- by peter f
- The Guardian
- Issue #2169
“There is more mental health than there used to be” says Alan Partridge at the beginning of his latest outing. There’s more Partridge than there used to be too. Steve Coogan’s clueless and grating minor broadcaster has been around since 1991. For a lot of viewers How are you? It’s Alan (Partridge) will be the comedy equivalent of yet another Rolling Stones tour. Like Rolling Stones tours (if you’re a fan) it’s worthwhile. Coogan has still got it.
For those who came in late, Alan Partridge is a Steve Coogan character. He’s a small-time media personality, sometimes on radio, sometimes on TV. Usually, he’s on the verge of becoming even more small-time, mainly because he’s an awful, tactless person. Awkwardness or anger is the main emotion of anyone who meets him. If you haven’t heard of the character, but he sounds familiar, there’s a reason for that. Partridge made his first appearance a decade before The Office was invented, and was at the forefront of the sort of nails-down-the-blackboard humour that made The Office such a hit. ‘Accidental Partridge’ is the online title for people who act like the character without knowing it.
The other reason for Partridge’s near-immortality is that the thing he’s making fun of never stops. TV and radio are still full of talking heads who think they’re thinkers, and produce metres of cringe while they’re doing it. For the high-end version, read Stan Grant trying to be profound. For the more day-to-day version, just turn on talkback radio, it’s everywhere. Our media misleads us and insults our intelligence in the service of capitalism. At least Partridge is funny about it.
This time around, Partridge is aiming for profundity by doing a documentary on mental health, a combination of inane solo feats and interviews with members of the public who inevitably let him down by arguing back or not cooperating. He runs a focus group for a mate and tries to introduce the topic of mental health to a roomful of people who’d rather talk about takeaway food and keep returning to the topic while Alan tries to introduce his banal mental health observations. Later on, he courts disaster by taking an anxious person on a driving lesson and making things worse by talking about trauma with her. For long-term Partridge fans, there’s the fun of seeing some of his old disasters return – the young Eastern European wife he was bragging about several series ago reappears, sometime after their inevitable divorce. Of course the encounter makes him look bad, but most things do.
