Easily Distracted

by Steve Coogan

  I was more aware than I should have been about the fact that most were university-educated – Armando went to Glasgow and then on to Oxford to do an MA; Patrick, David and Rebecca had gone to Oxford; Chris had gone to Bristol and Doon to Manchester – while I had been to a polytechnic. I certainly felt like I was punching above my weight.

  Neither Armando nor Patrick was remotely judgemental about my education; it wasn’t important to them, or to anyone else for that matter. It was all in my head. In fact, Patrick later told me that he considered me the big cheese in the room after Armando because I’d been on TV and drove a sports car.

  As much as I was in awe of them all, I knew I wouldn’t be in their gang if I wasn’t good enough. I made up for my lack of a university education by having a great ear and being able to come up with characters quickly. But sometimes Patrick, David or Rebecca would talk about Oxford and I’d have nothing to say.

  I’m sure for some people this screams ‘Alan Partridge subtext’, and they are of course right, but it was a while before I learned to turn my shortcomings and flaws into strengths. I wasn’t liberated creatively; I had a self-inflicted repression.

  Still, while I might laugh and say something funny about being at a polytechnic, I thought Oxford sounded great and secretly I wished I’d gone there instead. I was impressed, yet envious and irritated at the same time.

  I didn’t always help myself.

  My mild inferiority complex didn’t exactly propel me forward at the start. It didn’t turn me into a swot. Despite my resolve to put in the hours, I was, as ever, prone to laziness. Patrick pushed me and encouraged me in equal measure. He didn’t let me get away with anything.

  Thank goodness for Patrick.

  *

  When Patrick came back from Paris to work on On The Hour, I rented out my London flat to him. I was also, later, a landlord to Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, but that’s another story.

  I naturally gravitated towards Patrick, and I grew dependent on him very quickly; there was a time when I wouldn’t make a career move without asking his advice. He became my mentor, my sage. I had to know what he thought about everything. I sought his guidance and approval. Patrick’s role in my development was crucial. It was exciting for me to be around him, though no doubt I drove him crazy at times.

  Patrick was thoughtful and smart, exceptionally well read and knowledgeable. I used Patrick like Google for all things creative. He could answer most of my questions. He was my search engine for anything literary. He would just know.

  He could discuss things without necessarily having an opinion about them, whereas I’d been brought up to discuss things with a view to arriving at a conclusion. He taught me to think independently, freely and confidently.

  He even asked my point of view on things, which I found hugely flattering.

  If I was impressed by his mind, Patrick was impressed by my talent.

  I never doubted that I had more confidence than Patrick as a performer. But it was intuitive and instinctive with me, rather than intellectual. I didn’t think too much about it: I’d run at something, whereas Patrick would endlessly mull things over.

  He can be a curmudgeon, but I was drawn towards him because he was the opposite of light entertainment and I was desperate not to be a light entertainer. I wanted to be doing work that I felt mattered, that had substance.

  We became very close, both professionally and personally. When I later fell out with Patrick, it was like getting a divorce.

  My relationship with Armando was very different. He was the head teacher, a young fogey who had a kind of woolly, academic, BBC fustiness. And yet he was super-sharp, fiercely bright and forensic. He was, in some ways, like the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz, controlling all the action but hidden from view.

  Chris, meanwhile, very much fronted On The Hour. He was odd. Polite, but posher than Armando. And even sharper. A bit spiky, like John Cleese. His focus was absolute and he was quite militant about things being done in a certain way.

  Rebecca, meanwhile, was the most respectable woman I knew. She was so grown up and well presented that you couldn’t quite believe she had this wicked sense of humour.

  Doon was a bit more down and dirty. She was mischievous and had more of a filthy laugh. She was naughty. She could really make me laugh.

  But it was Arm’s show. He was in charge, and if On The Hour carries a kitemark with anyone’s name on it, it’s his.

  The show was cold and austere in a way that was really refreshing. It wasn’t trying to be liked, it didn’t try to charm you, and compromise wasn’t on the agenda.

