I, Partridge: We Need To Talk About Alan

by Alan Partridge

  So that was where Denton would come in. Not specifically for the quacking (in fact, least of all for the quacking – animal noises were a glaring weakness of his), but just to be the person whose sole job it was to bring the laughter. But my thinking was even bolder than that. I wasn’t envisaging that Denton would come and go like a weather girl or a traffic and travel person. Instead he would be by my side throughout, free to lob in a gag at literally any time.264 It would bring a real freshness to the show to have this unique comic mind chucking in dry comments the second they popped into his head.265 And a bonus: thanks to (a) the webcam and (b) his striking resemblance to Clyde from Every Which Way But Loose, even the deaf could enjoy him.

  Not that I was talking about a co-host. That would be taking it way, way, way, way, way, way, way too far. I’d already betrayed the trust of my digital devotees by introducing a sidekick at all. To go any further would have been insane. I like risk, but I’m not a dick. To make that point crystal clear I decided to enshrine his role in his on-air nickname, Sidekick Simon. His job would be to enhance the show, not to share it. Never to share it. Not ever. No, that wasn’t going to happen, pal.

  He would be the polish to my car, the buff to my shoe, the sun cream to my back. Just to be certain I was making the right decision, I consulted my assistant. She seemed unsure that a lowly lab assistant could cope in the pressure cooker atmosphere of digital local radio. This was good enough for me. I hired Denton there and then.266 At many of the pivotal points in my life I’ve found that the best way to reach a decision is to find out what a Baptist would do, then do the opposite.

  Yet ‘Sidekick Simon’s’ first show did not go well. I’d given him the perfect tee-up, advising listeners that major laughs were guaranteed: ‘If you’re standing, sit down. If you’re driving, pull over. And if you’re in a wheelchair, for god’s sake keep away from the top of the stairs.’

  In the event I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. Denton didn’t just let me down, he let himself down too. He was riddled with nerves, his usually hilarious asides turning into little more than muttered rubbish. I’d advised to him to have a couple of drinks before he came on, to loosen himself up a bit. But he hadn’t. He said he didn’t want to start drinking when it wasn’t even ten o’clock. I was absolutely furious. It was so unprofessional.

  Time after time I was forced to intervene and send my audience into fits of uncontrollable laughter after another one of Denton’s gags had fallen horribly flat. It was easy enough for me to do this, but that wasn’t the point. That night I thanked my lucky stars that the Wisbech nuclear scenario had not come to pass. I’d had an incredibly lucky escape.

  We limped on for the rest of the week, but on Sunday I told him to meet me for brunch. It was a session we’d go on to repeat many times in the future. I’d canter in with the Sundays under my arm and plonk myself down by the fire. There’d always be a tussle over the motoring section, which I would invariably win, either through brute force or just by invoking the Paper Purchaser’s Prerogative (my capitals, my whole phrase actually). Yet this particularly Sunday, it was serious. It was time for showdown talks.

  I made my position clear. The nerves had to be dealt with. He was free to do as he wished at the weekends, but as long as he was appearing on my weekday show, I needed to know that he had been drinking. I obviously wasn’t going to enforce this with a daily breathaliser test (couldn’t get hold of a breathaliser) but, believe me, I would just know.

  Happily it was a solution that seemed to work. He got over his nerves and I survived with my reputation intact. Other than those moments when I have either punched or shot people live on air, the name Alan Partridge has come to be a byword for broadcasting excellence, and I didn’t want that to be compromised.

  Denton’s morning drinking did end up costing him his driving licence, but despite his incessant moaning both he and I knew that he could still make it into the station by using as few as three buses. While he and his fellow passengers could just sit back and effectively be chauffeured into work, the rest of us had to undergo the daily headache of changing gear, looking in our mirrors and turning the steering wheel.

