Biggest Fans

National Insulation Association figures point to a 66 per cent heat loss through uninsulated walls, 25 per cent through the loft/roof space, and 20 per cent through windows and doors. Taken together, it means houses could lose as much as 111 per cent of their heat." Such are the thoughts that torment Alan Partridge one night. He tries to count sheep, but winds up remembering how much he hates farmers. So he makes a midnight ascent into his loft, to check that it is suitably lagged. It isn't – horrors.

While rooting around, he happens on correspondence from way back between his father and British Nuclear Fuels, informing Partridge senior that, as he never showed up to an interview at Dungeness power station, his application can be taken no further. On the spot, Alan resolves to walk the 160 miles from Norwich to Dungeness "in the footsteps of my father", to deal with the ocean of resentments he feels towards his late dad. As a plan, it makes absolutely no sense, but in the most perfectly Partridgian way.

Steve Coogan's character began life in the early Nineties as a useless sports reporter – on Radio 4's Today spoof On the Hour and then BBC Two's Newsnight send-up The Day Today. (He memorably insisted, on air, that the diminutive jockey he was interviewing simply had to be a child.) He was then given three BBC TV series of his own, and the 2013 film Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa. These days he resides, resplendent, in Mid Morning Matters, Sky's faux-documentary set in the fictional radio station North Norfolk Digital.

Partridge, then, remains a broadcaster. But thanks to Steve Coogan and co-creator Armando Iannucci, he has also developed into one of the most excruciatingly rich comic creations of all time. A seething knot of insecurities and Little England insularity, he's notable for icky bathroom habits, his awful attitude to women, his unusual strain of bi-curious "homoscepticism" (his word) and, above all, his total self-obsession and utter lack of social skills. In short, if you ever find yourself in a tricky situation, ask yourself "What would Alan do?", then do the opposite, and you will invariably have made the right move.

Nomad is his second volume of memoirs, following on from I, Partridge (2012), a brilliant demolition of the star-autobiography genre. This new instalment – written as before by Coogan with Neil and Rob Gibbons, though this time without Iannucci – is a worthy follow-up. Needless to say, Alan entirely fails to enter into the spirit of the exercise. He talks up his plans as if about to walk the Hindu Kush, but in practice has his rucksack couriered between b&bs (that is, until he realises how much it will cost).

In Tilbury, he stumbles upon the venerable Gyles Brandreth interviewing children's presenter Steve Backshall, who's doing a Sports Relief walk barefoot. Desperate to steal the limelight, Alan removes socks and shoes, too, but inadvertently jumps on a shard of glass: "I take off," he writes, "wheeling around the car park like a spooked horse on its period."

Even Alan feels bound to describe this as "a horrible image", and in fact the yuck factor has been generally upped since I, Partridge. (Later, Alan's infected foot inside his hiking boot leaves, as he says, "a trail of gunk behind it like a leather snail".) Occasionally, it gets a bit much, but the trio of writers sustain Alan's voice so perfectly that you laugh even as you gag.

The chapter "You don't have to be mad to work here... But Pat was!" covers the events of Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa, but this self-servingly unreliable account is both far shorter and considerably funnier than the film, which felt obliged to transform Alan into a kind of hero. (Unlike their cinematic counterparts, TV characters - despite their most strenuous efforts - always have to remain essentially unchanged, constantly at square one. In many ways, that's the whole point of them.)   

Here, Alan is back on form. By any reasonable criteria, the "nomadic walk" is a disaster - Alan emerges keener, for example, on chronicling the engine size of a Volkswagen Polo than on properly addressing his truckload of daddy issues.

What's more, Nomad is fun until the bitter end. Don't neglect the index: after all, who else would have "Reed, Oliver" preceded by "Red, Simply"?

Far be it from me to encourage genocide, but couldn't we at least lobotomise caravanners? The embodiment of grey, joyless, narrow-minded Middle England en vacances, they need an hour to negotiate the one-minute car wash, and annually take their risible tin homes on wheels on a lethargic tour of England, thereby causing the nation's road system to become as thrombotic as their own lard-clogged arteries. When they eventually reach their final destination (a field of mud), they sit in the rain for a week, mournfully eating Vesta chow mein in a minuscule galley kitchen that smells of urine and butane, while watching David Attenborough nature programmes on their portable satellite television, until it's time to leave. Then, having never once had the temerity to venture out into the real, raw, natural world that lies beyond their plastic-net-curtained window, they tow their wretched sarcophagus back home again at 15mph. Tiny on the inside, yet big enough on the outside to cause a 10-mile tailback, and seemingly wafted here from another epoch, these caravans are rather like Dr Who's Tardis, only in reverse. A re-Tardis, perhaps.

