Remarkably few people know who Alan Gordon Partridge is these days. Probably more famous for his on screen slaying of interviewee Forbes McAllister than he is for the calamitous BBC 2 chat show that housed it, Partridge was, for a time in the early 1990s, one of Norfolk’s best known stars. I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan is the third book by the former Knowing Me, Knowing You host, following the often-overlooked whimsical offering Something Funny Happened to Alan Partridge on the Way to the Stadium and his long-since pulped self-help manual, Bouncing Back, but it is the first to explore his life story with anything approaching real candour.
Much like the ill-fated Bouncing Back, this vaingloriously-titled tome is so replete with vacuous egotism that it reads more like comical fiction than it does a supposedly serious autobiography. When I purchased it, having been won over by the author’s enthusiastic plugging of it on ITV’s Jonathan Ross Show, I’d hoped that Partridge’s ghost writers, Steve Coogan (to whom Partridge bears an uncanny resemblance); Armando Iannucci; Rob Gibbons; and Neil Gibbons would temper his self-indulgent tendencies and help to get at the truth behind his scandalous behaviour on screen. If anything though, their input seems to have only encouraged such traits; indeed, I, Partridge is far from being the “stoic” downplaying of allegedly harrowing events that Partridge has the gall to claim within the text. The book’s early chapters see him pile half-truths on top of hyperbole as he hangs his parents out to dry, painting them as ogres torn from the pages of some misery lit nightmare. From there he moves on to shamelessly harangue his erstwhile playground tormentors, with washed-up former bully Stephen McCoombs repaid in full for his “Smelly Alan Fartridge” name-calling. What really irked me though were Partridge’s frequent ‘dramatic’ cutaways - sporadically he shifts from conventional past tense first person narration to third person present tense. Overwrought and narcissistic, Partridge’s prose is so sickening it’s hilarious.
Matters don’t improve as Partridge talks us through his university days – an institution now rendered redundant thanks to Wikipedia, he blithely opines – and moves onto his early work in radio. Only my shock at the bald-faced arrogance of the man kept me reading as he exaggerated the importance of his hospital radio work (“the last voice many of them heard was mine…”) before moving on to put his throwaway Radio Norwich shows such as Traffic Buster and Scoutabout on level pegging with prime time television. As Partridge recalls his progression into the BBC, working as a sports correspondent on On the Hour and The Day Today, his writing becomes even more self-aggrandising and the swipes at former colleagues and acquaintances even more frequent. I’m glad that I kept reading though, because by the time that I’d got as far as Partridge’s run as executive producer and host of Knowing Me, Knowing You, the hitherto tastelessness of the text was made to look positively discerning in comparison. His comments about the late Tony Hayers, former chief of programming at the BBC, are nothing short of hateful, and despite opening the chapter entitled “Forbes McAllister” with an avowal not to make excuses for shooting the man dead on live television, he goes on to put forward a series of spurious defences that I can’t believe saw him avoid prosecution. He even has the nerve to imply that he might have spared McAllister the more protracted painful death that his weight problem would have inevitably caused.
Partridge’s personal life, incredibly, is handled with same lack of grace. The former Mrs Partridge, Carol, is not only vilified by the author’s spiteful foray into the minutiae of her affair, but also by what he claims is a passage written by her reflecting on how very wrong she’d been to behave as she did. It’s revolting. Subsequent paramour Sonja, who has been relegated to Partridge’s cleaner since she was last seen in the “post-documentary” television series I’m Alan Partridge, doesn’t fare much better, despite Partridge’s favourable (but misogynistic) comments about her physique. Meanwhile his long-suffering personal assistant, Lynn Benfield, isn’t referred to once by name despite appearing more often than anyone else in the text save for the eponymous AGP. Most hurtfully of all though, after wearing out his thesaurus producing the most sesquipedalian and saccharine account of his son Fernando’s birth, Partridge blithely notes that his daughter’s birth evoked broadly similar feelings, and leaves it at that.
However, if you’re able to build up a resistance to the author’s oppressive and vindictive style, I, Partridge does illuminate certain key events in his life that weren’t covered in I’m Alan Partridge, as well as expounding on some of those that were. Partridge examines the roots of his infamous battle with obesity (which prompted two “clinically fed up” years and a barefoot drive to Dundee in a Vectra), blaming Pepsi or Shirley from Pepsi and Shirley (he can’t remember which) for getting him hooked on Toblerone, and talks frankly about his years of being sued by and counter-suing his former house band conductor, Glen Ponder, with whom he now regularly dines at Nando’s.
Some things really surprised me, such as Partridge’s reluctance to sue the BBC following its reneging on his contract to produce a further series of Knowing Me, Knowing You. Such aversion seems completely out character for Partridge; almost suspiciously so. Other things, such as the author using his book as a medium to pitch his idea for Norwich-based detective series Swallow to readers didn’t surprise me at all. If you’re interested in buying the rights to a television series based around the exploits of a seven-fingered bulimic maverick, feel free to contact Partridge through his publisher, HarperCollins.