  I liked having a sidekick, though. It was a rush. It took me back to my days at hospital radio. I didn’t have a wingman as such, but we used to do a feature where any child that was recovering from an operation could be wheeled down to the studio. They’d pick a few songs and read the traffic and travel (subject to their voice having the requisite clarity and authority). It was a really lovely part of the show actually. And while the music played they’d have the chance to tuck into Alan’s Cookie Jar (a ‘biscuit barrel’ in old money). Of course, kids will never say no to a sugary treat, so they used to love this, though I did have a strict rule of no more than two biscuits per child. The last thing they needed was to be brought back into hospital the next month for a gastric band or a filling.

  Plus, they didn’t come cheap. It’s not like biscuits grow on trees (note to self: possible film idea). You might think that buying a bag of broken bourbons from Norwich market doesn’t cost much, and you’d be right, but when it goes on for week after week after week, the financial burden can become pretty crippling. If they’d served a medical purpose I would have turned a blind eye, but with the best will in the world, it’s not like biscuits can heal broken bones (note to self: possible film idea).

  Denton and I became moderately firm friends outside of work too. Despite being a lab assistant he was actually an okay guy. His B in chemistry, C in biology and B in physics (all at GCSE) had left him with some pretty amazing knowledge. The speed at which he could tell you the colour any given metal would turn a Bunsen burner flame was nothing short of incredible. As I found out one memorable night in the pub …

  ‘Barium?’

  ‘Light green.’

  ‘Potassium?’

  ‘Lilac.’

  ‘Sodium?’ This is me asking the questions, by the way.

  ‘Orange.’ And that’s Denton answering.

  ‘Calcium?’ Me again.

  ‘Brick red.’ Denton again.

  Of course he could have been lying. After all it’s not always easy to trust the bearded. Not since Peter Sutcliffe anyway. I find it’s easier to trust a man with a moustache. In modern times those with upper lip coverage seem to have been pretty good eggs, with the exception of Saddam Hussein, Joseph Stalin, Adolf you-know-who and several others. Freddie Mercury seemed alright, though, despite his tendencies, ahem!

  Denton is no longer my sidekick of course.267 The trajectory of our working relationship – from strangers-in-pub to partners-in-crime in six days – was clearly unsustainable, and so it proved.

  I felt that Denton began to develop ideas above his station. Don’t misunderstand me – I wasn’t expecting him to pucker up each morn and kiss my rump, but I would have liked a little loyalty and gratitude. Sadly, these basic Partridgian values are commodities – like Sterling, or leaded petrol – that the public has deemed dispensable in recent years.

  The warning signs appeared when Denton began to turn up late. On North Norfolk Digital, this ain’t on. (I still have the internal memo that makes that very point.)

  Me, I have a routine. Although my show doesn’t start until 10am, I try to get to McDonald’s for 7 (otherwise you don’t get the booth by the window) with a pencil and pad. Before I do anything, I work out the tracklisting for the show and come up with scripted chat that I’ll pass off as spontaneous quipping when I flag in the final hour of the slot.

  A couple of coffees and seven hash browns later, I’m in the toilets putting my shirt back on after a good wash before brushing my teeth and grabbing another coffee on the way out. I’m beeping my horn outside Denton’s flat no later than 8.50am.

  Within weeks of being granted sidekickhood, Denton’s punctuality became a problem. He’d keep me waiting for two, sometimes three, minutes, before rolling into the car without a word of apology. His foul breath told me he’d recently woken and the cakey oran
ge build-up in the corners of his eyes was a sure-fire sign that waking early and/or washing had not been on his to-do list.

  I said nothing of course, preferring to make clear my disdain on air – by quelling my laughter, talking over him or making him explain his ‘jokes’ in great detail.

  I’m a forgiving man – I even returned a prized album of family photos to Carol after she left, going as far as gluing the torn shreds back together with Bostik and drawing in bits that had been lost – but I felt that Denton was pushing his luck enormously here.

  The final betrayal, when it came, was still a shock. I was woken one night by a text from my assistant. ‘Emergency,’ it began, but then it always does. ‘NND now. Not home.’

  I ignored the message, temporarily forgetting that when she texts ‘home’, she more often than not means ‘good’. I am continually staggered by her failure to grasp T9 predictive text, despite having used it for a decade.

