It wasn’t until hours later that I (i.e. me – she’d taken the bus to casualty) found it, hidden in an air vent behind a wardrobe. It was just sat there looking at me, like some sort of confectionery Anne Frank. (God I hate the Nazis!)
I gathered what remained of my Toblerone supply into just six bin bags. I knew that the most cathartic thing to do would be to just give it all away. So that very afternoon I parked up at the local primary school, wound down my window, and handed bars out to the kids as they walked home. It was just a nice thing to do and the fact that the police were called says more about genuine paedophiles than it does about me.202
Finally it was time to commence the total annihilation of all the un-needed flab within the body of Alan Gordon Partridge. In terms of weight I effectively had a large midget wrapped around my internal organs. And I wanted him gone. I looked into liposuction but it was too expensive. Besides, while I knew it could do a good job on tummies and thighs, I wasn’t 100% convinced of its ability to cure a fat back. I would have thought about the stomach stapling technique used to such great effect by Fearne Cotton, but it was yet to be introduced at that stage. Probably still being tested on rats.
My only option was to hit the exercise, hard. I started with a regime I found in my assistant’s copy of Bella magazine. She very kindly offered to do it with me, but when I thought about her in a leotard it made me feel all cold inside. I went for a drive to clear my head but at one point I nearly had to pull over because I was shaking. In the end we compromised. I would do the exercises and rather than be joined by her I would just watch Oz Aerobics on Sky Sports One. How that programme has not won awards I will never know.
The other big problem was the squat thrusts I was supposed to do. It was a simple question of physics. With the best will in the world, the only way my knees would have been able to cope with the sheer poundage was with the aid of a Silverline SE9 hydraulic jack.
I turned my attention to swimming, and it was fun for a while. We figured out that I displaced the same amount of water as half a Ford Fiesta! Not bad for a little lad from Norwich. Not bad at all. But soon enough the local kids started calling me Moby Alan. I gave the swimming up. It was the straw that broke the whale’s back.
The thing is, I knew one of their mums and I’d seen her leaving a local hotel the other week with a man who wasn’t her husband. Now I could have mentioned that to her catcalling child, but I didn’t. Well I did, but it gave me no great pleasure.
My emphasis changed again, this time to running. I was a bit nervous as I hadn’t been jogging for years and wasn’t sure I’d be able to remember what to do. But as long as you keep telling yourself to move your right arm in time with your left leg (and vice versa) and to push off with sufficient propulsion to travel part of each stride airborne, you literally won’t put a foot wrong.203
I used to run along the country lanes with my assistant driving behind like a Baptist kerb crawler. The idea was that if I went below a certain speed she would just blast the horn. The shock of it would lead to a sudden burst of acceleration. We called it the ‘toot and shoot’ technique. Yet such was the agony of running that I soon learnt to ignore the horn. (I only wish the same could have been said for the many, many horses that we spooked.)
No, we needed something more drastic, otherwise I would never lose the weight. With a heavy heart I decided on a new plan. If I consistently dropped below my target speed my assistant was to pull forward and slightly run me over. Well it worked famously. Believe me, when you’ve nearly been trapped under the front left wheel of a car driven by an unbalanced Cliff Richard fan, you soon speed up.
Once I got to grips with exercising, though, my excess baggage just melted just away. I was like a snowman in the sun. (One day I lost five pounds, although that was partly because I’d eaten some bad ham.) And within three months I was more or less back to my pre-Toblerone weight. It had been a slim-down as dramatic as it had been medically inadvisable. But I had succeeded.
How I longed to go back to the swimming baths and show those young boys my body. I used to lie in bed imagining them staring at me, my skin glistening under the changing room lights, my body covered in a veil of twinkling, chlorinated droplets. And it felt good, it felt right.
I would have done too, were it not for one thing – the sudden weight loss had left me with masses of excess skin. When I was clothed it wasn’t a problem – I’d just tuck it into my jeans. But when I was naked, you couldn’t miss it. I was half tempted to get on a plane to Papua New Guinea. Knowing that lot, they’d have cut it off and made crackling. Cannibals, eh? What are they like?!
