

  More worrying was the risk of my job being given to someone else. Occasionally certain young BBC starlets (Ryder, Irvine, Bonnet) would start circling, keen for a piece of my sports beat. But I was fiercely protective of my patch. I was like a lady swan guarding her cygnets. If anyone came too close, I would rear up, spread my wings and chase them across the park. And if they happened to be accompanied by the family dog, then I’m sorry but that dog was going down.

  I still believe I was right to be defensive – and, on occasion, orally threatening – because for a sports journalist in particular, the early 90s was a time of plenty. Whether reporting for radio or TV, the country was awash and a-slosh with sporting giants. Never mind interviewing them, it’s an honour just to say the names of these sporting greats. I’d often sit at home, saying them aloud, letting their names drench my teeth and gums like a good-quality fluoride mouthwash.71

  In athletics there was Linford Christie, Sally Gunnell and the not unattractive Fatima Whitbread. On the track we were witness to the derring-do of Nigel Mansell, in the ring the very hard punches of Frank Bruno and out at the crease the swashbuckling style of Ian Botham, known to friends and colleagues simply as ‘Beef’.

  And I, Partridge was lucky enough to meet them all. Just the other night I sat down in front of my roaring gas fire, poured myself a glass of bitter and totted up all the sports stars I’ve met over the years. The grand total: 116. Not bad for a young lad from Norwich. Not bad at all.

  If pushed, though, I’d have to say my favourite was Sally Gunnell.72 Not only did she insist on competing with a full face of make-up and a big, ballsy squirt of perfume, but she was also ruddy good company.

  In 1991 I was sent out to Tokyo to cover the Athletics World Championships. Sally was taking part in the 400m hurdles (for women). We all watched as she quite literally overcame all the obstacles put in her way to romp home to a creditable second place. Yes, Gunnell had silvered.

  Within minutes she’d put on high heels and a new pair of dungarees and joined a bunch of her fellow athletes at a local bar. It would have taken her longer, but she already had make-up on, you could probably smell her perfume in Hiroshima, and as she’d only actually been running for 53.16 seconds (a new British record by the way) it seemed crazy to shower – a wet wipe administered to the main danger zones had been deemed more than adequate.

  Yet no sooner had the shin-dig hit its stride than Sally’s chums and buddies seemed to drift away. Gunnell may have run her race but the rest of them were yet to compete. Their loss however was very much AP’s gain (my gain). And as Sally wasn’t ready to head home, we moved on to a restaurant serving authentic Japanese nosh.

  Of course, these days young professionals hotfoot it to Pret a Manger every lunchtime to gobble down box after box of sushi. But back then, things were different. Back then, our tastes were simpler and less foreign. As a result Sal and myself were pretty miffed as we browsed the menu. What was all this stuff?

  Others might have given up and headed off to a Western fast food joint, but not us. Our attitude was very much ‘when in Rome …’, so when the waiter came round we went for it and ordered a couple of bowls of rice.

  For the next three hours we chatted away like there was no tomorrow. Sally may only have managed silver, but in a Chatathlon our conversation would easily have brought home the gold. We seemed to cover every topic under the sun. Favourite film, best cheese, biggest regret, smallest regret, euthanasia. But little did we realise, as our ace natter entered its fourth hour, that our cultural ignorance was about to be our undoing.

  The problem was a little thing called ‘sake’. We’d been knocking back glass after glass of the stuff, assuming it was nothing more dangerous than indigenous pop. Yet as we left the restaurant we soon realised that we were catastrophically ming-monged. Sally was so gone she thought her silver medal was currency. And I was so gone that I later mistook Sally for Kriss Akabusi (look him up).

  But what a laugh we had as we staggered along the street like silly idiots. I dared her to hop all the way back to the hotel (she did). She dared me to pick up a bin and smash in the window of a nearby shop (I didn’t). We checked out a few more bars and even stopped in at a local karaoke place, duetting on UB40’s ‘Rat in Mi Kitchen’. And, at last, at long long last, when we finally made it back to our digs we couldn’t believe our eyes – it was nearly quarter to eleven. What a night!