  So it wasn’t until the following day that I realised the news was bad, and that I would be bidding ‘home’ riddance to my sidekick in a matter of weeks.

  Turns out Denton had been moonlighting for Bedtime with Branning, supplying wry observations and wacky character-led monologues to a presumably bemused late-night audience.

  Well, this was a clatter in the chops! Bang! I mean, I’d not demanded that Denton sign an exclusivity agreement, as his humour seemed so suited to mid-morning, but even without a legally binding contract, I’d have thought it obvious that he was mine.

  Apparently not. And so with the relationship visibly curdling by the hour, we limped on for another few weeks, before we decided to call it a day.268

  His departure gave the show a new lease a life – you’d have to be deaf not to recognise that – and my listeners were grateful that they were getting more Alan in their mid-morning diet. I pledged never to allow a sidekick to eclipse, obscure or impinge ever again. I’ve stuck to that pledge too – although, on occasions, I’ve shared mic-space with a girl whose name, I think, was Zoe.

  And what of Denton? Well, we bumped into each other in the King’s Arms three weeks ago, eyeing each other warily from across the bar, peeking out now and then from behind a strip of Scampi Fries.

  With them in my eye-line, it was inevitable that I’d buy a packet and, once opened, I offered one to the woman I was having a drink with.

  ‘Would you like one Scampi Fry?’ I asked.

  ‘Just one?!’ she replied, greedily eyeing up my full bag of fish crunches. It may be that she’d forgotten that taking more than one would almost certainly compromise her appetite, which wasn’t really on given that I was buying dinner.

  But no sooner had she eaten her Scampi Fry than Denton piped up with a joke about her having ‘fishy fingers’.

  On the face of it, it pertained to the distinctive aroma of scampi, but Denton and I both knew it had vaginal overtones. And while the woman was unimpressed, Denton and I fell about. It was a reminder of what genuinely good comedy sounds like and we’ve been fairly inseparable since then. In a recent raffle, I won an afternoon driving saloon cars around Brands Hatch and Denton has asked if he can come and watch.

  And when the day comes, I might swing round to his place and pick him up. Yes, I think I will.

  259 Press play on Track 41.

  260 Love that noise.

  261 The Terminator, for example. Or Metal Mickey.

  262 North Norfolk’s best music mix.

  263 North Norfolk.

  264 Provided he had first sought permission from me.

  265 So long as he’d run the ideas past me during the previous song.

  266 Unpaid.

  267 Press play on Track 42.

  268 I basically just stopped picking him up.

  Chapter 34

  Hanging Up the Headphones

  EVERYONE HAS A SHELF-LIFE – whether they’re a finely tuned athlete, a surrogate mother, or a lady newsreader. Disc jockeys are no exceptions.

  The last thing you want to do is plough on long past your sell-by date, trading on past glories (Simon Mayo) or pretending to like classical music (Simon Bates). The dignified approach is to recognise when your magic is gone, and serenely slip away, having negotiated a handsome severance package and delivered a stinging broadside against younger DJs and station controllers (also Simon Bates to be fair).

  I’m perpetually analysing my relevance and fitness for purpose, angrily quizzing my assistant on the quality of each day’s show and sending tapes to Denise and Fernando to flag up anything that sounds dated or fogey-like. So far nothing has come back.

  But sometimes there are whispers, nagging doubts, worries. I’m a human being – a good one, but human nonetheless – and the creeping concern that I am outstaying my welcome has lived alongside me in recent years, like a quiet wife or a sidelined application for planning permission.

  This has taken on new badness in recent months, culminating in a bounce-back to where I was before I bounced back. I found myself walking through the valley of no confidence towards the desert of deep despair.

  You see recently there have been whispers that the Partridge is past it. Naturally the naysayers haven’t had the testes to say this to my face, but you can just sense these things. Plus I’ve had my assistant sit behind them in the staff canteen and listen in to their conversations.