With his Pringle jumper, his nylon polyamide trousers and sports jacket, the star of I'm Alan Partridge (BBC2) is quintessential caravan man, and last night's new series revealed that he's now even living in one. Steve Coogan's brilliant comic creation remains as hilarious as ever, not simply because he dresses like his dad, but because he's sublimely oblivious to his own absurdity and never learns humility, even though he's constantly being humiliated. Five years ago, Alan was at rock bottom, "clinically fed up" and living alone in the Linton Travel Tavern, but now his career is on the up, with "the third-best slot on Radio Norwich, a military-based quiz show for cable TV called Skirmish and a girlfriend". Yet he remains as crass and boorish as ever, and the programme's deliciously excruciating humour is primarily generated by his complete lack of awareness that he's about as funny as an outbreak of rabies in a guide dogs for the blind home.

When I first encountered Alan almost a decade ago, he was a sports reporter and chatmeister on The Day Today, and his cringemaking bonhomie brought Alan Titchmarsh to mind. Then, when he became a DJ, he had much in common with Tony Blackburn, from the hair hat down to the penchant for unspeakably weak and forced puns (last night, for example, he poorly imitated Rhett Butler and quipped: "Flatley my dear, I don't Riverdance"). But seeing him present a compilation of auto smashes (entitled Crash, Bang, Wallop What a Video), I realised that there's also a lot of Jeremy Clarkson in the character because both share the same locker-room mentality and dubious political views, and both are just intelligent enough to realise that they're just not intelligent enough. Oh, and both have a huge lorry following their car wherever they go. You know, the lorry they need to transport their ego in.

Alan's attempts last night to recapture the media heights he'd once attained were painfully funny and highlighted the absurdity of trying to maintain a youthful and carefree media image after the age of 30. The innocent enquiry, "Didn't you used to be on television?" elicited the tetchy response, "Yeah, I got out of that - unpleasant people, bitter bastards" (though who can forget Partridge once desperately begging a BBC executive to commission his "Monkey Tennis" format, just so he could remain inside the magic rectangle?), and his attempts to ingratiate himself with the public were invariably cack-handed ("I really admire you teachers, doing what you do for such rubbish money"). His boasts of a successful broadcasting comeback were further belied when his favourite nocturnal haunt turned out to be an allnight BP garage run by Michael (the ex-army Geordie who formerly worked behind the tavern bar), a venue that enabled some timely satire to be slipped in. "You work in a petrol station, it's not the Gulf War," said Alan, adding, "which, ironically, is like a large petrol station."

After Coogan formed his Baby Cow production company, he entered a period when he seemed able to achieve success for others (notably Rob Brydon), but not for himself. However, with Armando Iannucci producing, and Talkback overseeing this series, he's back on form, giving us comedy that is rich, multi-layered and doesn't rely solely on embarrassment for its effect (unlike that runt son of Spinal Tap, The Office, which despite almost unprecedented media hype ended its run with 56 million people still not watching). Particularly appealing are the spectacularly vulgar sexual euphemisms from Alan, who loves to boast about his young Ukrainian girlfriend and confided to his builders that "occasionally, I dost venture South". Which was almost as funny as the euphemism a taxi driver once used for the same hobby when I was travelling in the back of his cab. "Can't be doing with it mate. It's like eating sushi from a barbershop floor."

Whatever that means.

It is the year 2065, and Alan Partridge is still stalking the streets of Norwich, all his hubris and Little England pettiness intact. This future – conjured with a bit of ageing makeup and back-projected video – may be merely a brief flight of fantasy in Steve Coogan's likeable new stage tour, but it's a very plausible one: Partridge's longevity seems boundless.

It has been three decades since Coogan created the character (in Radio 4's news spoof On the Hour) and 13 years since he last trod the boards as the hapless presenter. In those 13 years, the stream of Partridgiana has become a torrent. We've had a film, a web series, a podcast, two books, various mockumentaries and sitcoms on Sky Atlantic and BBC One, and now this song-and-dance extravaganza.

Despite once accidentally killing a chat-show guest on air, the Partridge of 2022 is "thriving in a cross-platform media environment" – as his seven-strong troupe of backing dancers puts it, in a Hamilton-esque opening rap. The loose premise is that Partridge has reinvented himself as a life coach. In an all-white athleisure outfit ("I thought, what would Jesus Christ wear, if he was Steve Jobs?") he's here to explain the secrets of his success.

There's a clammy desperation to everything he does. He's keen to move with the times, if only to boost his career, so he mouths all the right buzzwords. "Is there a lack of diversity in our audience? Yes, but I'm taking steps to address that, along with my partners the National Trust and the Countryside Alliance."

