Partridge, Alan

by I, Partridge We Need to Talk About Alan

  Staying there was just the tonic. My three months at the Lamberts’ were just enough to get me back on my feet. I referred to them frequently on Norfolk Nights, and my listeners took their trials and tribulations – Kenneth’s continued unemployment, Fran’s slurred speech – to their hearts.

  We each had to make compromises, of course we did. I had to store my property in the garage even though it was cold in there. For their part, the Lamberts knew if I was going to manage a solid morning of show preparation, I needed the kitchen to myself between 9 and 12 – I had to insist on that.

  For a while, things went smoothly, but soon Trevor’s breathing became a bit too loud. It was really off-putting. So I eventually decided to take my notes and Dictaphone to the public library and do my work there.

  In fact, I became such a fixture there, I heard one member of staff quietly refer to me as Karl Marx. I don’t think so! I’d take his ideas about the redistribution of wealth and shove them where the sun don’t shine! The workers own the means of production – I ask you!

  I was determined – absolutely adamant – that I wouldn’t outstay my welcome at the Lamberts. And so, after 14 weeks, I saddled up and hit the road.

  ‘Thanks for having me,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ Fran Lambert seemed to say with the good side of her face. ‘You can come and stay any time you like.’

  167 He’s moved to America now so he won’t mind me talking about it, but his wife did used to beat him quite a lot. She’s still in the UK but I’m not naming her. Anyway, I think she’s reverted to her Polish maiden name. She’s a teacher in Nantwich.

  According to Jim, she used to beat him with a plastic hosepipe then whirl it round her head so it made a futuristic noise. It may well be that she used to work for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. (The BBCRW used to manufacture sounds in the pre-synthesiser days. It’s an open secret that the Tardis noise was made by a BBC engineer scraping his keys down the fat wires inside a piano. And I’m told the sliding doors on Blake 7 were made by a clothes brush being swept across the back of a leather jacket.)

  168 I’d prepared this in advance.

  169 Press play on Track 32.

  Chapter 23

  Swallow

  ON THE TITLE PAGE of my pilot script for Norwich-based detective series Swallow, I wrote the words: ‘Dedicated to the memory of Stacy Morgan, 7.’

  Stacy wasn’t dead – she never even existed actually – but I thought it would set a poignant tone for the episode and/or gain enough pity to sway the mind of a commissioner. But I’ve scrubbed Stacy’s name off now and replaced it with that of Pete Gabitas, who did exist and is now dead. He’s sorely missed.

  I’m often asked if I have a manager or agent and, instead of answering with words, I used to take out a ten pound note, tear a quarter of it off and then scrunch that bit up and throw it in a bin.170 Never had one. Waste of money! And, as my career has proved beyond doubt, I’ve never needed one.

  But if anyone came close to filling the role of agent/manager, it would have been Pete Gabitas. The MD of BlueBarn Media, Pete was a big-hearted, big-bellied guy, who liked nothing more than providing cut-price production facilities to the region’s most creative minds – and then rounding the day off with a pint or two! We were kindred spirits, each/both sharing a love of Norwich, quality music and hovercrafts.171

  Does he say the unsayable? You better believe it! He’s like Norfolk’s very own Jeremy Clarkson, but one who actually believes the stuff he comes out with. He’s whip smart.

  He had his share of enemies, sure, but that comes with the territory when you’re hoovering up the lion’s share of corporate production and post-production contracts in the North Norfolk region. People were forever trying to topple him off his perch, something I found especially callous when he revealed he was suffering from a serious illness, the little-known ‘tall poppy syndrome’.

  All healthy competition you might think. Until I tell you that Pete died in a car ‘accident’ on 1 April 2005. Look to your right and you’ll see I’ve put inverted commas around the word accident. There are many of us who suspect foul play. I’m no conspiracy theorist – although I often regale dinner parties blow-by-blow with the arguments advanced by Capricorn One and JFK172 – but I am convinced that Pete was murdered.

