Partridge, Alan

by I, Partridge We Need to Talk About Alan

  There were other reasons why Christmas alone was enjoyable too but I can’t remember them at the moment.

  Besides, bugger all that, I had a TV show to make!

  I had been given a chance of redemption – a Christmas special of KMKY which had been agreed as part of the initial series commission. And with the internal inquiry into the regrettable death of Forbes McAllister still ongoing, I had yet to be deemed culpable of anything.

  The upshot: the BBC was duty bound to honour my contract and broadcast Knowing Me Knowing Yule. Not that this was the only consideration. I’d argued strongly that we must respect the memory of Forbes and plough on. We owed it to him to treat his death with the tact and decorum it deserved. Besides, I’m confident the Beeb would have wanted an hour-long special from me anyway. I’d proved myself over the course of Knowing Me Knowing You to be someone who makes television as unmissable as Forbes McAllister’s aorta.

  So, for all my domestic problems, I had to push on. Carol had left on Christmas Eve 1995. Knowing Me Knowing Yule was to be broadcast five days later. Bring it on, as American peacekeeping soldiers scream when given backchat by unarmed natives.

  The knowledge I could switch from the bony chest of my wife to the fleshy welcoming bosom of the British viewing public provided sweet, sweet, sweet succour.

  Emotionally, I’d invested a great deal in the success of the show. And nothing was going to go wrong.126 I spent Christmas Day alone, practising my musical number again and again and again until I my throat swelled up and I couldn’t fit Christmas pudding down it.

  The show was conceived by me as a kind of televised mulled-wine-and-mince-pies party that would take place in an exact studio mock-up of my house.127 There’d be guests milling around, food being cooked, an air of festive cheer and three lovelies dressed as Mother Christmas. (Bit misleading that. They were basically models dressed in Santa outfits, on stand-by to hand out mulled wine and mince pies.128 It’s wrong to call them ‘mothers’. There’s no way any of them had been through pregnancy or suckled young. You could tell that from their bodies.)

  And yes, we did have some last-minute gremlins. We had an eleventh-hour panic sourcing wheelchair ramps for [CHECK]-aplegic former golfer Gordon Heron, while star guest Raquel Welch cancelled three hours before we went live. Far from knocking me off course this provided a much-needed emotional outlet, as I was able to spend 30 minutes venting down the phone to her. I spewed all my bile into Raquel’s delicate ear, sometimes confusing her name with that of my ex-wife, sometimes not. Referring to her appearance in One Million Years BC, I called her a historically inaccurate sexy bikini sex woman, spitting that dinosaurs had long since been extinct before the arrival of admittedly sexy hunter-gatherer cavemen’s girlfriends that she’d played.

  Still! We still had a great show lined up. The now permanent chief commissioning editor for BBC TV Tony Hayers was going to come and chat, we had bell ringers, the world’s biggest Christmas cracker, TV chef Peter Willis,129 a sexy trio of models I called Christmas Crackers and Mick Hucknall had agreed to perform because he was, in his words, ‘trying to bang one of them’.

  An appealing line-up certainly. And yes, there were a few glitches, but most of them occurred in the final four minutes of the show, and so I’m still satisfied that we produced a piece of high-quality television.

  Admittedly, I left the studio a little shaken and with a hurt hand – but my spirits were up. As I’d walked on set that day I had no inkling whatsoever as to what a seminal moment this was. It would be my last show on BBC television.

  I won’t dwell on what happened other than to say our attempt to enter the Guinness Book of Records by pulling the world’s biggest ever cracker went wrong due to the unbelievably shoddy workmanship of its makers, White City Pyrotechnics.130

  That upset me to a disproportionate degree. One thing led to another and I ended up punching a golfing cripple in the face after he’d made an off-colour joke at my expense, and then responding to Tony Hayers’s have-a-go intervention by belting him a couple of times too. But the rest of the show was nothing like that.

  In retrospect, I’d taken my eye off the ball and allowed certain boundaries of acceptable behaviour to become blurred. I know – of course I know – that punching a wheelchair-bound former golfer in the face with a turkey-encased fist was wrong, just as twatting a BBC executive, twice, is inadvisable.131 But I was operating on about four hours’ sleep since Christmas Eve and I had set myself and the show unrealistically high standards.

