This book, the warts-and-all 'autobiography' of Alan Partridge, undoubtedly one of Great Britain's national treasures of TV/radio/general broadcasting, was an absolutely cracking read. For those of you unfamiliar with this particular man, he is a fictional character devised by Steve Coogan (and portrayed by him too), Armando Iannucci and a team of comedy writers (most of the same as those who did this) over the last two decades or so, who has become such an iconic monument of British culture that he more or less exists as a real person in his own right. With all the repressed rage and frustrated class-entitlement of Basil Fawlty yet all the desperate compulsion to be loved and admired as a worthy entertainer of David Brent (if you're not getting these references you've got some serious learning to do about British comedy), Partridge's status as a true titan of Little England is far broader and has an incredibly deep background. For a man who isn't real, the details of his life are wrought with a richness of detail and nuance that humanise him, though such a ridiculous character, effectively being as he is just an irredeemable dick, yet through the wealth of radio and TV projects he's been slotted into and the sheer coherence of this autobiographical backstory* as a way of tying it all together, I am left marvelling at the skill of the writing team. When watching or listening to any of the shows that made Alan Partridge famous, be it his ill-fated chat show Knowing Me, Knowing You or the cringe-sitcom following his floundering career I'm Alan Partridge or the radio shows he was sports presenter for way back before he really took off or even the current mid-morning radio slots he hosts on North Norfolk Digital, I was always left as a viewer/listener thinking "this is hilarious because of how closely it treads the line to what someone like Alan Partridge could actually be like if they existed" - but having read this book, I now feel like that hypothetical wondering might be vindicated. Coogan, Ianucci et al have truly created a living breathing insufferably-boorish bigoted boring bellend from Norwich. Obviously he's still fictional but his life (of course, narrated in his voice** which given his massive insecurity is far from a reliable narration***) is drawn out so well that it's given my a much deeper enjoyment**** of all things Partridge. Alongside the perfectly-written narrative accounts (anecdotes aplenty), the book features two inserted sections of pictures from Alan's life, the explanatory subtitles to which are a pure treasure, as are the utterly inane footnotes spattered throughout the book (some of which direct the reader to 'press play' on a given musical track - yes, this book has a tracklist, as the autobiography of any respectable Disk-Jockey would, and though I did not listen to these songs as and when commanded by Alan, I feel that doing so would certainly improve the reading experience somewhat, so there you go).
I should probably start a new paragraph.
Another for good measure. Anyway, if you're not a Partridge fan, you probably won't get this book, but please please please acquaint yourself with him, and if you find he tickles you in any way, devour everything there is to watch or listen to of him, and then read this. You'll love it. Alan Partridge is one of the greatest artistic creations in the history of human civilisation. (You can quote me on that.) Likewise, if you a Partridge fan, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It yielded more laughs-per-chapter than anything I've ever read, while also being an outstanding work of writership on part of the team behind it, and also provoking occasional moments of actual thoughtful sadness on the reality that people like Alan may exist. This is the less-gushing part of the post so I've saved it for a final paragraph.
