Partridge, Alan

by I, Partridge We Need to Talk About Alan

  I began to fall in love with broadcasting all over again. And in a funny, kooky, zany kinda way I think it fell in love with me again too.

  I may have been back at the exact same station, in the exact same building, at the exact same desk (the ergonomics needed work), but I was in no doubt that I was on a steep upward career trajectory.

  Helming my own show, with neither the limitations of a sports-only remit nor the self-serving irritation of studio guests, was a challenge as new and fresh as an egg salad. This time, I set the agenda. It was me and my personality and, as I’ve been blessed with a superb personality, it translated into shit-hot radio.

  For the first time, I was also at the controls when it came to selecting music. I knew that soundtracking my listeners’ early mornings was a major responsibility – music is a powerful emotional catalyst, and research suggests that people are at their most irritable between five and six in the morning. I was playing with fire. If my listeners were anything like me, hearing a sub-par song on the radio before breakfast could see them slamming cupboard doors in the kitchen, scrubbing themselves down with bodywash a bit too aggressively, or shouting at the assistant on the carphone. And I was buggered if my music was going to damage cupboard hinges, torso skin, or carphone cradles – all of which I value enormously.

  The knowledge that I was the conductor of my listener’s mood saw me gemming up on what ‘quality music’ meant. I’d spend hours in HMVs, Virgin Megastores and second-hand record shops staffed by greasy-haired 40-year-olds dressed as 20-year-olds, listening to contemporary music of every genre – Britrock, heavy maiden, gang rap, brakebeat. And I came to a startling but unshakeable conclusion: no genuinely good music has been created since 1988.

  The relief was, as Americans say, freaking awesome. The death of music on or before the release of Arthur 2: On the Rocks meant I was freed from the obligation of keeping up to date with contemporary music trends. Instead, I could continually revisit music that embodied an era of Thatcher, Hot Hatches and men who looked like girls – Bowie, Strange, Le Bon, Ant (not of ‘and Dec’ fame).

  I also knew I couldn’t just play music and read out the song title and artist – I wasn’t Mark Goodier for goodness sake. I needed to speak good as well. Having learnt a lot from my time in London and on TV, I knew if I was going to become the very best disc jockey there was, I couldn’t rest on these considerable laurels. After all, Caesar didn’t rest on his, he wore them on his head. Same with Hadrian. Would he have built his fantastic wall had he been sat on the aforementioned decorative headwear? I think not!

  I wasn’t nervous. Some people thought I was nervous but I wasn’t nervous. Nervous? Of what?! So no, not nervous. I just knew I had to put the graft in.

  And what graft! I’d shadow my colleagues, sitting in on other shows to pick up tips, learn techniques or take ideas wholesale – on one occasion staying at the studios for two days straight until I began to hallucinate during the traffic report of my third show without sleep and jumped into a bank of monitors to avoid a motorbike.

  I roped my assistant in as well, instructing her to scour long-wave radio for far-flung stations, and then tape entire shows – pausing whenever a record was played and then unpausing on the song outro – so that she could present me at the end of each week with an audio dossier of continental broadcast trends.

  Invariably, I didn’t have the time to listen to them – of course I didn’t – but I know she enjoyed being involved, even if she could only tune into most LW stations by standing on a box and holding the radio out of an upstairs window.

  In summary, then, I was becoming a better all-round broadcaster day by day. This bit could even be cut into a montage and set to music145 like the training sequence in a Rocky or Karate Kid movie, albeit with less physical exertion.

  134 Fat.

  135 See previous footnote.

  136 My phrase.

  137 He’s my cousin.

  138 The hyphen here is crucial. Totally different word without it. Totally different.

  139 Press play on Track 26.

  140 I’d stood up in a meeting and said, ‘If any of you people have got a problem with me, tell me now.’ And no one did, which proves they didn’t.

  141 I’d seen Gary Davies do this to a group of 10 air hostesses in a Travelodge near Luton in 1990. Next morning, he told me he’d later slept with every single one of them. [CHECK]

  142 I know I’ve used this sentence twice in as many paragraphs but I do want to make the point that no, I wasn’t worried about being welcomed back into the fold.