  But let’s not get hysterical. Some people assume it’s always wrong to smash a cripple in the face. But is it? Let me paint a hypothesis: what if the cripple, like the Jackal from ‘Day of the’ fame, actually had a false leg and was using a hollowed prosthetic limb to hide a specially adapted American bolt action Savage 120 rifle. What then? Is he still off-limits, fist-wise? I’m not saying Gordon Heron was an assassin necessarily. But you can see the point I’m making.

  What if Osama bin Laden had been in a wheelchair when crack US forces entered his compound and, with no concern for their safety, bravely shot him in the head and neck? Similarly, a Zimmer frame could easily be four tommy guns in disguise with fake rubber feet on the bottom which the bullet could pass through once the Zimmer was aimed horizontally. What if he had one of them? Yes, there’d be an outcry from disabled pressure groups but would his killing have been wrong? It’s not black and white. I’m just saying, sometimes – sometimes – not to hit a man in a wheelchair is an abrogation of responsibility as member of the public or the US military.

  Besides, the realisation mid-broadcast that certain participants were attempting to sabotage the show had got on my wick so, yes, I responded. I make no apology for that. I was like a wounded animal. If you step up to me, you better brace your ass for a genuine smackdown. They stepped, I smacked. Down.

  I couldn’t face going home. So after unwinding with a few halves of bitter, I spent the night with Glen Ponder. The next day I felt much happier.

  Some of the next day’s reviews focused far too much on the final few minutes – and those that didn’t each contained the phrase ‘self-serving’ or ‘vanity project’. I found these comments deeply offensive. People132 had asked to know more about my background and to find out who the real Alan was – if there’s something vain or self-serving about spending £29,000133 creating an exact replica of the inside of my home so that people gain a better understanding of me and my life, then guilty!!

  Hayers, who required emergency dental treatment which I was happy to pay for, was needlessly off with me in the days after the show. He was angry that I’d invited him on to the show as a guest to, as he called it, ambush him into recommissioning KMKY. Nothing could have been further from my mind.

  He was also angry that I’d punched him in the face.

  I left messages with his PA to say I’d booked us in at a Pizza Express so I could buy him lunch to say sorry. I didn’t hear back so I thought I’d better go anyway on the off-chance a message hadn’t been relayed to me. He wasn’t there, but fine. I wanted a pizza and tiramisu anyway, so it wasn’t as if I was going especially for that. That would be sad and I’m not/wasn’t.

  It wasn’t a big deal, to be honest, because I’d already started thinking that I didn’t want to be on BBC TV any more so it was fine.

  Three weeks later I received a letter from Raquel Welch’s lawyer instructing me not to contact her ever again. And that was fine too.

  124 Press play on Track 25.

  125 A brilliant marching song, up there with ‘Road to Nowhere’ by Talking Heads and ‘Portsmouth’ by Mike Oldfield.

  126 But brace yourself for the fact that it does.

  127 An idea subsequently stolen, wholesale, by Jimmy Hill’s Sunday Supplement.

  128 Not beef mince.

  129 Now the Michelin-starred chef-proprietor of Just Willis, but at the time suffering his own psychological meltdown which manifested itself in him appearing as transvestite Fanny Thomas. This
is a period of his life about which he is deeply, deeply embarrassed, and if you meet the guy for god’s sake don’t bring it up. Much like Tom Robinson, he’s now sorted himself out and has a couple of kids. He’s left his homosexual days behind him and now does nothing more gay than shop for antique furniture. Good on you, Fanny! Oops! I mean Peter! ;-)

  130 The company no longer exists, but its owners James Judd and Tony Dee have set up Greenacres, a chain of care homes for the elderly which I urge you not to use – even if it’s the only one in your area and your parents have become a real handful, toilet-wise.