Of course, in the years to come I’ll probably be able to donate my skin to medical science. And the thought that one day a flap of my tummy might be grafted on to the face of a badly burned woman is a source of enormous comfort to me. Not just her face either. I’ve got enough skin to cover large parts of her body. She really can afford to be as clumsy with that chip pan as she likes.
To summarise then: my drink and drugs heck had taken me to places I never wanted to go. Mainly Dundee. I’d like to say that I came out of the whole ordeal older and wiser. But I’m not sure I did (though I concede that the age one is is hard to dispute). Yet it didn’t matter because, by the spring of 2001, thanks to a hardcore diet and the love of a good horse (cheers, Treacle!) I was back. I had bounced back.
200 Press play on Track 35.
201 That was actually one of the titles I was thinking about for this book – ‘She Bore No Grudge’ – until I realised it made little or no sense.
202 The constables and I laughed about the confusion, though there’s no denying that I looked like a paedophile, many of whom – like myself at the time – are paunchy. It’s said they consume food as avariciously as they do explicit images of children.
203 There’s no need to tell yourself this out loud, although as a habitual sports broadcaster, I found myself automatically providing a third-person commentary of my runs which buggered up my breathing patterns and gave me a painful stitch in my abdomen.
Chapter 28
Bouncing Back204
I’M NOT SURE I’D ever felt so proud. As I walked into the shop, I could feel my chest puffing out like a toad’s throat. In front of me were rows and rows of books. And on the front cover? Yours truly. I reached out and tenderly fingered my glossy, smiling face. That might sound a bit weird, but it wasn’t.
I span flamboyantly on my heels so I could look out of the window of the big-name high-street bookstore in which I stood. As humans of both sexes hurried and scurried about, I nodded in quiet satisfaction. Today Norwich Waterstone’s, tomorrow the Booker Prize for Books!
Allow me to explain. To begin, you must join me as I return to the year 2PD (post-Dundee). Alan Partridge is in a tizz. He just can’t figure out what to do with his experiences. He has been through a major male mind meltdown, surely there’s some good that could come of this? Then one day in the bath tub – Ulrika! – it hit me. I’d translate them into a publishing deal.
As I searched around the soapy depths for my pumice stone, the idea began to take shape. The book would be called ‘Bouncing Back’. (Incidentally the pumice made pretty short work of my calluses. It’s no surprise that this tough yet lightweight material is also used to make insulative, high-density breezeblocks.) On the surface it would appear to be half autobiography, half self-help manual. Yet it would be so much more than that. It would be a system to set free the limitless potential within us all, which just happened to be bound in hardback and sold in all good bookshops. Plus Tesco’s.
I got so caught up in thinking about the book, that by the time I finally emerged from the bath, my skin was as shrivelled as an over-microwaved pea. But you know what? I didn’t care. My only focus now was on Bouncing Back. And I have to confess, I loved the writing process. Sometimes I’d sit in my study and just pound away on the word processor. Other times I’d go jogging with a Bluetooth headset on and get my assistant to type the chapters
up as I spoke them to her.
This run-writing worked very well. Unless I was going up a hill. In which case I quickly became too puffed out to talk. My assistant and I would simply maintain a comfortable telephone silence, save for the odd whinny of exertion from my end, until I reached the brow. Then I’d just make up for it by speaking at twice the speed on the descent. She’d really struggle to write as quickly as I was speaking, but that’s not my problem.
One morning, though, I decided to do something different. I resolved to write in the park. I rose early and, just as dawn cracked, I found myself a nice little bench by the pond and began yabbering merrily away into my Dictaphone. This only lasted a couple of hours, though, because my audio kept getting polluted. If I learnt one thing in the writing of that book it was that the pained cackle of a swan in labour really does carry on the breeze. Disgusting.
After what seemed like an eternity, the book was finally written. It had taken three long weeks. As I typed the very last word – ‘Allah’ – I collapsed on to my keyboard. I was spent, every last drop of me had been poured into that book (save for a couple of anecdotes that I took from Russell Harty and re-badged as my own – and there’s nothing he can do to touch me).