  143 ‘Is it me or is it hot in here??’ (if they were wearing a particularly revealing top) or ‘I’m going to have to report you two. You’re looking so lovely you’re distracting people from their work!’ (mock anger).

  144 I wasn’t either.

  145 Press play on Track 27.

  Chapter 18

  Linton Travel Tavern

  NOT A LOT OF people know this, but in 1997 I spent 183 nights in a Travel Tavern. To the best of my knowledge this remains the fourth longest period of unbroken residency in a British hotel by any non-OAP.

  Carol and her non-Gallic sex-chum had by now returned to my marital home, so I needed to get out. Awaiting news of a second series from the BBC while simultaneously needing to fulfil commitments to Radio Norwich, meant that Linton Travel Tavern seemed an obvious choice.

  It was situated in the sweet spot between London and Norwich, the perineum between the two metropoles at the Eastern rump of England. To say that it was exactly equidistant between the two wouldn’t be quite true – that honour belongs to JCC Wholesale Butchers on the industrial estate behind Mount Pleasant Road. (And no, they won’t offer wholesale rates to passing members of the public.)

  Now when you go long-term in a comfortable mid-range hotel, choice of room is paramount. This isn’t just a spot to lay your head for a couple of nights. This, my friends, is your house. So when I ended up with Room 28 I could not have been happier. Far enough from the centre of the corridor not to get piddled off by the incessant clickety-clack of the lift shaft, yet close enough to the fire exit to make it out alive if Al-Qaeda embarked on a repeat performance of their still-yet-to-happen American atrocity, albeit on a slightly smaller scale. Yes, if things went belly-up, it really was a beaut. And that’s before you’d looked out of the window …

  ‘Oh my god!’ I yelled at the top of my voice the first time I’d stopped to take in the vista. For a kick-off, no other room in the hotel could match it for unimpeded views of the A11. At any time of the day or night I could pull back my curtains and give you an accurate update on the traffic situation in either direction.146 Of course for a road-user such as myself this was manna from heaven. Never again would I be at the mercy of tailbacks. If I saw the traffic was slow moving I’d set off early. If not, at the normal time. It’s hard to put a price on that kind of up-to-the-minute intelligence. As it happened the traffic was never an issue for me (my show started at 4.30am), but that’s hardly the point.

  One of the most special things about going native in a Travel Tavern was how well-designed the rooms were. Everything you needed was so close at hand. It was like all the best bits of living in a deluxe house but without the constant, endless hassle of having to move between rooms.

  Think about it. Within that one bedroom you had a dining room (the bed), a lounge (the bed), a study (the desk), a meeting room (the bed and the desk), and even a gym (the gap between the bed and the wall). With a nightly routine consisting of press-ups, squat thrusts and shadow boxing, I don’t think I’ve ever been so fit, certainly not while staying in a hotel anyway.147

  In my last year living with Carol, Anglian Water had (against my will) moved us from a flat rate on to a water meter. To be honest I think they took one look at how clean I liked to keep my car and just saw dollar signs. On the other hand they were moving everyone in the county on to water meters so perhaps it wasn’t a pre-mediated act of anti-Alanism. I guess we’ll never, eve
r know. When you’ve been at the top and people perceive you to be not at the top any more, they often try to kick you when you’re down.

  I mention this because one of the other big boons of hotel life was the fact that water was free. I could use as much as I pleased. And believe me, I pleased. I’d often fill the bath, get in, then put the shower on too. It was like swimming in the sea during a tropical downpour. I called it my ‘Caribbean soak’. Bliss.

  If I was feeling like a challenge, I’d kick out the plug, turn the taps on and see if I could maintain the exact water level. It was like balancing the clutch in an old Mini Metro. Although tricky at first, by the time I checked out I could find the bath’s biting point within three minutes. Satisfying? Just a bit.

