Partridge, Alan
Page 11
The interrogators don’t let up, though. The torment lasts for hours before I’m thrown into a cold cell, and pick myself up from the straw114 and filth.
Through a hatch comes a tray of food. I paw at it listlessly until I notice that it contains chicken nuggets. And what chicken nuggets! These boast all the smoky zing of McCain Southern coating with the tenderest cuts of white meat. The beans are lukewarm but not overcooked115 and a generous dollop of smash adds a buttery finish that sets the plate off beautifully. To drink, a mug of steaming tea. A really, really good meal.
My solicitor arrives. By his own admission, he’s better equipped to handle employment tribunals than homicide but it’s a pleasure to see him. He’s a massive fan of the show and insists that until the last five minutes it had been ‘very good’.
I suffer the indignity of giving fingerprints – a relatively straightforward task that took longer than it should have because my hands were by now very, very sweaty and it was hard to produce a clear print.
Once released in the glaring sunlight of the sun, I’m hauled into the BBC for crisis talks, without a care for my other meetings. Hayers is quiet and it’s really hard to work out how he feels the series has gone. A health and safety officer has a lot to say, which feels like bolting the stable door after the horse has legged it in a hail of gunfire.
As the exec producer, it turns out I have ultimate responsibility, which seems unfair to me – and I say so. We craft a press release and then I try to arrange a meeting with Hayers to discuss ‘not just a second series, but other potential projects’. Everyone pipes up with ‘For fuck’s sake, Alan,’ as if my career should die just because Forbes has.
Then I go home. People are quick to claim the credit when things go well, but journalists’ calls to the BBC were met with an officious: ‘Alan Partridge is not and never has been an employee of the BBC. He is a private contractor and all such contracts are under constant review.’
The shooting of Forbes McAllister was, without question, the pivotal moment in my life. I often think it’s like that film The Sliding Doors with Gwenyth Paltrow. But instead of tube doors shutting, it was a bullet fired directly into a celebrity’s heart. Not deliberately, or even recklessly. (Even after all these years, I feel compelled to add that caveat …)
You know, there were two victims that day. Me, because of everything I went through. But Forbes McAllister is also a victim in a way, because of course he died.
102 Scott has continued acting, but now stars exclusively in gay pornography. Fortuitously, he has grown into the spitting image of Richard Gere, so has made a lucrative series of films that pay sodomical homage to Gere’s back catalogue: Gays of Heaven, Pretty Man and An Orifice and a Gentlehand.
103 Or rather: one of two. Don’t forget that I killed a man. Keep reading!! LOL.
104 I’m not going to waste time thinking about this.
105 Abba-dabba-doo!
106 I didn’t kill him! Or rather: I didn’t kill him.
107 You have to say that.
108 One deposit: gone.
109 It’s a little known fact that Peter’s grandfather Joseph designed the London sewer network. Some people have very unkindly suggested Peter has simply taken what his granddad did literally and continued it metaphorically, delivering an unending torrent of human filth and waste into our homes. But I’m not one of those people. I think he’s quite good and has made a reasonable contribution.
110 Press play on Track 23.
111 Legal disclaimer: Not all of these things definitely happened.
112 See above.
113 See above.
114 Now I do remember there being straw.
115 Few things are more depressing than beans that have been over-boiled and stirred until the structural integrity of the beans have broken down into a kind of pulse mush.
Chapter 15
Splitting From Carol
TRUTH BE TOLD, I knew it was probably curtains for me and Carol in 1989, when I asked her to act more demurely at a Radio Norwich summer roadshow and she responded by downing her glass of wine and getting another one. You don’t piss about with a guy’s career like that.
We lasted another six years – six years which for my money were among the happiest times of my life – and while I’m certainly not angling for a reconciliation with a woman like Carol, stranger things have happened. I believe there are few things that can’t be sorted out over a coffee and a cuddle and I’m not saying I want her to at all but if she ever did have the guts to pick up the phone and admit she was wrong and was leaving her new lover and would I consider giving it another go, I’d be polite enough to give the idea proper consideration – on the strict proviso that the possessions of mine that I surrendered during the divorce were returned to me and that the sexual intercourse with other men was knocked on the head.
