It’s now been 34 years since Alan Partridge, Steve Coogan’s most celebrated creation, first reported for On the Hour from the Lord’s pavilion at Glamorgan versus Essex (“Well, Graham Gooch, all out for 36 – that was quick, you must be pleased”) and announced himself as a sports correspondent of rare distinction.
Since then, Partridge has conquered chat shows with Knowing Me Knowing You, bounced back in I’m Alan Partridge, reconquered local radio in Mid-Morning Matters, starred in his own film, and spread his wings into standalone documentaries, before finally – finally – getting back on primetime BBC territory with This Time, in 2019.
Most recently, he has been in Stadium Partridge mode: the last proper Partridge outing was the 25-date Stratagem live tour in 2022, and he also surprised Coldplay fans at Wembley Stadium by singing Abba’s “Knowing Me, Knowing You” that summer. But, for Partridge purists, his podcast From the Oasthouse is where the most concentrated hits of mundane, wittering, self-doubting Partridge are to be found – and now he’s back for the fourth series.
“I’ve done live comedy – for my sins – and sometimes you just have to do that kind of big, crowd-pleasing type stuff,” 59-year-old Coogan says over Zoom. “I mean, you throw a bone for your peer group in the audience occasionally, so they don’t go, ‘Why has he gone super-broad?’ But you try and get the balance right and be accessible at the same time.”
The podcast, by contrast, is where he and long-term co-writers Neil and Rob Gibbons can cut loose. “We don’t really care how specific or potentially alienating we get,” Coogan says. “So that’s really enjoyable.”
In one episode, he’s trapped in his assistant Lynn’s porch while trying to deliver a school minibus (read: lightly refurbished fish van) with his face on the side of it to a team of young skateboarders; in another, he’s packing a go-bag to hide out in the wilds should he ever be cancelled. Coogan takes this series to some subtly heartbreaking places, too – hearing Partridge contemplate what would happen to him without Lynn, who thinks she might have cancer, you could be listening to a vintage Alan Bennett radio play.
“If I wasn’t Alan Partridge,” says Coogan, in what’s difficult not to hear as a Partridgean turn of phrase, “I would listen to it. Sometimes, I’m actually slightly envious of people who get to just sort of hear it unfiltered and unmitigated.”
Coogan’s been busy outside of Partridge of late, too. He popped up in the Joker sequel last year, and played an English teacher in junta-era Argentina in The Penguin Lessons (alongside said flightless bird) this year – and Labour MP and broadcaster Brian Walden in Channel 4’s Brian and Maggie, opposite Dame Harriet Walter’s Margaret Thatcher. Soon, he’ll play former Republic of Ireland football manager Mick McCarthy in Saipan, a dramatisation of McCarthy’s infamous stick-it-up-your-bollocks bust-up with captain Roy Keane at the 2002 World Cup.
Partridge, however, will always be there, yomping the Norfolk countryside until his next media commitment. “ We never want to do it unless we want to do it, if that makes sense, because it will show,” he says. “I believe that it will betray itself, and it will jump the shark. That’s what everyone’s always worried about, which is not a bad pressure to have, to be honest with you.”
After an extended break, Partridge will be back on TV soon, too. Alan Partridge: How Are You? will see Partridge delving into mental health, and “trying to find some sort of meaning”.
“Whether it is real or not, we’re not quite sure,” says Coogan. “I think he’s probably not sure whether his trying to find meaning in life is what he really thinks, or what he thinks he ought to think.”
That malleability is what has kept him such a potent character. Partridge was, once, an unreconstructed Shires Tory. But for the past 15 years, he’s been trying to get with the programme. “ Early on, looking at it, he’s quite sort of two-dimensional – not <em>not</em> funny, but not as sophisticated,” Coogan says. “And it starts feeling a bit like pulling the legs off an insect, sort of saying, ‘What an idiot’. But you sort of run out of steam with that after a while. It has to be more than that.”
But the tide has turned from David Cameron’s brand of husky-hugging Conservatism, deeply appreciated by Partridge. With Reform on the march and our politics in a decidedly darker place, what will North Norfolk’s most storied broadcaster do now?
“He will just ride the wave,” says Coogan. “I mean, in some ways, he’s a bit like Keir Starmer: ‘What direction is the wind going in? Which way is this going? Let me quickly push my way to the front and look like I was leading you.’”
Ah yes, Starmer. Coogan is a longstanding Labour supporter, and even interviewed Tony Blair in character at the 1996 Labour Party Conference. (After Coogan and Armando Iannucci missed their first flight to Manchester, Coogan just about made the next one but had to fly in full Partridge costume, complete with briefcase.) But a year since the election, Blair’s heir has not endeared himself.
“ I think that almost everything is just political. I don’t think he has any ideology. I think every decision he makes is, ‘What is the most politically expedient thing to say and think?’ And it makes me admire – which I never thought I’d say – Margaret Thatcher for at least having an ideology and a point of view.” He’s really warming to this theme, so animated he’s nearly out of his swivel chair. “And a vision. I didn’t agree with it, but at least she had one. He doesn’t have one. So I am not an ally.”
Such pointed asides will soon find another outlet. Six years after what was thought to be their last testy lunch, Coogan and Rob Brydon will get back together for a fifth series of The Trip – which debuted in 2010 – their semi-improvised ramble through Europe with 24 Hour Party People and A Cock and Bull Story director Michael Winterbottom.
A mixture of reality-blurring play with Coogan and Brydon’s public personas and competitive impressions of Michael Caine, in retrospect it looks like the point at which Coogan found a way of reckoning with Partridge and moving on.
This time, they’re heading to Scandinavia – that’s about all Coogan’s sure of at the minute. It is, he thinks, a bit like when a band swears they’re splitting up after a farewell tour, then you start seeing them on festival bills a few years later. “ The band had gone off and done their solo projects and didn’t realise they were actually better together,” he says, grinning. “Like Oasis, on a smaller scale.”
Arguments that go round and round, while Coogan and Brydon slowly open up new angles on each other’s insecurities and anxieties, is sort of the whole idea of The Trip. But it felt like he and Brydon were hitting a limit after a while. “ I said, I think after the third one, ‘We’re just repeating ourselves, aren’t we? It’s the same material – it’s not the same type of material, it’s literally the same material.’”
This, it turns out, was music to director Michael Winterbottom’s ears. “ You go, ‘But this is just going around in circles’, and he says, ‘Yes, but life goes round in circles’.”
This time, though, the focus has shifted; where once he and Brydon were midlife strivers looking for new highs while trying not to think about youth having left them, this time they’re both approaching 60 and thinking about their legacies. It’s new ground from which to fire Roger Moore impressions at each other. “We don’t feel like we’re flogging a dead horse,” Coogan says.
That uncertain gap between the actual Coogan and Brydon and the versions which bickered with each other was always where The Trip found its comic energy. But even if there’s a certain overlap between Coogan and Partridge (“You and your fucking Venn diagram…” he recalls Brydon sighing after another explanation of his relationship with the character) it’s the gap between him and his characters that still appeals to his sense of mischief.
“ You can sort of talk about anything, but in a way that I couldn’t, you know. Gender politics, fine. Black Lives Matter, absolutely fine for Alan to go there. It feels a bit like you’re stealing apples from someone’s garden. It feels a bit naughty.
“ If you’re being cynical about me,” Coogan says, grinning, “you might say it’s plausible deniability.”
The new series of ‘From the Oasthouse’ is available to stream on any podcasting platforms now