  Then there was the food in this place. Goodness me. Why not treat yourself to three restaurant meals a day? I know I did. Although on some occasions I was just too busy in my room – waylaid on an important business call, prepping the next day’s show, watching Emmerdale – to go down for dinner. In which case I was able to improvise. Don’t forget that every room had a kettle. That instantly opened the door to everything from cup-a-soups to Pot Noodles. Combine the kettle with the refrigerated mini-bar and – wallop – you’ve got yourself jelly.

  But if kettle cuisine wasn’t good enough for you, there were other in-room options too. At one point I smuggled in a microwave, though annoyingly the game was up within a week. A passing member of staff had been alerted by its unusually loud ding (a common failing of many of the newer Sanyos). I normally muffled the sound by wrapping it in my duvet and lying on top but on this occasion I’d forgotten, distracted by a cracking pile-up on the A11 eastbound (guesstimated fatalities: four, excluding livestock).

  I tried to claim I wasn’t using the microwave to prepare food. But they refused to believe that I only had it there to speed-dry hand-washed undies. You win some, you lose some.

  One meal I’d always dine out for (out of my room, not out of the hotel) was breakfast. It was an all-you-can-eat affair, which was magnificent, but that wasn’t the only draw. Every so often they’d have a chef out front making omelettes to order. Now I’ve always been pro-egg, but even by my standards this woman was good. She could turn out an omelette that wouldn’t have disgraced itself on the tables of The Ritz, Little Chef, any of those places.

  You had to get there early for Omelette Tuesdays, though, because after a while the quality pretty much fell off a cliff. Linda, the chef, was quite old and to be honest after cooking about twenty I think it all got a bit much for her. If you got there any time after seven thirty, the passion had just gone from her eyes. It was an incredibly sad sight.

  A member of staff once told me that things had started to go wrong a few years ago when the fad for free-range foods came in. Linda just wasn’t into it. Apparently when it came to eggs she had some sort of ideological objection to paying more than 6p a unit. Like I say, very, very sad.148

  One person stands out from my eight-month Travel Tavern residency.149 A chap by the name of Michael. He was employed there in what, as far as I could make out, was an unspecified capacity. I did see him behind reception once, but know for a fact that he wasn’t allowed to handle money.

  He was employed by a woman I referred to as ‘Susan’, which was her name. I’m not sure exactly how old she was, but she was good-looking for her age. In the early days I’d toyed with the idea of starting a relationship with her. Yet the more I thought about it, the more doubts I had. As a customer, I was in part paying her wages. And that more or less made me her boss. No, a sexual relationship with this woman would have been quite wrong. I did feel sorry for her, though, as I could tell she ached for me. But what can you do? I’ve barely seen her since I un-resided myself from Linton, although I did have a brief chat with her last year in her new role as Facilities Manager for the Norwich Metropole.

  ‘Hi there, Susan. You’re looking well,’ I began.

  ‘Thanks, Alan. How can I help?’ she replied, three hours later (we were chatting via email – the ‘you’re looking well’ thing was just me taking a chance).

  ‘I wanted to ask about half-day rates for your conference room, please,’ I responded, instantly – we were still on email but my assistant had my phone set up so it beeped when anything dropped into my inbox. ‘PS Do you still ache for me?’ I had half a mind to add, but probably in a slightly smaller font so as not to embarrass the poor woman.

  A lot of the other staff were pretty joyless, which I thought was a shame because it really was a quality establishment – everything was premier but the price, as Dawn French’s former squeeze would say. That lack of passion was typified by a pair of the hotel’s younger employees. One was a guy called Ben, the other was a girl who often had her hair in a bun. My abiding memory of them is that they were having a relationship. Either that or they were brother and sister, I forget which.

  Like I say, though, the one that stood out was Michael. By the time I left Linton I’d ‘converted’ him. He was no longer just an employee paid to do my bidding. He was now a friend, who did my bidding. I was dead glad to have a new buddy, but it was also nice to be able to prove wrong all those people who say that it’s impossible to make a lifelong friend out of a hotel employee.