Arriving on stage by gingerly sliding down a metal bannister, Coogan slips into the character like one of Alan's old driving gloves. It's a fine performance, a gear above the broad-strokes script he has cooked up with his directors, twin brothers Rob and Neil Gibbons (the writing team behind the past decade's Partridge ventures).

There are entertaining set-pieces – including one marvellously elaborate sight-gag, a great surprise that it would be a crime to spoil here – but Stratagem never generates the fist-biting awkwardness that made Partridge's best TV outings such a painful pleasure.

Coogan's former co-writer Armando Iannucci once said the challenge with Partridge was "reining him in". Coogan is funniest when he has a foil; his best acting is his reacting. But Stratagem is – for better and worse – almost precisely the kind of show Partridge himself would devise, a big, glitzy vehicle designed to keep all eyes on its preening star, complete with a closing medley of off-key 1980s power ballads.

In the right format, uninterrupted Partridge can make for fine comedy – as the wonderfully mundane Gibbons-written podcast proved – but in the theatre more dramatic friction is needed to create sparks. While Tuesday's show began and ended with deafening applause, that rock-star reception seemed out of proportion to the sometimes muted laughter mid-show.

The best scenes here pit Partridge against un-cooperative guests; a polished protégée who's outgrown him and a gobby, Love Island-ish audience volunteer (both played by rising comic talent Emma Sidi), as well as an Irish, bucktoothed Partridge lookalike (Coogan again, reprising a popular This Time character via pre-recorded video). Alan Zooms the latter to offer an apology via one of his god-awful self-penned poems ("'Tis Ireland... the clover-clad clump"), but is cut off before he can finish.

In those moments, when Partridge realises he's had his own spotlight stolen, the pitiful spasms of pain that cross Coogan's face speak louder than words, and the whole show clicks into place. Those scenes suggest that perhaps a format closer to Knowing Me, Knowing You – a series of on-stage interviews – might have proved funnier than all the slick choreography and multimedia musical bells-and-whistles. Still, there's enough here to keep fans on board with the prospect of another three decades of Alan. A-ha!

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The last time Alan Partridge graced the nation's stages, he was trying his hand as a life coach, in Steve Coogan's 2008 tour Alan Partridge and Other Less Successful Characters. The idea clearly stuck because, 14 years on, it's been developed into a full show. Stratagem, Partridge tells us, is "a fun way to share knowledge that, I believe, will change your life." And so begins a very satisfying two hours for fans of Coogan's deathless alter ego, as Alan combines motivational PowerPoint with time travel, song-and-dance, and a relaxation exercise turned slanging match with an upstart protege.

The whole show, created with Coogan's Partridge co-writers Neil and Rob Gibbons, is tight, well-worked and has its own satisfying little narrative arc, as the flimsiness of Alan's life-coach pretensions is revealed. Coogan is far from the first comic to find pathos in the overreach of motivational speakers, but Stratagem doesn't turn much fire on that soft target. Really, it's just two hours of tremendous silliness, revelling in Partridge's foot-in-mouth illness-at-ease, making hay in the chasm between his fussy, small-minded reality and the big-vision sophisticate he longs to be.

All this is achieved with the help of a troupe of young backing dancers whose friendship Partridge is needily eager to claim, and cameos from comic and Starstruck actor Emma Sidi as a successful Stratagem graduate and a mouthy audience member whom Alan ill-advisedly invites on stage. None of which, of course, suggests a man whose life advice you'd go anywhere near. But no matter: in act one, Partridge focuses inwards instead, co-opting the magic of theatre (as he keeps telling us) to address first his 11-year-old and then his 103-year-old selves. The latter is to be found in a dystopian 2065 cyber-Norwich, a half-man, half-avatar with an ageing Partridge face and the lower half of a can-can dancer in fishnets.


Will we still be laughing at Partridge when he's a centenarian? You wouldn't bet against it: the character whom Coogan once considered "an albatross around his neck" is nowadays at the centre of his own thriving multi-platform metaverse. And Coogan clearly takes pleasure in the performance. I don't just mean the endless adenoidal pettifogging, which reaches its apogee here in an 80s power-ballad routine that Partridge keeps interrupting to discuss the finer points of Lib Dem politics. It's also the rich comedy of physical awkwardness, as Alan inches uncertainly in and out of someone else's follow-spot, or disguises himself as soft furnishing. His trendy upstage graphics, which ape the famous iPod silhouette ads, are also hijacked by a precious visual gag that will live luridly long in the memory.