I first got wind of Carol’s infidelity when she came home from the gym wearing a pair of black Asics cycling shorts after having gone out wearing a blue Adidas pair. Also, the Asics pair were for men.116
Suddenly things that had seemed innocent – the snazzy new hair do, the packet of condoms in her glove box, reported sightings of her in nightclubs with a man – started to collect in my craw. What was she up to?
I began to keep a diary. I publish it below only to demonstrate how in the right I was.
21 Aug 1995 – Carol’s acting suspiciously again. Can’t explain why but if you could see it you’d agree.
24 Aug 1995 – Carol’s bought a new dress. No sign of it on any bank statements. A gift from a lover? [EDIT] Just realised she could have used cash.
30 Aug 1995 – Carol smells of a new aftershave – L’Homme I think. But I’m still using a giant bottle of Pagan Man [it was an ex-display model off a ferry]. Enough evidence to confront?
31 Aug 1995 – Didn’t confront.
6 Sept 1995 – Carol’s brother turns up and tells me she’s seeing117 another man. Reluctantly discredit his testimony on the grounds that he’s a former alcoholic and current weed junkie.
21 Sept 1995 – Carol now staying at the gym two nights a week in order to be first on the cross trainer. Suspect that’s a lie. Put in a call (false voice) to all local hotels to check she’s not staying there.
4 Oct 1995 – Park up outside the gym and watch Carol enter. She stays until 8am the next day. Thank God. Thank God. She is staying at the gym.
26 Oct 1995 – Carol 40% less randy than this time last year. Menopause or sourcing sex from alternative supplier?
8 Nov 1995 – Found men’s pants in the back of the Micra. Gotcha!
8 Nov 1995 – Actually what if this is a Gotcha? Edmonds can be one sick bastard, and I do have the profile to be the subject of a BBC1, Saturday night prank. Hmmm.
9 Nov 1995 – Realised they were my pants. Relieved/disappointed.
15 Nov 1995 – Had a succession of calls to the house. Whenever I answer the caller hangs up. Even when I impersonate Carol.
1 Dec 1995 – Heard Carol on the phone saying: ‘That was great sex last night.’ Oh this is so confusing!
[I spent several sleepless hours that night constructing rational explanations for this sentence. Perhaps she’d caught the tail end of a blue movie on Channel 4 and was chatting to a girlfriend about it? Maybe she’d said ‘sects’ in a reference to some pseudo-religious team version of step aerobics? Perhaps it was someone’s name – Jim Greatsex? Perhaps she was trying to say Great Six in a Scottish accent. Come sunrise, I’d convinced myself of all these things.]
8 Dec 1995 – Struggling to find a spare moment to confront Carol. She’s always at the ruddy gym.
15 Dec 1995 – Got drunk and tried it on with Sue Cook. She was so understanding – though witheringly emphatic in her rebuttal.
21 Dec 1995 – Had a long chat with Bill Oddie. An experienced birder,118 he’s lent me his binoculars and given me some great advice on how to remain still for long periods of time and go completely undetected in undergrowth and shrubbery. It’s
surprising how many of these techniques can be used to track an enemy or errant spouse.
22 Dec 1995 – Called in sick to Peartree. Told Carol I was off to the office then set up a vantage point opposite the house. Binoculared her entering the premises with a man then shutting the bedroom curtains.
22 Dec 1995 – Decided to stop keeping a diary now. I’m not an idiot.
Yes, it seems the French-smelling sex provider was Carol’s fitness instructor. Far from being French, he was actually from Luton. His only Frenchness was his cowardly duplicitousness and the kissing he did with my wife.119
I was waiting for Carol when she got back from the gym that evening. She breezed into the kitchen, as I sat at the kitchen table with a bottle of wine. I hadn’t drunk from or opened it – drinking during the day makes me nauseous – but I think the effect worked.
‘Been enjoying yourself? I said, but with loads of emphasis so it was clear that ‘enjoying’ might have a double meaning.
‘Mmm-hmm,’ she said, like she didn’t have a bloody clue.