  It was in my first few months at the BBC that I received one of the finest pieces of advice in Britain. I was over at TV Centre preparing to interview a bantamweight boxer (I forget his name and ethnicity) when I saw a man coming out of the disabled toilet – it was none other than the late, great Des Lynam.73 Clocking me, he wandered over, doing up his belt and seeing to his fly.

  ‘Heard you on the radio last night, Alan.’

  ‘Crumbs,’ I spluttered. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I liked what you did.’

  ‘Crumbs,’ I spluttered again, in much the same way as I had done previously. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘But a word of advice on your broadcasting voice.’

  I stiffened up like a cock; a cock that was afraid of being attacked by a fox. What was he about to say? Gladdeningly, I didn’t have to wait long for the answer, because it was a conversation in real time.

  ‘Your broadcasting voice is solid enough, but it’s too nasal. If you ever want to make the leap to TV …’

  ‘I do, Des, I do,’ I thought to myself, but didn’t say out loud.

  ‘… then you want to pull the nasality up by about a quarter. And Alan?’

  ‘Yes, Lynam,’ I said, for some reason selecting to use his surname rather than his first name.

  ‘Trust me on this one.’

  And with that, he was gone, as gone as gone can be.

  That night I barely slept. Thoughts were tumbling around my head like the trainers in the washing machine I referred to both on page 3 and page 64. Des was right. How could I not have spotted this before?

  My mind drifted back to my earliest broadcasts on hospital radio. I had indeed beefed up the nasal quality of my voice, thinking it lent it a timbre that was trustworthy, authoritative and basically quite nice. It sounds crazy when I think back to it, but I was so convinced of this that I used to deliberately try to catch a cold. The all-too-common viral infection of the upper respiratory tract was an excellent way to cause profound blockages of the soft palate which in extreme cases can make you sound like Melvyn Bragg before he had that operation. As such, it was perfect for my needs.

  Many was the day I’d ride the public bus system of Norwich, seeking out any passengers with the snivels. I’d move over to them and casually strike up a conversation. I’d talk about the stuff of everyday life – the weather, last night’s TV, the design of the new Opel Kadett which, staggeringly, had a transaxle that allowed the clutch to be replaced without removing the transmission unit. I didn’t care really, just as long as I was close to them.

  And when they finally reached their stop, I would always, always insist on a handshake – or better still, a long, lingering, long embrace – to up my chances of contamination.

  Once I was so desperate I even doused myself in pepper. I stood next to a man with a nose throbbing like a Belisha beacon and waited for him to sneeze. As he threw his head back I inched even closer, only moving a
way again when I knew I’d been covered in a fine sheen of infected nasal drizzle.

  Yet now, almost four years later, I saw the folly of my ways. My voice had become too nasal, too serious. If I was to fulfil my ambitions of being a top-quality TV broadcaster I needed a cadence that was versatile. I needed a voice that could flit like a carefree moth from the heavyweight to the powder-puff.

  I spent the entire night stood in front of my bathroom mirror doing everything in my power to quash exactly 25% of my vocal nasality. Of course with radio being an entirely aural medium, the mirror had no part to play. I could just as easily have stood in front of a wall. (But, truth be told, I had spotted a pimple developing on my neck – roughly three inches south of my left ear lobe – and was keen both to track its growth and plot its destruction.)

  By daybreak I had finally cracked it. Although, as a result of ten hours of unbroken speaking, I had also lost my voice. Ironically, the three weeks I subsequently had to take off work very nearly cost me my job. But I clung on, I survived, and returned as the broadcaster I am today. I now had a voice that could take on any chat-based challenge; that could swoop and glide from genre to genre. It was the voice that I still use today – high-brow yet inclusive, candid yet mysterious, loud yet quiet. In short, it was the voice of I, Partridge.