  Right from the start, Armando’s way of doing comedy was hugely inspirational for me. For all the run-ins I’ve had with him over the years, I talk about him like he’s a relative. Part of me still can’t figure him out, but he’s been a huge part of my life.

  I’ve never socialised with Armando, though; we have very little in common. Armando, for example, has zero interest in cars. He once told me how he picked up Colin McRae, the late rally driver, from the airport in an Austin Metro with an automatic gearbox. Armando really couldn’t understand why it would be the antithesis of everything a driving enthusiast would want in a car.

  There might have been some dignity if it had been a manual.

  Knowing Armando as I do, the idea of him driving Colin McRae all the way back home from the airport in an Austin Metro is just hilarious.

  When we were writing I’m Alan Partridge for television and Armando and I were a little more comfortable around each other, I would sit there leafing through a car magazine.

  Someone asked him what I was like and he said, ‘Steve’s someone who reads car magazines.’

  That’s all he knew about me because that’s all I did when I was in the office when we weren’t writing.

  My relationship with Patrick was more intimate. We were close friends and I trusted him implicitly. I would tell him my troubles; he would counsel me on my professional and personal life with great patience. It would never have occurred to me to go to Armando for advice about either.

  And yet, when he sent me that letter, Armando changed my life in ways that I couldn’t ever have anticipated. I still get goosebumps when I think about it.

  CHAPTER 43

  ONCE ON THE Hour had been commissioned as a series, Lee and Herring wrote a brilliant, incisive sketch about a sports reporter. It became increasingly surreal and there were no punchlines, but it was incredibly funny.

  Armando turned to me. ‘Steve, can you do a generic sports reporter’s voice that’s not an impression?’

  The voice was very different from the way Alan now talks. It wasn’t, in fact, that different from my own voice, except more nasal and monotone. A bit like Elton Welsby, John Motson or David Coleman.

  So far as I remember, Armando, Patrick, Rebecca and Dave Schneider were in the room when I first did the voice.

  I’ve never been particularly interested in sport, but I know that commentators tend to sound very confident and simultaneously slightly stupid. They never stop talking, even if they’re stuck for something to say.

  Lee and Herring wrote some original scripts that had a strange, surreal quality, but none of the comedy was character-driven. It is sometimes said that they invented Alan Partridge. Let me be clear. They did not.

  I started to improvise about how I wanted to get into light entertainment to get away from the serious news guys who I feared looked down on me, and then I improvised as a racing car commentator, which was immediately funny because I know so little about the rules of sport.

  The more mundane the sports reporter, the better.

  ‘There they go, racing around that bend. Along the straight now. Down the dip. Through the chicane. Around the bend again. Down. Up a bit.’

  Everyone started laughing. Armando says it’s as though Alan emerged fully formed.

  Although, at that early stage, he didn’t yet have a name. He was simply ‘sports reporter’.

 
At a certain point we decided that he should have a name. I thought it should be a name that sounded familiar, that you felt you’d heard before.

  ‘Alan’ seemed like an appropriately sporty, Middle England name. It didn’t sound bookish; literary people aren’t generally called Alan. Alan would have a nice car on the drive and wear golf sweaters.

  I’m pretty sure I came up with ‘Partridge’. We had to check in the phone book to see if an Alan Partridge – or a list of Alan Partridges – already existed. But there was only the news reporter Frank Partridge.

  ‘Alan’ and ‘Partridge’ fitted well together. It didn’t sound overly comical.

  One of the first good pieces of advice Patrick gave me was to change Duncan Disorderly’s name to something more anonymous. Paul Calf doesn’t sound like a nice, cosy name for a character. It’s deliberately unpoetic.

  Names of comedy characters usually have some history to them, and mine were no different. Duncan Disorderly was a stupid pun and Patrick was right to make me change it. Gavin Gannet then became Gareth Cheeseman. Someone called Gareth Cheeseman wrote me a very angry letter saying that everyone laughs at him now, which is unfortunate.