  131 Although god knows they need thumping now and then.

  132 A class of schoolchildren aged 8–9 years old.

  133 In real terms, less than a woodwork teacher would have got in the 70s.

  Chapter 17

  Return to Norwich

  IF THE BBC THOUGHT I was going to sit around waiting for them to mull over a second series or have yet more ‘meetings’ or conclude a criminal investigation into a man’s death, they had another thing coming.

  If a shark stops moving, he perishes. If I stop broadcasting on the TV or radio, well I don’t know what happens because I’ve never let it come to pass. Probably not death but something pretty unpleasant – like glandular fever or the mumps!

  I needed to work, so I approached Nick Peacock, then head of Radio Norwich, at a charity gypsy fight. Nick’s a larger-than-life134 character but I saw him as a heck of an admirable guy. He was beset by hygiene issues135 but his indomitable spirit and enormous wealth had enabled him to achieve a marriage.

  It’s true what the Bible says, I mused to myself on their wedding day: beauty really is only skin deep. I mean, Carol Smillie is beautiful but blanks me every time she sees me and has a habit of tutting when I speak. Meanwhile, Anne Diamond is one of the nicest people I’ve met.

  So I was pleased that even Nick could find someone. It reminded me of the relationship between Catherine Zeta-Jones (incredibly beautiful) and Michael Douglas (looks like a grey crow).

  Anyway, Nick was helming Radio Norwich and had always been a pretty solid guy. So in between bouts, Nick and I found a quiet corner of the warehouse and I broached the subject of returning to Radio Norwich, in a role over and above and away from my erstwhile sports brief.

  Sports reporting had been fun – I think I mentioned the evening I spent with Gunnell – but my horizons had broadened. People now looked to me to provide a much fuller ‘broadcast experience’.136 Merely providing award-winning snippets of sporting headlines would have left them short-changed and angry.

  No, I’d lanced the all-rounder bubble, and the pus of mainstream acclaim had been all that it emitted – any sport that had been around had scabbed up and dropped off. I said to him, ‘Nick, what can I do?’

  He said, ‘Do what you want.’137

  Bloody hell, I thought. This is ideal. Nick wants me to do it, the listeners want me to do it, I want to do it.

  ‘Oh, I’m not sure the listeners want you to do it,’ he said. (I’d thought it out loud.) ‘But tits to all that, I’m sure we can sort something out.’

  It was such a refreshing attitude, I agreed to re-138 sign there and then.139 Listeners are important, certainly, but automatically placing them on some kind of raised plinth (or ‘pedestal’) is tiresome. Sometimes people need to put the DJs first.

  Nick was ballsy. He’d been in charge of the big revamp of Radio Norwich, which to the naked eye comprised of a new aluminium handrail by the steps, and a slightly bigger sans-serif font on the signage. He said there was much more to it than that and said he’d overseen a major organisational restructure which I wouldn’t understand. Try me, I said, and he reeled off some high-falutin corporate speak which I won’t bore you with now but which I did understand.

  There were plenty of familiar faces still at Radio Norwich and I was confident I’d be welcomed back by the guys there. No one had had a problem with me when I left the station back in 1991.140 In fact, I’d seen some of them in bars and restaurants in Norwich during my chat show heyday and I’d frequently arrange for a glass of wine and an autographed napkin to be sent over, which I’d then acknowledge with a smile and a nod.141 That was something I didn’t have to do. But I did because at the end of the day I’m a good guy. As my mother used to say: it’s nice to be important but it’s more important to be nice. FYI – she was neither.

  Don’t get me wrong, I knew that there’d be the odd snide comment from people who think that a two-and-a-half-hour radio show five days a week is – I’m laughing as I write this – somehow a step down from presenting a half-hour TV talk show once a week (12.5 hours of weekly output, versus 0.5 hours). But there are idiots in all walks of life.

  No, I wasn’t worried about being welcomed back into the fold. Employees at a London station like LBC or Radio London or London FM might have been a bit sniffy about it, but people in Norwich are warmer-of-heart than their bitter London counterparts with their negative-equity and their stab wounds.