  As for the neck pimple, it expanded for a further 48 hours before I was able to take it down using a hot pin.

  68 Press play on Track 16.

  69 The next quantum leap forward was to come in 2003 when – breaking the mould once again – the guys at Beyond Petroleum launched their fabulous Wild Bean cafés. Quite simply, shit hot.

  70 Little did I know that some years later I would be spending a lot of time in one of these petrol stations as a certain Geordie chum saw me through the many stages of a pretty hefty mental meltdown. But that’s for later. And please don’t skip ahead. Just stay patient, keep reading and you’ll get there.

  71 I remember around this time bumping into former Grandstand presenter Frank Bough at a fancy dress party in Shepherd’s Bush (long story). I commented that the early 90s really was a golden age for British sport. Frank simply took the ball gag out of his mouth and said, ‘You’re not wrong, Alan’ before dropping on to all fours and being led away.

  72 Press play on Track 17.

  73 Lynam may have been unencumbered by disability, but he was also a senior figure in the BBC of the 90s. As such, he was contractually entitled to use these roomier facilities whenever he wished.

  Chapter 10

  My Own Show

  MY STAR WAS RISING, like the bubbles in the glasses of champagne I would have been enjoying if I liked the taste of champagne. I was being recognised in hotel bars, train station WH Smithses and the local branch of Do It All.

  It was a pleasantly warming sensation at first, before a stern lecture-to-self in my bathroom mirror (bought from Do It All funnily enough!) made me wise up. ‘These people don’t care about you,’ I said. ‘You mean nothing to them. They’d sooner earn an extra £1,000 a year than worry about whether you’re going to be the next presenter of Sportsnight.’

  And that realisation – that these people would stab me and spit on my jolting corpse – probably did colour my approach to the general public.

  Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t become a recluse. But I steeled myself against hangers-on and well-wishers, typically meeting their so-called compliments with a snort or a stony silence.

  In the BBC things were different. I worked on a style of glad-handing that I felt sure would ingratiate myself to more important people and earn me a reputation of being a charming TV personality. It had worked for Dale Winton, who could switch from air-kissing a commissioning editor to screaming hot spittle into the face of a researcher in about three seconds. But he was inhaling a lot of nail varnish remover around that time, I’m told.

  Back to me. I was becoming known for my no-nonsense interview style, and my never-say-die attitude, certainly in my opinion and I’m sure in the opinions of a great many others.

  Sometimes that meant being ruthless, a trait I demonstrated when grabbing the first interview with javelinner Steve Backley after a quite lovely throw at Crystal Palace. Seeing ITV’s Jim Rosenthal jostling for position, I sidled up behind him, muttered ‘Hello Jim’ and, as he turned to respond, he fell/was pushed off the media rostrum. He landed on a stack of hurdles, suffering cuts and bruises as well as some seriously duffed-up pride. Well, Gary Newbon went spastic.74 The two of them were the Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Doo of ITV Sport – great friends on and off camera – and our feud was real and long-standing.

  Newbon tore his jacket off, then his shirt, pounding at his belly and tits and shouting ‘Come on then! Come on!’ It was incredibly unseemly and I know Gary was kept away from athletics events for a good while after that.

  I secured the interview and asked Backley some searching questions about his training regime, skin-tight sportswear and marital status. The piece went out that night. You could see Newbon in the background, facing away from camera but slumped on a folding chair (by then in tears), but needless to say I had the last laugh.

  I hated ITV back then – and that loathing spurred me on to be the man on the scene whenever a sports star or their attractive spouse had anything to say. I had an easy way with people, and much like Piers Morgan today, was able to flit effortlessly from the high-brow to the utterly juvenile, from the serious to the inconsequential in a heartbeat. Unlike Morgan, I can also flit back the other way, whereas he is often stranded in thick alley for the remainder of the conversation. You can actually see his eyes swivelling as he struggles to break free of the tabloid moorings. Still, he’s a good interviewer and a solid guy.