Where does all this leave the Stratagem programme, and changing our lives for the better? Barely anywhere. In act two, Partridge gets back to the point, extrapolating some daft anagrams and bullet-pointing the programme's nonsense principles. One of these – atonement – is illustrated in dialogue with a newer Coogan alter ego, the Irish rebel singer Martin Brennan, whom Partridge slighted on BBC One's This Time and now seeks to make peace with by means of a penny whistle.

The show is, then, an extension rather than an expansion of what Partridge does. Another splash around in the shallows of self-delusion, sexual repression and midlife unease. But no one makes that territory funnier than Partridge, as Coogan proves again in this joyful show.

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More than 30 years since he first appeared on Radio 4's On The Hour, Alan Partridge is now so enmeshed in the national comedy fabric, there's no longer any need to mention his creator Steve Coogan in the show's title. Since he last toured in 2008, Partridge, right, has bucked the hit-sitcom-to-dismal-feature-film trend with his movie Alpha Papa, and diversified with TV specials, new series and even a documentary, but still we can't get enough of the blissfully deluded cringe-meister. Now he's back with a whole show to himself in Stratagem, a life-coaching seminar incorporating musical bombast, dancing girls, poetry, Hamilton-inspired rapping, epistolary storytelling and, er, time travel, all courtesy of the show's purported sponsors, P&O and Bet365.

Yes, it's as mad and chaotic as it sounds. Oh, and there's one astounding sight gag in which Alan, disguised as part of the set, erupts from his hiding place like a marauding transformer built from soft furnishings. Entirely, stupidly brilliant!

At times the show comes on like Partridge The Musical, and is all the funnier for it. The set is aptly over the top with metal ladders, an elevated walkway and a giant screen on which Alan interacts superbly with long-suffering PA Lynn (Felicity Montagu) and Irish farmer/rebel singer Martin Brennan (Coogan), breakout star of This Time With Alan Partridge. We are also treated to grotesque close-ups of a gurning Partridge via a hand-held camera.

Clad from head to foot in shimmering white, he cuts a messianic figure, at odds with the mundanity of his maxims: 'Grab life by the throat and throttle it.' In this age of cancel culture he must have his say: 'In these gender-sensitive times, you can't say "tits-up", but you can say "cock-up". Interesting!'

A bolted-on romantic sub-plot and the odd clunky moment do nothing to distract from what is two hours of pure, unadulterated Partridge. And, as he croons his way through a medley of 1980s power ballads, that is more than enough.

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The key to Alan Partridge's longevity – besides Steve Coogan's incredible immersion in the creation – is that he's so perfectly gauche in any situation, always falling just short of the self-awareness that would save him from humiliation. Not that he ever quite realises how socially inept he's being. His latest venture, Stratagem, is a motivational personal improvement seminar and is pure, unadulterated Partridge. But comedically that's not quite the asset it might seem.

For if Partridge were to put on such a presentation, it would be clumsily ambitious, a stodgy jumble of strained, over-the-top ideas that don't fit together, making it sluggish to watch. True to the character, that's what we have, with the parody sailing so close to the real thing that it stumbles into the same pitfalls.

The audience really are asked to watch an awkwardly weird time-travelling playlet in Partridge interacts with a future avatar of his 105-year-old self with a can-can dancer's legs. It might have seemed a good idea in the minds of either Partridge or Coogan and his co-writers Rob and Neil Gibbons. But in reality, it loses much of the audience. And are these dated, sub-Clarkson jokes about Richard Hammond being small the actual gags, or is their weakness supposed to be ironic?

Partridge is at his most cringingly funny when he has a smarter adversary to clash with, in front of someone he's trying to impress. When he's outwitted or brought down by his hubris, he loses face, and possibly more if the jeopardy's ramped up.

But Stratagem is his ego project, and he only occasionally interacts with someone else. So when things go wrong, there's no consequence, he just blasts on with his big-budget show.

It starts impressively strong. Within the first few minutes, we have a misfiring Hamilton-inspired rap as 'Dr' Alan Gordon Partridge, in his white polo neck ('what Jesus Christ would wear if he was Steve Jobs') boasts of his command of the 'cross-platform media environment', introduces his awful sponsors and mocks the lack of diversity in his overwhelmingly white, middle-aged audience.

The character's desperate bids for relevance are aways strong, from his lamentable attempts to be chummy with his young, diverse troupe of back-up dancers, to the underlying suggestion this whole project is a cynical leap on to a mental health bandwagon.

But this gets lost in a selection of disjointed sketches, with Coogan spending much time interacting with the giant screen, his back to the audience.