  Ernest Moss was previously Ernest Ickler. Being a health and safety officer he was a stickler for things … not great, I know. Terrible, in fact. Patrick only let me keep Duncan Thickett because I pointed out that it was a real person’s name; someone at drama school knew of a social worker with that name.

  After we’d named Alan, we talked about where he was from. Milton Keynes was too obvious. We pored over a map of Britain. I was tired of hearing Liverpool and Midlands accents in comedy, and Norwich was interesting because it isn’t en route to anywhere and as such is probably the most isolated city in England. Patrick liked Norwich because he’d recently been there to watch Arsenal play at Carrow Road, and I was keen because I immediately thought of ‘Naughty Norwich’ and fondues and BBQs. Norwich isn’t the north or the south; there’s a kind of otherness to it. It doesn’t have an overwhelming sense of itself, like, say, Yorkshire or Cornwall does.

  I didn’t know what the Norfolk accent was like, so I didn’t attempt it. If anything, Alan speaks received pronunciation, but I occasionally use flat, northern vowels for comic effect. He’s ostensibly well spoken, but a bit nasal, which is a northern idiosyncrasy.

  It was obvious to me that Alan would drive a Ford Granada. He felt like a type: a bloke with a collection of golfing sweaters who religiously washed his car at the weekend, who was slightly right-wing and very judgemental. Very clean. Catalogue man.

  Alan is a Thatcherite more than a Tory. There’s a small appreciation of high culture in onenation Conservatism that you don’t get with Thatcherism. Alan is a typical Little Englander, one of those Napoleonic shopkeeper people. For him it’s about status and being respected in a very superficial way. He measures himself against success. For him, knowledge is something one could acquire by ordering the wipe-clean vinyl edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica and a subscription to Reader’s Digest.

  If you look at the pantheon of loved British comedy characters, they have a common denominator, a thread running through them. Dad’s Army’s Captain Mainwaring, Fawlty Towers’ Basil Fawlty: they are all frustrated. Frustrated at not being properly recognised for who they are. They are essentially disappointed with their lives – more Dunkirk than D-Day.

  And the humour comes from that frustration.

  We love them because we recognise that fallibility, that vulnerability. It’s cathartic for an audience.

  Alan was the perfect character for me to immerse myself in and, because he was on the radio, he evolved organically. I was given scripts to work from when I sat at the sports desk, but when I was doing interviews with sportsmen or -women, the writers would suggest funny things Alan could say and use in his own way.

  In the second episode, for example, Armando suggested that I become obsessed with groin injuries in a matter-of-fact way. It was even picked up by the press: the sports presenter who can’t stop asking athletes about their groin injuries.

  It certainly set a pattern: on The Day Today, Alan interviews a topless female jockey in the changing room. He’s like a little boy lost and doesn’t know what to say. I just played it for real, like a boy who can’t quite believe that a woman has unselfconsciously taken her top off in front of him.

  By the time we were doing The Day Today, we were officially a new generation of comic talent. The BFI website reliably informs me that The Day Today was ‘the most radical satire seen on British screens since the 1960s’, but On The Hour was more of a cult radio show with an audience built on word of mouth.

  Although we knew we were on to something, without the benefit of a live studio audience we had no way of knowing what people thought of On The Hour. Occasionally a member of the public would come up and say a particular sketch was really funny, but the audience was just getting to know certain characters in the series.

  By the time we came to recording the pilot of Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge in front of a live audience, in the spring of 1992, Alan’s fanbase had really gained momentum: the queue outside the BBC stretched around the block.

  *

  I had no idea, of course, that Alan Partridge would come to define my work in Britain for the next two decades. In the beginning I didn’t even regard him as a stand-up character, never mind a character who might be loved as much as Captain Mainwaring or Basil Fawlty. He did, however, feel special and different.

  If you were to draw a Venn diagram of Alan and me, there would clearly be an overlap. I would explain to people who asked that I used Alan Partridge to channel all the things about myself that I was embarrassed about. And then they would want to know more.