  From whence did these hushed conversations arise, you ask (or at least, I do)? Well, it was all triggered by an incident in May. Craig Kilty, aka The Monster, a DJ from rival station Orbital Digital, had tricked his way into my studio and duped me into saying the words ‘I listen to Orbital Digital.’ Far from this being a clever publicity stunt, however, most people just ended up thinking he had learning difficulties. Which to my mind, he definitely does.

  Yet it seemed that the chattering classes around North Norfolk Digital had seen it differently. To them it was a sign that I was letting my guard down, that I was losing my hunger, my sharpness, my ‘joie de broadcast’. Of course this was cobblers/fucking bullshit. But it still needed answering, and the only way to do that was to stage the kind of one-off radio event that people would be talking about for a generation, certainly in my household anyway. Which is how I came up with the idea of ‘Mid-Morning Matters, mid-air’.

  Whoosh! Legs together, arms by my sides, I shoot up into the air, my body spiralling like a drill bit. ‘Shiiiiit!’ I scream in terror as my beloved Norfolk disappears beneath me. Up I go, higher and higher, climbing like a bird (that flies vertically). Two feet, three feet, four. God knows how many Gs I’m pulling.

  Then suddenly the ascent seems to stall. ‘Norwich, we have a problem,’ I quip, deep inside my own head. But of course we don’t have a problem. It’s just Old Lady Gravity getting her way. (She always does in the end, the bitch.) And so here I go, beginning my long descent back to earth. Four feet, three feet, two. As I gather speed, my side parting lifts off my scalp. ‘I can fly!’ it must be thinking. How wrong it is. How wrong it is.

  And then – ka-boom! – 13 stone, 8 ounces269 of pure Alan Partridge crashes down into the forgiving embrace of soft, inflated plastic. A broad Cheshire cheese smile lights up my face. I really do love a bouncy castle.

  It’s August 2011 and you join me at the annual Fun Day of North Norfolk Digital.270 A million miles away from our dark, cramped studios, the Fun Days are all about glitz and glamour as we broadcast live from a large field or car park. It’s a rare chance for us radio professionals to do our stuff in front of a real-life audience, and I for one love it. Reading the travel news into an unresponsive studio mic is one thing, but announcing a tailback on the A47 while staring deep into the eyes of a local granny as she nervously tries to calculate the implications for her journey home? Well you can’t beat it.

  I like to spice things up with a gimmick too. Last year I broadcast wearing a full suit of armour (hot, but worth it). The year before I didn’t do anything. (I was going to dress up as David Beckham, but in the end I didn’t as I was in a bad mood on the d
ay.) And this year, I’ve trumped the lot. A first for digital radio anywhere in Norfolk,271 I’ve decided that part of my show will take place mid-air, as I catapult myself up and down on a bouncy castle.

  People have tried to talk me out of it of course – some concerned that the jumping will compromise sound quality, others believing (wrongly) that the castle is only for the use of under-10s. But there’s no way I was going to be dissuaded, because this year of all years, with rumours circulating that I’m past it, I need to make my mark.

  A few practice leaps have banished the nerves that kept me awake for much of the night. And as I look out into the small but high-quality crowd I can feel myself basking in the warm glow of relative confidence. I breathlessly clamber aboard the castle (having first removed my shoes) and quickly scare away any remaining children. Yet barely have I finished my first mid-air ‘Hello, Norfolk!’, than things go horribly, catastrophically wrong.

  As I reach the high point of my first ascent, I can just make out something odd going on below. A grubby man has rushed forward and is shoving the castle out of the way. Suddenly there’s nothing to cushion my fall but cold, hard car park. My whole life flashes before me (it really would make a good film).272 But before I crash to earth I notice who the perpetrator is. It’s none other than my DJing nemesis, Dave Clifton.

  With an hour to kill before opening time he’s clearly decided to come and make mischief. Yet this time he has badly miscalculated. What he is attempting won’t just leave me a bit red-faced, there is every chance it could lead to paralysis on a truly Perry Masonesque scale. And there is no way I am prepared to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair, even though I have always been curious about the turning circles of the motorised ones.