With no great concern for the 'life coach' premise, we used the CCTV in Alan's house to eavesdrop on long-suffering PA Lynn who's house-sitting. While it's a delight to see Felicity Montagu, even via screen, this seems a clumsy add-on. More successfully, we visit Martin Brennan, the Irish farmer from This Time, who mercifully cuts short Alan's dreadful poem of Emerald Isle clichés.

Some moments zing with the choreographed moments adding a suitable sense of arena-scale occasion. The second half opens with a brilliantly ridiculous sight gag, and as expected, in-person interactions work better than the giant Zoom-style conversations. Emma Sidi shines brilliantly as two characters so totally different she's almost unrecognisable as the same actor: a confident graduate of Stratagem now outshining Partridge and a loud woman pulled out of the audience, above, disrupting his hoped-for slickness. In both cases, Alan's upstaged, and his pathetic essence comically exposed in a way it's not when he's at the centre of an elaborate showpiece.

So while there are scenes of brilliance, overall Stratagem puts the 'a-ha!' in 'a half-baked concept'.

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Impossible though it is to do justice to Alan Partridge with only the written word at our disposal, we must try. Because after his years in the wilderness, Linton Travel Tavern and North Norfolk digital radio, the monkey tennis-pitcher is back. Almost. Well. To be clear. The exquisitely excruciating creation of Steve Coogan and Armando Iannucci (and others at On the Hour, where Partridge made his first appearance) 'Alan Partridge' is definitely back, in This Time With Alan Partridge.

It's the character's first proper run-out since his 2013 feature film Alpha Papa, and is co-written and directed by twin brothers Neil and Rob Gibbons, who have become – since 2010's Mid Morning Matters – not just keepers of the flame but fuel and bellows for it too. They have accomplished the feat of finding new layers in Alan, somehow allowing him growth without change, development without enlargement of that definitively constricted soul.

But is Alan himself – as it were; good God but we live in complicated times – back? He has returned to the BBC proper, standing in, dry-mouthed and periodically stricken, for the co-presenter on a current affairs programme (a parody of The One Show, with a dash of most of the others to season) who has fallen ill. But he is not the broadcasting behemoth he once – if only in his ceaselessly self-deluding mind – was. Still, it's a start. And as he says in the opening scenes, "I am here to give of my best."

Oh, the fractional excess of it. The infinitesimal flinch it causes in everyone around him. That ineffable blend of neediness and arrogance that infuses every word. He is back. He is back.

All of Partridge life is here. The dogged pursuit of the wrong path, becoming irretrievably mired in the wrong tone that sucks him down like quicksand (a lighthearted piece about leopard seals finds him describing how they "toss penguins around like rag dolls ... for fun"). The desperate, conscious arranging of his face into the right expression. The attempts at banter or just simple conversation that always circles back to the subject of Alan. The endless compounding of errors that makes any time he speaks a white-knuckle ride to potential disaster; realising, for example, that referring to "bosomy" downs is Not Right, he corrects his description to "or like a smooth, fat teenage boy". You know you are in the presence of Partridge when you wish to flee as you laugh. And all the while, his co-host Jenny, portrayed with consummate brilliance by Susannah Fielding who plays off Coogan in about seven different dimensions, fights the conversational fires he sets as she strides unblinking on to the next link.

The differentiation of This Time With Alan Partridge's layers and escalation of every exchange is precision-engineered: beautiful things and a joy forever. There is the bedrock in the perfect replication of such a show's set, energy and topics. Then comes the skewing and skewering of the show, its format's absurd swinging between the frivolous and the heavyweight with occasional curve balls, with Alan reading lines from his autocue that could almost be pasted directly from a script nicked from Eamonn Holmes or (presuming they still bother supplying him with such things) Richard Madeley. Where in "Bedroom-based do-badders known as 'hacktivists'", Alan's introduction to a piece on internet dangers, could real life be said to leave off and invention begin?

And from there, his creators modulate smoothly, seemingly effortlessly although it cannot be, into Partridge. Through the overconfidence, let the neediness poke, then the rage that lies beneath that thin, thin skin and let the moment go to hell in a handcart. Watching Alan is to watch his creators let him give enough rope to hang himself, watch him choke then cut him down just before he starts to go blue.

This Time brings Alan back, in all his glory and his tragedy, at just the right time. He surely voted Leave but, as a man of no convictions or courage, must now want to remain. He has always been little England made flesh, while also embodying the tortured monster of insecurity and discontent that lives unchanging inside us all. We get the heroes we deserve, and as you finish writhing in agony and lie limp from laughter, hatred, panic, despair and/or stilled in awe at the end of another half hour in his appalling company, you can only reflect that if Brexit means Alan then the whole business just got more complicated still.