Much like the ill-fated Bouncing Back, this vaingloriously-titled tome is so replete with vacuous egotism that it reads more like comical fiction than it does a supposedly serious autobiography. When I purchased it, having been won over by the author’s enthusiastic plugging of it on ITV’s Jonathan Ross Show, I’d hoped that Partridge’s ghost writers, Steve Coogan (to whom Partridge bears an uncanny resemblance); Armando Iannucci; Rob Gibbons; and Neil Gibbons would temper his self-indulgent tendencies and help to get at the truth behind his scandalous behaviour on screen. If anything though, their input seems to have only encouraged such traits; indeed, I, Partridge is far from being the “stoic” downplaying of allegedly harrowing events that Partridge has the gall to claim within the text. The book’s early chapters see him pile half-truths on top of hyperbole as he hangs his parents out to dry, painting them as ogres torn from the pages of some misery lit nightmare. From there he moves on to shamelessly harangue his erstwhile playground tormentors, with washed-up former bully Stephen McCoombs repaid in full for his “Smelly Alan Fartridge” name-calling. What really irked me though were Partridge’s frequent ‘dramatic’ cutaways - sporadically he shifts from conventional past tense first person narration to third person present tense. Overwrought and narcissistic, Partridge’s prose is so sickening it’s hilarious.
Partridge’s personal life, incredibly, is handled with same lack of grace. The former Mrs Partridge, Carol, is not only vilified by the author’s spiteful foray into the minutiae of her affair, but also by what he claims is a passage written by her reflecting on how very wrong she’d been to behave as she did. It’s revolting. Subsequent paramour Sonja, who has been relegated to Partridge’s cleaner since she was last seen in the “post-documentary” television series I’m Alan Partridge, doesn’t fare much better, despite Partridge’s favourable (but misogynistic) comments about her physique. Meanwhile his long-suffering personal assistant, Lynn Benfield, isn’t referred to once by name despite appearing more often than anyone else in the text save for the eponymous AGP. Most hurtfully of all though, after wearing out his thesaurus producing the most sesquipedalian and saccharine account of his son Fernando’s birth, Partridge blithely notes that his daughter’s birth evoked broadly similar feelings, and leaves it at that.However, if you’re able to build up a resistance to the author’s oppressive and vindictive style, I, Partridge does illuminate certain key events in his life that weren’t covered in I’m Alan Partridge, as well as expounding on some of those that were. Partridge examines the roots of his infamous battle with obesity (which prompted two “clinically fed up” years and a barefoot drive to Dundee in a Vectra), blaming Pepsi or Shirley from Pepsi and Shirley (he can’t remember which) for getting him hooked on Toblerone, and talks frankly about his years of being sued by and counter-suing his former house band conductor, Glen Ponder, with whom he now regularly dines at Nando’s.
Some things really surprised me, such as Partridge’s reluctance to sue the BBC following its reneging on his contract to produce a further series of Knowing Me, Knowing You. Such aversion seems completely out character for Partridge; almost suspiciously so. Other things, such as the author using his book as a medium to pitch his idea for Norwich-based detective series Swallow to readers didn’t surprise me at all. If you’re interested in buying the rights to a television series based around the exploits of a seven-fingered bulimic maverick, feel free to contact Partridge through his publisher, HarperCollins.
The latter sections of the book focus on Partridge’s time spent presenting Norfolk Nights, which he describes with curious pride as being “the third best gig on Radio Norwich”, before going on to chart the station’s sale to a huge company whose owners saw fit to consign the former Skirmish presenter to a daytime slot on their newly-rebranded North Norfolk Digital station: Mid Morning Matters with Alan Partridge. Desperate to meet his word count, the author wastes more words describing how digital radio works than he does his tenuous relationship with his moonlighting sidekick, Simon Denton, but in some ways that’s a blessing as at least his Wikipedia-pinched technical ramblings are devoid of his inimitable self-centredness, if not his proclivity for product placement.
Yet I enjoyed every single page of I, Partridge. Whether its author was sharing his trenchant views on female armpit hair or vacillating wildly between love and disdain for the BBC, his shamelessly shallow musings are buoyed by a feckless charm that evokes comedy and pity in equal measure. In writing this book, TV Quick’s ‘Man of the Moment 1994’ hoped to cement his legacy as the finest ruddy presenter ever to come out of Norwich, but instead he’s unwittingly written one of the most genuinely funny books of all time. And make no mistake – we don’t laugh with Partridge; we laugh at him. If ever I’m feeling down on my luck, all I have to do is envisage the man whose only real friend in the world is Bill Oddie, and whose idea of luxury accommodation is a room in a travel tavern equidistant between London and Norwich. Partridge may have taken my £7.99 but, needless to say, I've had the last laugh.