‘Have a nice time at the “gym”?’ I said, making inverted commas around the word ‘gym’ with my fingers.
‘Yes,’ she said. Her knowledge of mimed punctuation was pitiful.
‘Have a good workout?’ I said, slotting my right forefinger in and out of a hole I’d made between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand.120
‘Yes,’ she said. Not a flicker. Who doesn’t understand the fingersex-mime for goodness sake? I lost it, throwing my empty wine glass crashing to the floor but it landed on the carpet of the hall in one piece.
‘Careful,’ she said, suddenly irritated. ‘You nearly broke that.’
‘What, like you broke my heart?’
Silence. I was particularly pleased with this line because it’s the sort of thing I’d usually think of long, long afterwards and then admonish myself for not having come up with at the time.
‘I know, Carol. I know.’
But then she turned to face me and looked so sad that I started to cry on her behalf. And then on my behalf. And then I didn’t know whose behalf I was crying on because I was making a right mess. I had a cold at the same time so it was like a mucal tsunami.
She picked up the wine glass and handed it to me so I could have another go and this time I clattered it on to the lino where the stem snapped. Still not the smithereen effect I wanted but better than before. ‘Thanks,’ I said.
Then she led me to out to the garden and explained that she’d been having an affair with her gym instructor.
I asked all the obvious questions. Since when? Why him? How can you be attracted to a man who basically wears leotards? She told me all about him, including his name – which I’m not going to publish here in case, like Abba, it somehow entitles him to royalties.121
Eventually, after lots of crying (me), shouting (me), and sighing (both), we went back inside – we’d realised that the next-door neighbours were having pre-Xmas drinks and could hear everything. ‘Enjoying this are you?’ I shouted through the hedge. ‘You like a bit of grief with your mulled wine??’ I thought afterwards.
I explained to Carol that I’d forgive her. We’d try again in the morning, perhaps go and talk to Sue Cook about it, but she was shaking her head. I began frantically pitching shows at her – desperately outlining my portfolio of programme ideas in the hope of convincing her that we could be happy and rich. But she just kept shaking her head.
The doorbell went. Bill Oddie was standing there. I opened the door to him and was just saying, ‘This isn’t a good time, Bill’ when he saw Carol. He could see I’d been crying and was clearly doing the mental maths. No one spoke for a while and then Carol gathered up her things, brushed past us and headed back to the Micra. She turned the ignition and a blast of ‘The Winner Takes It All’ came through the speakers before she could switch it off. I began to cry and she looked at me through the windscreen and reversed, very proficiently, on to the road.
We watched her go until she’d disappeared round the corner. At which point, we stopped watching. I noticed Oddie was just standing there. ‘Not a good time, Bill.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ he said. ‘I just wanted my binoculars back.’
I want to be fair to Carol. Yes, she’s mind-blowingly selfish. Yes, she takes grumpiness to a staggering new level. Yes, she’s manifestly not as clever as me. But she does have good points. On French holidays, she took to right-hand driving with real panache. She also makes relatively decent meatballs.
That pretty much covers it.
Carol left me 14 months after the last of my TV chat shows. I wasn’t in a good place (the back garden usually) and she’d found it difficult to offer the right122 support.
But I can’t speak for Carol. Nor would I want to. Only she knows why she wanted our marriage to end, so she’s very kindly outlined – in her own words – what went wrong. Over to you, Car.
‘I loved Alan and probably didn’t fully appreciate what I had. He was working hard to provide for me and the kids and I probably took that for granted.
‘He was away from home more than I’d have liked but I acknowledge that Peartree Productions needed him and he had a career on the telly. You can’t do that if you’re swanning around at home, for crying out loud.
‘He’d be working long hours trying to resuscitate his production company, his mind forever racing with new ideas and formats. Every now and then, in front of guests, I’d laugh at the sheer inventiveness of them.
‘But yes, Alan’s career hiccup hit me hard. I’d invested a great deal of hope in Alan being a fixture on mainstream TV for years and years to come. God knows, he deserved it and was (is!) a damn sight more of a talent than the likes of Tony Robinson or Andy Marr.