A wave of relief rushed over me as I began to dribble on the space bar. If pony-trekking had soothed my troubled mind, writing this book had been a full radiator flush, removing any traces of magnetite sludge from my system. My demons hadn’t been exorcised, they’d been rounded up and shot. And now, as I bulldozed them into a mass grave with a fag in my mouth, I could move on with my life.
Of course there was still the small matter of finding a publisher. My previous work ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Stadium to Alan Partridge by Alan Partridge’ (a wry collection of amusing anecdotes about my experiences as a sports reporter) had been published by Peartee Publishing, the publishing wing of my now defunct company. (PP had gone under years before, after an injunction from former goalkeeper Ray Clemence who angrily questioned the validity of one of the anecdotes.205)
So we needed to source a new publishing house. I’m told by my assistant that it only took about a month – after all, anyone reading the manuscript would quickly see that snapping up the rights was a total ‘non-brainer’ – but can’t recall the exact details as I was drinking a lot of cider at the time. I don’t really like cider but there’d been a very good deal on at Thresher’s. And this explained my somewhat distracted response when she’d phoned with the good news.
‘I’ve found you a publisher!’ she squeaked.
‘What?’
‘For your book.’
‘What about it? It’s ace.’
‘You asked me to find you a publisher.’
‘For what?’
‘The book, Alan. You asked me to find you a publisher for the book and I’ve spent the last month sending it to various companies and now one has come back and said they’re willing to publish it!’
I hesitated. Was the news sinking in?
‘Just get me some crisps.’
No, it wasn’t. The next day, though, with all the cider now either drunk, spilled or thrown, I soon shaped up. And let me tell you, I was elated. My strategy of combining searingly honest admissions about my own life with a liberal use of the Roget’s thesaurus, had worked a treat. I was to be published!
I immediately phoned Carol, before quickly hanging up when I remembered we were divorced. I know – Fernando.
‘Son?’
‘I’m just in the loo, Dad.’ He was such a joker!
‘Son, I’m to be published!’
‘That’s great, Dad.’
‘The book will share my own life experiences and teach people a system for setting free the limitless potential within us all.’
‘So like half autobiography, half self-help manual?’
‘Kind of, but also so much more than that.’
‘Great, Dad.’ I heard a plop. Either he hadn’t been joking about being on the loo, or he was dropping stones into a well.206
‘Fancy meeting for a drink to celebrate?’
But the line went dead. In his excitement at my publishing deal Fernando had cut the call off. No matter, because I was still as pleased as the punch I would later make at home from whatever I could find in my drinks cupboard.
Fast forward a few months and it was launch day. It was ten minutes to opening time and I was explaining to the manager of Waterstone’s where best – and in what quantities – to position my book in the store. I grabbed a nearby book (not one of mine) and tore out a blank page to quickly sketch a store map. I clicked my pen into life, its inky nose jutting obediently into view, and began to write.
‘Biographies: 10; Health & Wellbeing: 10; Mind, Body & Spirit: 10; New Releases: 6; Bestsellers: 6.’ (I knew this was cheeky, as the books hadn’t even gone on sale yet, so I drew a smiley face after it to quell the shopkeeper’s anger.) I also penned in 5 to go by the cash tills because I’d read something about Cadbury’s Chomps doing the same to cash in on impulse purchases.
Next, I headed home and began sending copies to friends, family and a raft of BBC executives, past and present. This wasn’t an attempt to show them that I’d bounced back from their rejection fitter and stronger than ever. No, it was simply because they all went to Oxbridge so I know they liked reading and didn’t really watch any TV. Out of respect for the dead, I also sent copies to the widows of Tony Hayers and Chris Feather. It was a classy touch.
