COMEDY: ANNA CAREYreviews I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About AlanBy Alan Partridge with Rob Gibbons, Neil Gibbons, Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan HarperCollins, 320pp, £20; and Small Man in a BookBy Rob Brydon Michael Joseph, 343pp. £20
MOST GREAT TELEVISION comedy characters have very limited lifespans. They shine brightly for a couple of series and then, if they linger longer, tend to get less funny as the years go on, tarnishing the memory of their glory days. And yet, nearly 20 years since he first appeared in the BBC radio news parody On the Hour, the fictional broadcaster Alan Partridge is as funny as ever.
Played by Steve Coogan, Alan was always gloriously gormless, petty, egotistical and pompous, from his early days as a sports reporter in On the Hourand its television version, The Day Today, to his golden years as the star of the spoof chat show Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridgeand the dark time after he left the BBC, as shown in the mockumentary series I'm Alan Partridge.
It’s nearly a decade since the second and final series of the latter, but a series of short online videos in 2010 showed that Alan was still hilariously dreadful. That the character still worked so brilliantly was a testament to the huge skill of both Coogan and Alan’s writers, especially his cocreator Armando Iannucci.
Onscreen success doesn't always translate to the page, however, which makes Alan's new memoir, I, Partridge, an especially impressive achievement. I expected this book to be very amusing; I didn't expect it to be so consistently, and so fantastically, hilarious.
Unlike many television characters, Alan works wonderfully in print. In fact, at times the new format makes him even funnier. It's the perfect way to highlight his pedantry – he frequently uses abbreviations, for example, then painstakingly explains what they mean in parentheses or footnotes. He also provides readers with a soundtrack; footnotes urge you to play specific tracks. While reading about Alan's exploits in Tokyo you're advised to listen to Japanese Boy. Moments of profound insight are soundtracked by Clannad's Theme from Harry's Game. As he warns in the introduction, "The soundtrack is mandatory."
As a rule, books based on television programmes are amusing only to those familiar with the original shows. But Alan is such a brilliantly realised character that I suspect even those unfamiliar with his onscreen adventures can enjoy I, Partridgeas a hilarious portrait of a comic monster.
Of course, parts of the book are even better if you're already an Alan fan, especially his strangely inaccurate recollections of events from the television series; the well-known scene from I'm Alan Partridgein which he humiliates himself by begging a BBC commissioner to give him another series here becomes an over-the-top moment of triumph, ending with Alan being applauded by the entire BBC restaurant.
It's hard to single out highlights in a book that made me laugh out loud so much I had to stop reading it on the bus. The Tristram Shandy-esque scene describing his own birth is particularly good, however, as is the chapter devoted to his attempts to make Swallow, a Norwich-based crime drama about a strangely Partridge-esque detective whose "marriage broke down because his wife was too selfish to recognise his cleverness". But the whole book is superb, right down to the carefully Photoshopped portraits on the dustjacket, and the pitch-perfect comic tone is perfectly maintained throughout.
The comedian Rob Brydon would be the first to admit that he owes a lot to Coogan, who coproduced his breakthrough hit, Human Remains. Having spent more than a decade struggling as a radio presenter, actor and voice-over artist, Brydon saw his career go stratospheric in 2000 when two programmes he had cocreated, Marion & Geoffand Human Remains,became huge critical successes. Brydon was 35 when he became famous, and if his likeable Small Man in a Bookis anything to go by, his years in the showbiz wilderness have left him with a healthy lack of ego.
Full of unsentimental accounts of failed gigs and humiliating auditions, there's no bitching or spite and very little self-pity in this memoir; in a way, he's the anti-Alan Partridge. But whenever you think things are getting too cosy or pedestrian, Brydon will throw in a very funny joke with enough of an edge to remind you that although he may now appear in a high-profile series of cereal adverts, this is a man whose television comedy breakthroughs were a brilliantly sad portrayal of a man whose wife had left him ( Marion & Geoff) and a collaboration ( Human Remains) with Julia Nighty NightDavis, who no one could ever accuse of being cosy.
Brydon comes across as a funny and decent man (now happily married to his second wife, he writes that his first wife has no desire for publicity, and “it is for this reason, and this reason alone, that she features less in these pages than her major role in my life surely warrants”), and, reading about his determination in the face of countless rejections, it’s impossible not to be delighted when he finally makes it.
Ending just after Marion & Geoffand Human Remainsbecome critical hits but before the sitcom Gavin & Staceymade him a household name, Small Man in a Bookis a pleasantly ego-free celebrity memoir. Alan Partridge wouldn't understand it at all.
Anna Carey is a freelance journalist. Her debut novel for young adults, The Real Rebecca, has been shortlisted for an Irish Book Award