  Am I as incompetent, narcissistic and socially inept as Alan? Sometimes. But aren’t we all? Isn’t that why we respond to him?

  Alan’s foibles aren’t unique; there is an unfiltered honesty coupled with ignorance. Some critics have been very reductive about my relationship with Alan Partridge; they seem to think I might be wounded by the observation that I’m a bit like him. As if it’s something I’m not completely cognitive of.

  People still say, in a surprised manner, ‘Ah, Steve Coogan actually is like Alan Partridge’.

  To which I say, ‘Well, yes, of course I am. Alan is a conduit for all my demons. Clearly he’s a bit like me. I have inadequacies and that’s OK. What makes it work is my being comfortable with that and giving vent to them through Alan.’

  What irritates me is when I do other characters and they still say, ‘Oh, that’s a bit like Alan Partridge.’

  Well, no, that’s actually me you’re seeing in those other characters. And Alan is a bit like me.

  To be reductive myself, I knew that if I wanted to make the shift from Sunday Night at the Palladium to The Day Today, I had to offload my flaws on to Alan Partridge.

  Alan allowed me to make a virtue of my innate ignorance about certain things. I very quickly learned in improvisation sessions that the key to Alan was using my immediate reactions to anything anyone said. Those reactions, unedited as they were, had a childlike quality to them.

  Actually, it was rather like seeing the world through a child’s eyes, because Alan was giving his first, visceral response to virtually everything. I almost didn’t want to foster anything too eloquent. I had to pretty much say the first thing that came into my head. It was a technique that made us all laugh simply because it was so reductive while being profoundly honest.

  I could use Alan as a dumping ground for my insecurities and at the same time say, ‘This is not me. It’s someone else.’

  Later on, I would be writing Alan with Patrick and Armando and I’d say something as myself.

  In unison they would respond: ‘Just say that as Alan! It’s perfect!’

  As I felt selfconscious about having been to poly, so I was still aware of my lack of sophistication. I would play to it, but I really was green about certain things. When I fir
st started working with Armando and Patrick, there were terms and references I just didn’t get.

  They would casually refer to architectural styles or writers I’d never heard of. A few times I would scribble down a reference and look it up later at the library. The Internet had yet to be invented.

  Patrick remembers me being as assertive and confident as him and Armando in those writing sessions. He says I mocked their Oxbridge intellectualism and vetoed gags that I considered too highfalutin. He says he and Arm regularly deferred to me because I was Alan. However, I remember clearly feeling like the world of clever comedy was almost out of my reach, but not that far away. I felt like I could just about jump off the riverbank and grab hold of the branch without falling into the river.

  *

  Once or twice when we were making On The Hour and The Day Today, I did a sketch that reduced the cast and crew to tears of laughter – usually the improvised chats with Chris where Alan was mercilessly bullied.

  Patrick and I wrote a sketch for The Day Today about a night attendant at a public swimming pool called Keith Mandement. The morning of the recording, I was studying the script and said I had two voices for Keith, both painfully monotone, but one much sadder and more pathetic than the other. We chose the latter. That was the extent of the discussion.

  Talking to a documentary maker (played by Armando), Keith spoke in a voice that sounded at times as if he was almost flatlining:

  KEITH: ‘I’m the night-time supervisor. I basically watch the monitors at night to see if anything occurs. There was one incident, I remember it quite clearly. I was filling in a puzzle and I heard a noise, a commotion, up in the rafters and somehow, we will never know even to this day, a pigeon had got in and was flapping about in the rafters. We called the bird specialists and they removed it in the morning. I’m never tempted to use the pool myself at night, although some time ago I used to go down and take showers. And on one occasion I went down and found a woman’s swimming costume which I put on and paraded around, singing a Joan Baez protest song. This pool has been open nearly forty years and in all that time I only slipped up once in my mind. I was engaged in a particularly tricky word puzzle and forty people had broken into the pool and were playing around, ducking, bombing and doing all manner of prohibited activities and eventually someone was killed.’