  It was around 11.30pm when his wife’s silver Peugeot 306 cabriolet with red interior careered off the road and into a primary school. Yes, he was way over the drink-drive limit – and ordinarily I’d agree that the alcohol could have been a factor. But knowing Pete as I do/did, I can assure you he’s a better driver when drunk. So much so that he’s often given me a lift home when he’s been drunk and I’ve been sober.

  That night, he’d had six pints of lager and half a bottle of wine – pretty much the sweet spot for his driving capability. To the untrained eye, he looked very, very drunk. To the trained eye, my eye, I know that he was fine to drive.

  So, having ruled out alcohol as a contributing factor in the crash, you have to ask who wanted Pete dead and how did they do it? I’m in the process of making a YouTube video about the case under the banner of ‘Alan Partridge scrutinises …’ (hopefully the first of many).

  Funnily enough, it’s the kind of case that would be perfect for a regional detective like Swallow.173 Pete was a massive fan of Swallow, perhaps seeing a little of himself in the rule-breaking cynic.

  I’ll give you the quick pitch now: Swallow is a cool 50. He’s works in Norfolk CID. Whereas most regional detectives drive a classic or unusual car, Swallow has saved up to buy a brand new five-door Audi A3 turbo diesel in metallic graphite grey with black fabric interior. He’s not interested in satnav, leather seats, or CD stacker systems. That, to Swallow, is just so much bullshit.

  His vice? Well, booze has been done, so I thought it would be quite nice if he was bulimic. (I got the idea from seeing John Prescott cleaning himself up in the toilets of the Savoy.)

  Fastidious but austere, Swallow always carries a checklist of items: a comb, two biros, Fisherman’s Friends (the mint, rather than people), and a faint smell of vomit. Plus an evidence bag which he never uses for evidence, but keeps folded in the right-hand pocket of his donkey jacket in case he has a big meal. Yes, Swallow’s always very well turned out, with pressed slacks, black leather tie, buffed-up shoes and a rich brown leather jacket.

  His is a restless mind – even in his downtime he has to occupy himself. But rather than immerse himself in chess (been done), Swallow solves Dingbats and other word-related puzzles, including word searches. He likes nothing more than sitting down with a copy of The Puzzler in a wicker chair that looks out over the fens and immersing himself in puzzles.

  He also has a weakness for doing 10,000-piece jigsaws. In case you hadn’t noticed, this is a metaphor for solving a case. And in the last episode, we’d see him put in the final piece and suddenly seeing that it depicts the face of the local conman. Quite how or why this would work isn’t yet scoped out. He’s also a keen cook, gardener and birder. He has no middle fingers on one hand, so he can’t swear but is permanently doing the heavy metal sign.

  I see Swallow as something of an enigma. He has the largest collection of samurai swords in Europe, but no one knows where he got them from. And when not cooking or tending to his gardens or completing jigsaws or finding words or watching rare wetland birds, he plays kendo – the Japanese martial art with body armour and big sticks of bamboo (shinai). His sparring partner and friend is Chan, a Chinese widower who owns a laundry next to Wallis Shoes on Exchange Street in Norwich.174 He’s a useful foil to Swallow because, as a laundryman, he doesn’t think like a police officer.

  Throughout the pilot episode, we see Swallow constantly harassing a circus even though left-wing university-educated police chiefs reprimand him for it. But at the end of the pilot episode, his right-wing views are vindicated when he blows the lid on a drug smuggling racket. He works out that drugs are being smuggled in the collective recta of circus elephants when
he spots bags of drugs among the grassy balls of dung on the circus floor.

  He lives alone. His marriage broke down because his wife was too selfish to recognise his cleverness.

  Is he politically correct? Who, Swallow?? No chance. He’s old school, and is aware that a disproportionately high amount of crime is committed by the unemployed and asylum seekers so why not stop them and shake them down? The squares at Police HQ can swivel.

  In the pilot episode, Swallow suddenly notices there are no black people in Norfolk. Have they been spirited away or were they never there? He has to crack the case.

  Also in the pilot episode, he wages a war against the travelling community who almost never have the correct documentation for their vehicles. He frequently impounds them to get them off the road.