‘When his show hit a few snags and he was hung out to dry by the BBC, I began to realise that my dreams of being on the arm of a BBC mainstay were fading. I mean, he’d come back stronger – that was never in any real doubt – but I was impatient and wanted all the rewards that he’d promised me.
‘Hurt, upset and I guess a bit too moody about the whole thing, I took to visiting the gym. I’d suggested that Alan come too, but after every unreturned phone call to the BBC he’d dig an angry hole in the garden and so any spare energy went on that. Besides, he was already in pretty good shape.
‘At the gym, I met a personal trainer. He was young, physically in peak condition – no arguments about that, fair do’s, some people have a lot of time on their hands – and didn’t stretch me intellectually, which did my confidence the world of good.
‘In a clear contravention of my marital vows, I began sleeping with the guy. God knows how Alan feels about that. I never stopped to ask his permission or run the idea by him. This carried on for an indeterminate amount of time.
‘I then split with Alan, who hadn’t been having an affair. Not because he couldn’t. He could. He was a well-regarded TV personality. You think he was short of offers? Dream on. But he exercised self-restraint. What can I say – that’s Al.
‘Alan wasn’t perfect. There were a couple of minor niggles which I won’t bore you with now. It wasn’t anything significant, and it was certainly not in the bedroom department, a room where to be honest he played a blinder.
‘So, that’s my story. It’s the tale of stubbornness, broken promises, broken dreams and – I have to admit – my own shortcomings as a spouse. I’ll now hand you back to Alan.’123
Thanks, Carol. Appreciate that.
Carol scotched ideas of a reconciliation and said we were splitting up for good in 1996, and I – of course – demanded sole custody of the children. Fernando wasn’t keen as he was living in Cambridge midway through the final year of a politics degree, while Denise was living in Ipswich with an art collective. I consulted a lawyer nonetheless and he advised me not to pursue it. The law always takes the side of the woman.
116 Press play on Track 24.
117 He says ‘banging’ actually but I mean, honestly.
118
Some people wrongly refer to birdwatchers as ‘twitchers’, a phrase emphatically rejected by the birding community – presumably because they think it paints birdwatchers as hunched weirdos beset by debilitating tics, which isn’t always the case. I’m assured that only a small minority of them suffer from these kind of spasms.
119 i.e., ‘French kissing’ – a technique in which two mouths dock at the lip, creating a closed arena for intermittent insertions and exploratory recces of the tongue interspersed with quicker prods, darts, scoops and jabs.
120 Known in the international diving community as the OK sign – the left hand bit, I mean. For god’s sake, don’t do the sex mime to indicate you’re able to breathe.
121 Must get up to speed on this royalty thing.
122 Any.
123 These are Carol’s actual words in the sense that I ghost-jotted them and faxed them to her I don’t know how many times for her to sign off. She had ample opportunity to make amendments but declined to do so – ergo, she’s happy with it.
Chapter 16
Yule Be Sorry!
THE DAY AFTER I confronted her, Carol had said to me she wanted to clear her head so moved out just before Christmas. I sat on the edge of the bath, sobbing and eating a pork pie until the pie was gone – at which point I felt a heck of a lot better.124
Don’t get me wrong, the prospect of spending Christmas in unbroken solitude didn’t fill me with cheer, but it actually turned out to be alright. Brilliant even. I’ve subsequently done the same (out of choice) on four other occasions.
The benefits once you think about them are obvious. You’re free to break the rules. That year I had a glass of beer at 10am. Imagine that! A glass of beer and a piece of toast on Christmas morn. I didn’t finish it – it was horrible – but I chortled as I thought of what the ‘ball and chain’ would have said. Stupid cow.
Then there’s the almost overwhelming sense of liberation that comes with wearing a dressing gown (nude beneath) without having to anxiously reknot the string every few minutes. The gown flops open and reveals your goolies? Big deal! No one’s there! It just feels good. After a few more glasses of beer, I put on a CD of Christmas songs and marched up and down my landing to ‘Stop the Cavalry’ by Jona Lewie.125 After a few minutes of brisk promenading, my gown spread apart, like the curtain of an old proscenium arch theatre to reveal a one-man show by John Thomas. I let it.