Alan Partridge's existence at all is a masterwork of sociocultural satire. In the same way that The Thick of It (by most of the same writers, remember) explores the dark twisted nexus between democratic politics and the liberal media, I think Alan's 'life and work', taken as a whole, can be seen as a grand and complex insight into a variety of unfortunate factors floating about in Britain today (or at least, in the 1989-2007ish period). Geographically and historically he can definitely be said to be a product of his environment. Alan Partridge grew up in the decades where traditional British modernism and community structures were giving way to individualism, and while he as a character is not in any substantive sense 'postmodern' he's definitely been able to shape his life according to the opening-up that this current had in enabling people to more aggressively determine the shape and trajectory of their own life - ultimately a decline in top-down social purpose bestowed upon persons, which for people like Alan merely empowers an unnoticed but pervasive lifelong wrestle with purposelessness. These decades also saw the diffusion of higher education on a bigger scale, empowering the lower-middle-classes with new outlooks on life - in Alan's case, a classless unfounded snobbery that he's quite good with general knowledge. Also, the economic development of these decades meant that traditional career paths were no longer a given, and as mass-entertainment became something to which society oriented itself with passive resignation, the excess of material and intellectual wealth accrued in Britain started to find itself being wasted on things produced for the sole purpose of bottom-of-the-barrel lowest-common-denominator drivel - like chat shows. These are, I think, symbolic of the roaring emptiness of late-20th-century western culture, and it is telling that it is Alan Partridge's lifelong ambition to be a broadcaster of the type who hosts one such avenue of background noise, convinced, as so many who chase these careers probably are, that presenting a pinnacle of vacuousness is a legitimate alternative to attaining true usefulness, fame, or love. From the 1970s onwards, the British public started sitting in sofas staring at TVs and vaguely forgot about everything else that they weren't directly obligated to partake in. Culture, religion, art, any form of wisdom? Meh, whatever floats your boat, but if it doesn't float my boat, then who cares. Politics and social issues? Meh, I'll side with whatever floats my boat, who cares about yours. The trajectory of Alan's career and the views he voices reveal a complicated indictment of our media, which seems to spout utterly empty tripe so as to maintain an utterly empty audience, and the only people who would strongly desire to be the face of such a media are utterly empty people like Alan Partridge, people without a clue, petty materialistic reactionary bigots who desperately crave attention, and they do get it, but only in its most primitive, pointless and soulless form.
These are my own personal reflections on the cultural titan that is Alan Partridge, his life and work; the writing team may have had completely different ideas. But hey ho. Alan is, alongside everything already said about him; sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, ableist, actually a fairly rubbish broadcaster, and an all-round horrible git. Yet this book, in a handful of well-placed passages, does, with unexpected clarity of human insight, make us wonder how a person like him could exist with the 'life that he lived' and the 'shows that he made' and still be able to tolerate living in his own skin, and in those passages where Alan's self-reflection is activated in a genuine sense we see a giant wall of ignorance and denial, blocking this somewhat-clever man's view of the fact that absolutely nobody wants him to be doing what he's doing, and this wall enables him to proudly, cheerily even, keep doing it. Ahaaa to that!
* Unlike his first autobiography, Bouncing Back, which experienced shockingly poor sales (for an autobiographical work of such high calibre by a respected public figure in the Norfolk area) and sadly had to be pulped.
** It's available in audiobook form, read by Steve Coogan in Alan Partridge's voice. Get in!
*** I strongly recommend watching Knowing Me, Knowing You and I'm Alan Partridge and perhaps even listening to some of his radio stuff before you read this book. They're all on Netflix (or DVD boxsets are pretty cheap if you want some awesome Christmas ideas). You'll find it thoroughly amusing, and the horrific awkwardness of some of the scenarios he finds himself galloping into through his sheer social ineptitude will be at stark contrast to the ways he recounts these events in the book. It ties all the loose nuggets of his life that we've seen in shows etc. together brilliantly, fleshing out the realer (and actually deeply sad) life underpinning them all in intervening chapters. I only wish that this book had come out two years later so that the events depicted in the film Alpha Papa (a comedy-thriller marking his debut on the big screen, whereby the broadcaster we all love to hate so much somehow ends up being solely responsible for defusing a hostage situation), as that time revealed Alan not only to be a top entertainer of the people but also a man of action, much like Roger Moore or someone, and reading his telling of how it all happened would've been amazing. Ah well.
**** And I already did have a pretty deep enjoyment of all things Partridge. I'd grown up with a dim cultural awareness of him, but in my third year of university, my close friend and next-door neighbour Charlotte (same who gave me this - yeh, we share a broadly bizarre sense of humour) broke her leg. This meant that a lot of her time had to be spent basically not moving and being kept company to avoid depressive boredom, and during the two-or-so month period it took for her to regain the skill of walking, we must've watched every episode of Knowing Me, Knowing You and I'm Alan Partridge at least three times each. I'm not joking. We binged and re-binged and we have no regrets because it provided some of the funniest evenings of studentdom.
No comments:
Post a Comment