  The pilot episode follows Swallow as he’s assigned a naïve young sidekick, DC Wide-Eye, a stickler for the rules. Together, this odd couple have to come together to find out who’s been fly-tipping in a residential area.

  It goes without saying that the show will look terrific. The series will be peppered with skyscapes of Norfolk while the opening sequence will be shots of huge deciduous oaks intercut with two masked men playing kendo intercut with a drive-by shooting intercut with two hands playing a jigsaw. The reveal at the end is that the kenshi are Swallow and Chan and the jigsaw player is also Swallow.

  Incredibly, the rights to Swallow are still available for purchase. I can be contacted through the publishers.

  170 I’ve stopped doing it now.

  171 I can’t speak for Pete of course, but my early interest in these floating vehicles was sparked by the chase sequence in Live and Let Die. Sometimes you forget films, don’t you, but this scene has always stayed with me. It’s up there with classic scenes such as the Union Jack parachute bit in The Spy Who Loved Me and the scene in Sophie’s Choice when she has to choose which of her children to send to their certain death. As you can see, I love movies.

  172 I have similarly strong views on the death of Princess Diana (indeed, when she died I wanted to ring up the media and say, ‘Happy now??’ but I didn’t have their number).

  To this day, there are so many questions that don’t add up. When I hear people refer to it as an ‘accident’, I shake my head and chuckle at them. Ditto when people say the twin towers were not detonated by the CIA.

  By a similar token, I’m proud to say that one of my favourite books is Erich Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods which alleges that Jesus was genuinely an alien. And people may scoff, but I’m yet to meet anyone who can provide a compelling argument that the ascension into heaven was anything other than Christ taking off back to some kind of mothercraft.

  Of course, I don’t believe every word he writes, but Von Daniken himself says 2% is conjecture and 98% is probable fact.

  173 Press play on Track 33.

  174 Don’t bother looking for it. It’s a Halifax!

  Chapter 24

  Other, Better TV Work

  PEOPLE WHO WORK IN broadcasting hate to admit this but it’s true: the vast majority of TV is unwanted. Audiences sit there, stuffing Doritos into their fat mouths, passively allowing television programmes to wash over them with the odd drib or drab landing in their eyes and ears. Do you honestly think anyone ever wanted to watch Going for Gold with Henry Kelly?175 Or set the video for World in Action?

  It’s hardly fulfilling to pour your heart and soul into making TV content only for it to be used as an audio-visual backdrop to a man doing a crossword or a tired mum smacking one or both or all of her children.

  The same cannot be said for corporate, marketing or public information videos. In watching them, your audience has made a conscious, active decision to view. They’ve gone out of their way to remove the free DVD from its polythene sheath, to turn off their BlackBerries for a health and safety induction, or to shuffle their way to the recreation room to learn about the dangers of diabetes.

  They’ve made an appointment to view, and that knowledge makes the work utterly thrilling. It was this exciting realm that formed the next stage of my broadcasting career.

  I hope this doesn’t sound vulgar but the money is effing brilliant. It’s borderline grotesque. I was not complaining. These people will pay through the nose for a presenter who has the gravitas, humility and time on their hands to front content that will be seen by less than a thousand viewers. I had that humility. And time. And gravitas.

  Markedly different from publicly available TV work, this kind of presenting was a real learning curve. And I learnt plenty: you must smile when you say the name of the product – even if it’s for a genito-urinary complaint. There’s no need to speak louder for a geriatric audience.176 And there’s no budget for wardrobe so dress smartly before leaving the house.

  Between 1996 and 1998, I became quite indispensable in this specialist strand of broadcasting, having seen off Rob Bonnet and John Stapleton in the land-grab that followed Nick Owen’s back injury. Until then, Nick had earned – and this is only my estimate – more than £12 million a year, and while I didn’t even approach those kind of numbers, I earned enough to pay for a hire-purchase vehicle and a static home.

