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It’s possible you and I have spent more time in the company of Alan Partridge, a fictional creation, than with several friends or family members.
Steve Coogan’s defining comedy character first appeared as a spoof sports reporter on Armando Iannucci’s BBC radio show, On the Hour, in 1991. He has come and gone, foot always in mouth, ever since. The man in the string-back driving gloves has “Aha-d” his way through increasingly layered, increasingly greying iterations that have taken him from a TV chat show (Knowing Me, Knowing You) to a movie (2013’s Alpha Papa) and now, more than 30 years on from his debut, to a spoof mental health documentary.
Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan) and his long-suffering assistant, Lynne (Felicity Montagu), in How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge).
Yes, you read that right. How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge) is a two-part comedy that features one of the world’s most tactless men attempting to talk about what men don’t like to talk about. It is – it should be said – raspingly funny, but it is also poking a hornet’s nest: sending Alan headlong into the mental health debate is courting controversy.
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“We only do Partridge when we want to do it, not when we’re told to do it,” says Coogan, speaking in London. “And we don’t want to do stuff that’s safe.”
Mental health, he says, felt like a place to dump Alan precisely because it will ruffle feathers. “If it looks like something you shouldn’t laugh at, that’s a good indicator that it’s fertile territory for Partridge,” Coogan says. “We want to do stuff where people might get offended, and so we thought mental health seemed pretty good … because people are uncomfortable about it.”
The “we” Coogan talks about is himself and his writing partners, Neil and Rob Gibbons. Alongside Coogan, the Gibbons brothers have been Alan’s surrogate brain ever since the series of YouTube shorts, Mid-Morning Matters, in the 2010s. Over that time, Alan has become more and more depleted, while the comedy has taken him into the culture wars and identity politics – anywhere his creators consider dangerous ground. It’s only possible, Coogan says, because Alan Partridge has been around for so long and done so much.
“Thirty years of people investing in the character means that it gives you licence to do stuff that you couldn’t do with a new character now,” says Coogan. “Thirty years of provenance allows you to go places that are very difficult for any other comedy to go to. It’s because there’s a certain trust that’s built up, a trust that you won’t abuse people – or if you look like you are abusing people, that you’re doing it in good faith.”
Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan) tackles Britain’s mental health crisis in the documentary, How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge).
It means Partridge provides a welcome outlet for his creator and amanuensis: “Any topic which is difficult and that probably I, personally, couldn’t speak about publicly without annoying some people somewhere, of whatever their political persuasions or their worldview, with Alan you can talk about it.”
For Coogan, using Alan as a mouthpiece is not only an opportunity to get laughs, but it’s also a potential balm.
“There are all these tribal, attritional conflicts online,” he says. “If you bring some humour into it, as long as the humour isn’t destructive or hateful; if you laugh at something, you can sort of make it seem less scary. So I actually think it’s a genuine, positive thing you can do because as long as you spread the mockery evenly around, then you can make things easier to talk about.”
In How Are You? Alan Partridge dresses and looks more than ever like the British right-wing populist MP Nigel Farage. Ironically, over time, Partridge’s regressive attitudes and conservative, jingoistic political stance has found its way back into the mainstream. He could easily get a job these days doing spluttering punditry on adversarial platforms such as Sky News or Britain’s GB News.
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“There’s no doubt about it,” Coogan says, “Alan’s able to say the Emperor’s not wearing any clothes in a way that people will then go, ‘Oh! He said it out loud.’ In both the younger and older generation these days, there is frequently, I think, an impasse between what people intuitively think and what they know they ought to think. We constantly elevate that with Partridge, and people laugh.”
Coogan compares his greatest creation to the British Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer. It’s safe to say he doesn’t think much of the Labour leader.
“He’s got these 25-year-old SpAds [special advisers] around him telling him what to say,” says Coogan. “None of it is what he actually thinks, it’s just some calculation that that will be the least worst thing to do. It’s nothing to do with sincerity.”
Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge on his spoof radio show, Mid Morning Matters.
What Starmer and Partridge – and so many of the political class, and influencers, and celebrities – want is approval, approbation and ultimately to stay relevant. It’s one reason why the Alan Partridge character has remained relevant after so long on television.
“People say you’ve been doing it years, isn’t it time to pack it in, isn’t it boring, time to stop?” says Coogan. “But all of those things would be the things that trouble Alan. So we go, let’s just grapple with that head on and then that’s where you find your material. It’s like, ‘Please, please, please find me relevant’.”
How Are You? finds Alan on the cusp of irrelevance, at the back end of a stint living in Saudi Arabia, shilling for the tourist board and doing anything – anything – to stay in front of the camera. But each time Coogan brings his man back, both he and Alan are that little bit older. How does he move him on as the years go by?
“We know that he doesn’t want to be old, and so we sometimes take inspiration from things that make us laugh,” says Coogan. “Like middle-aged men who review cars: for some reason, they wear leather jackets with zips … as if it somehow makes them young. It’s so pathetic. But I look at that and go, ‘Great, let’s use some of that for Alan’.”
Steve Coogan thinks the younger generation have taken to Alan Partridge because he reminds them of their parents.
Perhaps the strangest thing about Alan Partridge is that the more he becomes indisputably one of the older generation, the face of “OK Boomer”, the more popular he becomes among Gen Z.
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“What I’ve realised,” says Coogan, “is a lot of younger people that now like Alan didn’t before. It’s because I think they see their parents or the older generation in him, and they’re laughing at that. When I was growing up, our parents didn’t want to be like young people. These days everyone wants to try and pretend they’re 19, and I think you see a lot of that in Alan.”
It means that of all the people Alan Partridge, the one-time sports reporter living in an Oasthouse in Norwich and making a crust recording voiceovers for the local pub chain, is once again the man of the moment.
“If he was just a fool, an annoying fool, it wouldn’t work,” says Coogan. “It works because he is not mean, he’s not malevolent, he’s not nasty, he’s just misguided. A group of firemen came to my show and said, ‘We like Alan … because he tells it like it is’.”
I tell Coogan that response sounds similar to the fans of several attention-seeking controversialists one could mention. We both hesitate … could it happen?
“I do get people saying to me, ‘Yeah, let’s elect Alan prime minister’, and I go, ‘Er, how on earth would you do that?’ It could be that the joke suddenly eats itself,” says Coogan, pondering the prospect. “Hmm. I might have to kill him.”
He’s joking. I think.
How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge) premieres on HBO Max on October 4.
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