  But I was a bloody good interviewer and a bloody solid guy.75 And I began to wonder if I was fulfilling my potential. My son was teaching me about quadratic equations at the time and although I convinced him that they were genuinely irrelevant in real life, it convinced me that I should look for a fresh challenge. Like so:

  Alan asking sports questions = a bloody good sports interview.

  Which means, if you divide both by ‘sport’:

  Alan asking questions = a bloody good interview.

  It went something like that anyway. Fernando’s had algebra in them, but his maths homework wasn’t important back then. That might sound cruel but my focus was almost exclusively on my continued career progression.76

  At a BBC party that autumn, I introduced myself to a commissioning editor by the name of Adam Walters. I remember the moment well.

  ‘You’re Adam Walters, aren’t you?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied.

  Walters was being talked of as the next big thing in BBC commissioning, something I found hard to understand (and still do) given that the role of a commissioner is basically to put a tick or a cross in a box. Who knows? Maybe he had neat handwriting. Or maybe he had friends in high places.

  Either way, Adam was a good person to know. So I found out where he played squash and would make sure I happened to be having my shower and talc there at the same time as he/him.

  Quaffing a juice afterwards one day, I suggested that I come in to talk about the idea of a chat show, in which I, the chat show host, would chat to guests on the show. He was intrigued at what was a really fresh idea and an appointment was duly arranged for that afternoon.

  I ran home, excess talc spilling from the bottom of my trouser legs. I popped on my newest blazer, brushed my teeth, waited six hours, brushed them again and called a cab. As I zoomed towards Shepherd’s Bush, I opened the window, imagining my face on the billboards that massively spruce up Holland Park and that make Shepherd’s Bush roundabout a pleasure to circumnavigate. It would be called ‘Alan’s Show’, I’d decided, and would be absolutely ace.

  I bounded into the foyer, announced that I was there to see Adam and waited. And waited. The receptionist couldn’t find any record of Mr Walters. ‘Are you sure he works for BBC TV?’ Then everything went quiet
.

  Mouth dry, head spinning, and suddenly keen for a poo, I staggered from Television Centre. Steadying myself against an old woman who was there for the BBC Tour, I took another step into the street and bellowed at the sky.

  ‘They want me back on the radio!!!’

  You see, Walters was a radio commissioner. Of course. Of course. I should have known. He had that lifeless, grey, dead-eyed quality that they all have at Broadcasting House. I called a cab and, with a heavy heart, went for a meeting with Adam Walters. Of Radio 4.

  It wasn’t the best meeting I’ve ever had. Almost on auto-pilot, I ran through all the famous people I knew (who, I said, I could definitely get) and Walters seemed duly impressed. I was in a seriously bad mood, no doubt, but Adam’s compliments and the excellent selection of biscuits there soon cheered me up. He all but offered me a show there and then. Paydirt!

  People ask me if I found that daunting. They don’t know Alan Partridge. If anything was making me apprehensive it was that a light-hearted comment – in which I joked that I owned my own production company and would make the show myself in exchange for a hefty development and production fee – was somehow taken at face value.77

  So the next morning I created a production company by putting posters up around Norwich and giving work experience to family friends. And lo, Peartree Productions was born.

  Alan’s Show – this was a working title – began production on 9 August 1992. Peartree Productions was a thrilling place to work, dynamic and young – indeed, many of the staff should technically have been at school. We really felt we were making something important. And so it proved.

  We worked out a format – I would ask questions, the guests would answer, as if in conversation – and after a few trial runs I had it down pat. Unable to afford celebrity bookers, we relied on two researchers, Lisa and Jason, to approach agents. And on the whole, they did a good job. (Lisa’s personality could be an issue. I suspected her of smoking cannabis and, as her employer, rifled through her bag to be sure. Nothing, but she went berserk. Her attitude really, really stank sometimes.)