  His background was in the army. He’d served in Northern Ireland and Gibraltar. (He’d been in Cyprus too, but I think that was just on holiday.) So perhaps it’s not surprising that he was a firearm enthusiast.

  Whereas Michael thought we should all be allowed to own a lethal weapon, I didn’t. In fact I am proud to live in a country where it’s pretty tough to get a licence for a firearm. The last thing we want is to end up like the USA, where buying a gun is as easy as buying a bagel, and probably as cheap as well, though I’d have to check that. That said, the more I talked to him about it – whether at the Travel Tavern, in his largely unfurnished terraced home or at Laser Quest – the more I began to see chinks of logic in his argument.

  I’m certainly not saying he won me over. He didn’t. I remain as firmly opposed to gun ownership as ever. But stick this in your pipe and smoke it: what if a burglar breaks into your home when your children are lying in bed at night? Should you just offer to show him the way to the family silver/your collection of semi-antique tie pins? Given the kind of crippling mortgages that this country’s homeowners are struggling with, surely they should be able to repel an intruder with a shotgun? No one wants people killed. But even the most liberal person out there would agree that you should be able to at least get them in the kneecaps. That’s common sense. Just aim low, the law should say.

  Or even worse than burglars, what if you’ve got foxes that keep coming into your garden? It wouldn’t be so bad if they stayed on the lawn, but last night, and forgive the language here, they were fucking all over the herb garden. It’s got to stop.

  They’re actually very randy animals, and that’s okay, we’ve all got needs. But for Christ’s sake keep off the flowerbeds. Never before had I been so irked by vulpine intimacy. I was so mad last night that I was considering fighting fire with fire. If I’d had a consenting adult with me (female) I’d have gone to their den and had sex in it. And that’s despite the very real danger of coming away with a dirty back.150

  Of course, that was all just in the heat of the moment. I soon calmed down and realised that a more measured approach was just to stay calm (after all, these were just wild animals following their instincts) and put poison down.

  A lot of people criticised Michael for his love of guns. But at least he loved something. And I think we could all learn from that. After all, surely it’s better to love something than nothing, even if it means a few intruders get paralysed from the waist down, or the neck down if it’s dark and you can’t see where you’re shooting?

  By the way I don’t know why I’ve been referring to Michael in the past tense. He’s not dead. I don’t think he is anyway – he just texted me.

  It’s a strange truism that people tend to feel sorry for a
man whose house is a Travel Tavern. But for AGP (Alan Gordon Partridge) things were pretty ruddy swell. This was one of the most creatively fecund periods of my entire life. I was absolutely fizzing. I was like an Alka-Seltzer. Or a Berocca. Or to be honest just a bog-standard soluble aspirin – they’ve all got baking soda in. I remember once bringing this metaphor to life in a meeting with a senior executive from Fenway Plastics. I was on a short-list of two to front a corporate video. Seeing that he was wavering, I went for broke. I went right up to him, bared my gums and made a very loud fizzing noise in his face. It backfired. Not least because my mouth was still littered with bits of recently consumed banana.

  It wasn’t just corporate stuff keeping me choc-a-block busy. I also had projects on the boil with 24 broadcasters around the world. How many of the UK’s other blue riband presenters could say that? And although the exact level of commitment from these channels was hard to gauge, they had at least taken my calls.

  I was also injecting seed capital into a number of exciting business ventures. In the days before Dragons’ Den, this was Partridge’s Nest. Local entrepreneurs would come and meet me in my room. I’d lie on my bed eating grapes like an emperor and quietly listen to their pitches. I could tell they were nervous – after all, get through this and they were staring down the barrel of an investment in the high three figures – but I remained stony-faced. Again, like an emperor.

  When they were done I’d put down my transparent bag of fruit and begin my questioning. Within minutes I would almost always have found their flaw. And I’d tell them too. ‘Your business isn’t scalable.’ ‘Your sales projections are gubbins.’ ‘I don’t like your face.’ Occasionally, though, very occasionally, someone would leave the Partridge’s Nest having struck gold (up to a ceiling of £999).