This Time with Alan Partridge, episode 1 review: a sublimely excruciating return for a disastrously bad broadcaster
It's a terrific title for the BBC-comeback show of Steve Coogan’s magnificent comic creation, Alan Partridge. “This Time”, gently mocks the sort of meaningless names given to “magazine” shows on telly.
It also reeks of that most Partridgean of qualities: desperation. “This time, you’ll all like me and the Beeb won’t axe my show! Please...!”
For Alan’s relationship with the BBC has always been fraught. At the end of his first telly series (the faux chat-show Knowing Me, Knowing You, 1994-’95) he accidentally shot and killed a guest on air.
The first episode of the even better follow-up – the Linton Travel Tavern-based mockumentary I’m Alan Partridge – saw him assault hated BBC commissioning editor Tony Hayers with a giant wheel of cheese, having previously ended his own Christmas Special by lamping the same fellow with a plucked partridge impaled on his fist.
There followed a hiatus from the BBC of 15-odd years, during which time the character found a plausible new slot on the fictional, barely listened-to radio station of North Norfolk Digital, in the Sky series Mid Morning Matters.
When it was announced that writers Coogan and Armando Iannucci were to be joined for that not by original co-writer Peter Baynham but by two young upstarts, brothers Neil and Rob Gibbons, Partridge connoisseurs everywhere winced. In fact, this duo nailed it, with Coogan's performance as flawless as ever: the essence of Partridge lived on.
Loosely inspired by The One Show, Alan’s new project sees him back where he longs to be: on television.
The credible premise is that Alan (taking a quick break from the North Norfolk airwaves) is a last-minute, stand-in co-host, with us seeing what the viewers see, alongside vérité, Larry Sanders-like cutaways to Alan off-camera and behind-the-scenes.
And, just moments into the first episode of This Time, you realised, with joy, that the Gibbon bros and Coogan (now their only co-writer, and also starring, naturally) have once again perfectly captured l’esprit de Partridge.
With the exception of that festive special and a handful of episodes of the first series of I’m Alan Partridge, this new effort is as funny as anything he has ever done.
We first encountered Alan on the sofa with his co-host Jennie Gresham.
Played to perfection by actress Susannah Fielding, she is one of many young, capable, beautiful women that the Fates have placed within arm’s reach of Alan over the years as if purely to torture him.
As the seconds ticked down to going live, he started complaining about having a dry mouth, needing water.
Not since a Spunt dancer (don’t ask) repeatedly thrust his groin into Alan’s face in Knowing Me, Knowing you has he looked so sublimely panic-stricken.
Alan and Jennie’s first guest was an environmentalist and leopard-seal expert (Cariad Lloyd). While she and Jenny were at pains to highlight the seals’ cuddlier side, Alan – ever the drama queen – portrayed them as the most vicious beasts ever to have taken to the oceans.
“Wrong tone...” he muttered to himself, before resuming with an oleaginous and atrociously timed “Ahhhhhhh!”.
This vignette also yielded a quite marvellous little nugget of writing: twice, Alan proudly introduced said seal-fancier as “Alice Clunt”, only for her to point out that her surname was actually Fluck.
Overall, the script wasn’t perhaps quite as merciless towards Alan as past efforts have been. But – and contrary to what Coogan has recently claimed – it strikes me, happy to say, that at heart Alan (so far) seems to have barely changed over the years, however much the world about him has done so.
Certainly, his ineptitude was by no means the only familiar character-trait of his that registered loud and clear here. One later section, on hand-washing – reeking of magazine-TV pointlessness – saw Coogan have an absolute field-day with a not-so-holy trinity of xenophobia, anal retention and sexual impropriety.
“The human body is the most efficient incubator of bacteria with the exception of imported meat,” Alan proudly declared, before reciting a revolting, nursery-rhyme mnemonic about washing one’s hands after visiting the lavatory.
The (attractive, female) expert he consulted confirmed the importance of manual hygiene, before showing him a film of her demonstrating exactly how to execute said ablution. Inevitably, after just a few seconds of watching her slender, soapy fingers slide sensuously over each other, Alan was jelly. Again, Coogan rendered this wonderfully.
Elsewhere, Alan incurred the wrath of Shell Oil, delved haplessly into gambling addiction and had a farcical encounter with technophobic sidekick Simon Denton (Tim Key, a welcome hangover from Mid Morning Matters).
He also saw Jennie “accidentally” steal some of his lines – though is there the hint of a spark emerging between the unlikely duo amid the acrimony?
If so, his longtime assistant and admirer Lynn (Felicity Montagu) won’t like this. As the the off-air sections are revealing, she has nothing but venom for Jennie, and there's a whiff of Lady Macbeth-like ambition creeping in.
The episode wrapped with the ever-insensitive Alan unmasking a “hackivist” (Liam Williams, one of the cast’s four Edinburgh Comedy Awards laureates) whose condition for being interviewed had been anonymity, and who duly stormed out.
Alan (with camera-crew) strode boldly after him, Jeremy Kyle-like. But he then misguidedly followed him into a crowded BBC lift, where he faced a comprehensive defeat: having to end the entire episode awkwardly en route to the ground floor, as Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis (gamely playing herself) told him he’d asked all the wrong questions and then refused to give him her email address.
Who, in all honesty, can blame her? And who, moreover, can resist tuning in to next week’s (reputedly #MeToo-dominated) episode? Seldom have comebacks to prime-time telly been more excruciating than this disastrously bad broadcaster's – which, for Coogan and co, is of course the ultimate compliment.