  Play your cards right (and I do) and this kind of work can provide a deliciously regular source of income. This sort of ready dosh can be handy when you need to pay for life’s essentials – groceries, utility bills, the slush fund you set up some years ago to defend yourself against the odd bout of unavoidable legal action.

  But I say again – it’s not just anyone who can land these kind of jobs. You need to hit a certain level of ability before the really big boys start knocking on your door. You don’t seriously think that just anyone can be trusted to record a ten-minute sales video for, I dunno, Beccles-based Startrite Intrusion Detection Systems? I mean these alarms save lives.

  Pick the wrong man (Rav from Crimewatch, for example) and potential customers will take one listen to his voice and zone out. The net result? People are going to wind up dead. Try sticking that on your CV.

  So it makes me proud to say that during those years I have fronted over 60 corporate videos for everything from potato-based processed food products to Latvia.

  Of course it wasn’t always plain sailing.177 I was once cow-bombed while stood on a traditional East Anglian narrowboat178 fronting a piece of sales collateral for the county’s leading off-land holiday operators.

  It was a sunny afternoon and out on the Norfolk Broads the mercury was nudging 90. On the river-bank beyond, holiday-makers and the unemployed were sunning themselves in 32 degrees of pure British Celsius. It was then that my marketing patter was interrupted by a cow falling on me from a motorway bridge.

  Incredibly, a group of militant APFs (anti-Partridge farmers) had decided that revenge was a dish best served deceased.179 They had waited for me to cruise beneath them and then tipped the big dead Friesian right on top of me. As I lay there, fighting to catch my breath, trapped under what was essentially a vast leather jacket, I knew I was lucky to still be alive.

  It crossed my mind that the animal had simply fallen from the bridge while stopping to look at the view (and what a view – formed when rising sea-levels began to flood medieval peat excavations, the Norfolk Broads, with their reed beds, grazing marshes and wet woodland, offer even the most casual of boaters over 100 miles of stunning navigable waterways). But no. To borrow from the parlance used by the farmers, Partridge had been ‘beefed’.

  I mention that story because my publishers felt it would make ‘a good anecdote for your book’, but actually most corporate engagements are far less dangerous. In the year 2000, I was hired to front Crash, Bang, Wallop. It neatly brought together three of my biggest passions: cars, car crashes and high-quality sell-through videos.

  Had Police, Camera, Action! not already been a hit international TV show, it would have been the video that inspired Police, Camera, Action! The idea was simple. We would play to one of the most innate of all human traits – rubber-necking.

&nb
sp; And I had an idea for a USP: why not show fatalities? Please don’t misunderstand, road deaths break my heart. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been reduced to tears when slowing down at the site of a pile-up to grab a few snaps on the camera phone. But isn’t that the point? By showing unedited footage of RTA fatalities, weren’t we shocking drivers into being more careful? The deader they are, the stronger the message. And believe me, the drivers I had in mind could not have been deader.

  In the end I was over-ruled, though we did reach a compromise. We would show horrific accidents, but we’d use crash test dummies. I personally oversaw some of these shoots and I cannot tell you how much fun it was. We had families of four – just dummies remember – flying through windscreens left, right and centre. I hadn’t laughed so much in years. I wanted to do one with a crash test dog but apparently they don’t make them.

  We got most of our footage from the Highways Agency and the police, plus the odd one from me following people home from company Christmas parties. I’d do the tailgating and my assistant would hang out of the window with the camcorder. It was simple, safe and almost always ineffective.

  Ironically this was the time in my life when I was least at risk of being injured in a car crash myself. Due to an unfortunate Toblerone addiction, I had ballooned180 (see picture section). I even disabled the driver-side air bag on my Rover. It was simply not needed.

  At this time I was also considering switching to an automatic. Like any real man, I much preferred a manual but my newfound bigness meant there were logistical issues to address. The recent expansion of my left thigh had effectively taken my gear stick out of the equation. When I got into the car, the contents of my leg would take four or five seconds just to settle. I’d sit there watching as it advanced like lava. I’d often have the engine running and a CD playing before it had finally come to rest, with the gear stick nowhere to be seen.