  No, I wasn’t worried about being welcomed back into the fold.142 I was fully prepared to be the big man and chat to each employee individually to ensure there were no hard feelings, so I made sure I sidled up to each member of the team – in the kitchenette, outside the lavs, jogging after them in the car park. I was making the effort and it paid off. At the end of each of these conversations, I said: ‘Right, point blank. Do you like me?’ And they all said yes.

  It was good to be back. I was pleased that I wasn’t making television programmes. I was happy. This was good and I liked it. In short, I was glad to be back working for the radio station I’d been at five years earlier.

  Had things changed at Radio Norwich in the time I’d been away? Not a great deal. While a few of the faces were different, the people who owned them were the same. By that I mean, the intervening years hadn’t been kind. For example, the girls on reception had sagged in the jowls a little and while I’d flirted with them in the past,143 it didn’t seem appropriate any more. But apart from the onset of ageing, I was pleased to see that the ethos, the spirit and the playlist of Radio Norwich were all exactly the same.

  Nick and I fell out shortly afterwards. I’d asked for – and been given – the breakfast show. Done deal, shake of hands, my press release written. So when, just a couple of days before launch, I bumped into the incumbent brek-jock – a journeyman DJ called Dave Clifton – outside Oddbins, I commiserated in that hollow, plastic way that passes for friendship in the media.

  ‘Bad break, mate,’ I chirped. ‘Good luck in what remains of your career.’

  Dave frowned as he loaded his cans into the boot of his car, and claimed he wasn’t going anywhere, mate. I told him I’d been given the breakfast show and he sniggered in a way that made me want to thump him in the guts.

  ‘Depends what time you eat breakfast,’ he laughed and drove away, wine bottles clinking in the boot like the laughter of a glass-throated child.

  Nick (his skin now cloaked in a bumpy rash as a result of work-related stress and a wholly inadequate hygiene routine) had reneged on his deal – rendering him dead to me then and always – and had slotted me into the early morning show. Providing classic hits, news, weather and chat from 4.30 to 7am was by no means a bad gig but it wasn’t the flagship vehicle I’d been dangled. I confronted Nick in a corridor and told him he was making a massive mistake. ‘You’re making a massive mistake,’ I said.

  He mumbled something about upsetting the listeners and scurried off, but I followed him down the corridor. ‘The listeners? Remember what you said? “Tits to all that, I’m sure we can sort something out! Tits to all that, I’m sure we can sort something out! Tits to all that, I’m sure we can sort something out! Tits to all that, I’m sure we can sort something out!”’

  I’d followed him to studio 2, bamboozling him by placing the emphasis on a different word each time, and continued bellowing it for a while before I realised that Emily Boyce was in there doing the weather. She covered the m
icrophone and said ‘Do you mind?’

  Realising my error, I gasped a sexual swearword. Although still hoarse with anger, I must admit I was deeply embarrassed by that. But I’m pleased to say Emily and I became firm friends and I never dropped the Fuck-bomb over her bulletins again.

  Nick and I are no longer close – in fact I was delighted when I learnt that he wasn’t invited to Fernando’s wedding.144 He left the station with a stress-related illness and I’m glad. I’m told that he’s lost a lot of weight, but at a rate that made you think twice about complimenting him on it because it was more likely to have been the consequence of a serious illness. Again, glad.

  Up With the Partridge – again, the name Alan’s Show was vetoed by people who think they know my own output better than I do – proved to be nowhere near as depressing as expected.

  To be fair, the demographic was a real melting pot: farmers, taxi drivers, new mums at their wits’ end, fishermen, late-night returning ravers, and the disturbed people for whom darkness brought only despair. That gave the show a really spontaneous feel.

  On my insistence, we conducted audience research, using a survey that I designed, which turned out to be chock-full of insights and learnings. In fact, the findings directly shaped my show. With the majority of Norfolk owning or having access to a telephone, it seemed utter folly not to build the show around a phone-in feature. Similarly, we learnt that a daily feature in which we asked aviation fans to call in with sightings of RAF training exercises was causing distress to the families of servicemen and consternation among RAF top brass who argued that it had serious security implications. I thought that was a bit precious. But after 18 months, Scramble! was quietly dropped. This was agile, responsive radio and I was its pioneer.