In the end there weren’t that many left for friends and family, but I figured Denise and Fernando wouldn’t mind sharing one, on the basis that they were siblings. And on the basis that we were now divorced, I decided my wife Carol could buy her own. Or, worst-case scenario, rent it from the library. (As I wouldn’t be receiving a new royalty every time a copy was taken out, I suggested to Norwich City Council that I get a cut of any late fees instead. They didn’t go for it.)
One thing that did thrill me, though, and I knew it would thrill the reviewers, was that I had managed to stretch it to over 300 pages. It had a real meatiness to it. I banged it down on the kitchen table so I could enjoy its undeniable thud factor. ‘Thud,’ it went. ‘Thud,’ I repeated, like a parrot trained to accurately mimic the noise of books.207
Yet my happiness was to be short-lived. Sales were disappointing. My refusal to dumb down (if anything, I had dumbed up) had cost me dearly. I received word via fax that a lot of stores were going to take it down from the shelves. I was absolutely thunderstruck (thanks, Roget’s).
I marched into the offices of my publishing company and read them the riot act. ‘There’s only one course of action I will settle for,’ I roared. ‘A raft of nationwide TV adverts to give the book the push it deserves.’ The subsequent silence that fell over the open-plan office told me that my message had got through loud and clear. You could have heard a pin.
As ever, though, there were logistical headaches to be addressed, so in the end we hammered out a compromise. Instead of running a series of nationwide TV adverts, they were not going to run a series of nationwide TV adverts.
By this point I was left with no choice. I had to take matters into my own hands. Sales needed to be boosted, and fast. I quickly formulated a plan of action. Every day for the next fortnight I would go down to Norwich train station, set up a stall and see if I could shift a few units myself. It would be stripped-down concourse retailing in its purest form. I launched myself into it like a small circus man being shot from a cannon. What a buzz! I’d literally flog to anyone. It didn’t matter if they were travelling inter-Norfolk, trans-county or intra-Anglian, they were all fair game as far as I was concerned. I felt like I could sell coal to the Eskimos.
I was rigged-up with one of those cordless mics that you fix to your head. I loved it, with its sponge-covered microphone dangling in front of my mouth like a big black grape. When a sale had gone well I almost wanted to reach out and lick it! (Couldn’t though – tongue too short. Oh to be a lizard!)
&nb
sp; Better still, it gave me total mobility (within a radius of 20 metres). If I headed out to its distant eastern rim, the radius took me within spitting distance of WH Smith. (Literally, in the case of one chap who flicked me the Vs. I’ll be honest, I lost it.) And this meant I had a captive audience. After all, what do we all do if we have time to kill before catching our train? We head to Smith’s to browse the latest issue of What Car magazine, even though we’ve already got it at home. And possibly have a flick through Cosmo if someone’s taken one out of the packaging.
It’s safe to say that my maverick tactics caused quite a few sleepless nights over at WHSHQ (WH Smith HQ). They were petrified I was going to snaffle their customers. It’s not that they came over to have a word, it’s that they didn’t. They tried to act like it didn’t bother them. And in many ways I thought that was much more revealing.
I may have resembled a market trader, but in fact I was a bookshop without walls. And they knew it. The only thing they had over me was that I didn’t do snacks, mags, chocs and pop. Although I was giving away a free Danko torch with every sale. And I know which I’d rather have. If the power goes while I’m tucked up in bed with a good book, I’m hardly going to be able to keep reading using a bag of Revels. No further questions, your honour.
I remember the first book I sold to a WH Smith customer. He was a man by the name of Warren. Before he’d been sucked into my sales tractor beam, he’d been innocently copying out a recipe for white bean stew from the BBC Good Food magazine. Yet within minutes he was writing me a cheque, £8.99 poorer but one very good book richer. And I remember that I did use those exact words.
It might seem weird that I remember the name of a man who bought a book from me almost 15 years ago, but in my defence he did have a lisp. Not that I realised at first. I thought he was just being silly. But the more I chatted to him, the clearer it became. There were no two ways about it – this man had a disabled mouth. Out of interest, I enquired if it entitled him to a badge for his car. It didn’t. Justice? Not in this world, mate.
Partridge, Alan Page 20
