Disgusting Bliss (15 page)

The potential for the character’s development had been obvious in
The Day Today
, which Lynne Truss observed was ‘the making of Coogan, whose genius as the banal, dim and vainglorious Partridge is unmissable’.
⁴⁷
Iannucci looks back on
Knowing Me
. . ., or rather the period of making it, with mixed feelings. Everything had been done at such a pace. The radio version of
Knowing Me
. . . was done at the same time as
The Day Today
pilot. And then the TV version followed straight on. ‘I’m not entirely happy with it,’ he says now.

Patrick Marber revealed, ‘We wrote each of the television shows in blocks of six days, working day and night, living on takeaways, thinking we were going to explode. We had agreed a production schedule that was murderously difficult for us. We thought we were going to write the whole series in advance of making it, and of course we pissed about and didn’t, so then we had to write it between shows. The whole series was an essay crisis.’
⁴⁸
Morris turned up to the production one day with a large cake for everyone.

As with the schedule of the radio series, the real sense of imminent disaster only added to the sense that Alan himself could fall apart at any moment – which he did at the end of the Christmas special. It was that spectacular character disintegration over the series which made the show more than a chat-show spoof. The team had always thought of
Knowing Me
,
Knowing You
as a sitcom in the sense that Alan’s character was revealed during the run.

Iannucci played with the sitcom format again when Alan returned in painfully reduced circumstances without his chat show in
I’m Alan Partridge
. Looking to develop the emotional resonance in the show, Iannucci checked out
The Day Today
contributors Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan, who were making their own hit show with
Father Ted
and were rather flattered at the attention. ‘I remember being surprised that he would ask us about anything,’ says Mathews.

Having visited their set, Iannucci enclosed
I’m Alan Partridge
in four walls so the audience could only watch what was going on through monitors, explaining that the audience were to be ‘eavesdropping on something they weren’t meant to see’.
⁴⁹
Which was, in essence, Alan going down an emotional plughole, subsisting in his Norwich motel. It was all pretty grim stuff. Iannucci remembers looking at the characters and thinking, They’re just a big bunch of losers, who’ve all gravitated towards each other and they’re all keeping each other afloat.’ Only the live audience kept the show from unbearable bleakness. Within the closed set they used hand-held cameras: ‘You could see how cramped Alan’s bedroom was because we could go right around him,’ said Iannucci, ‘but at the same time Steve could take the rhythm of his performance from the laughs that he was hearing.’
⁵⁰

Like so much of the best work of productions led by him and by Morris, the shows had a fluid, organic quality that refreshed the sitcom format. Both of them would amass huge amounts of material in the course of making programmes and threw out scenes that had taken months to develop if something funnier or a better direction was discovered in late rehearsals. The Partridge writers slowly teased out the plot and occasionally came up with ‘Alanisms’ on a range of topics which Iannucci compiled into what became a thick file. Actors would frequently arrive to find writers still working on the script for that day, but Iannucci and his team were good at handling chaos and Steve Coogan was always very sure of what would work for his character, so that somehow it came together.
I’m Alan Partridge
marked the height of popularity for the character.

Over the course of producing
The Day Today
and
Knowing Me, Knowing You
, Iannucci himself had felt an increasing urge to escape from the shadows. Steve Coogan and Chris Morris were such strong presences that much of the audience might well have thought the shows were all theirs: ‘Some of it’s inevitable anyway,’ Iannucci says, ‘and some of it at the time you get worked up about and then years later you think, I don’t know what all that fuss was about. I can remember really genuinely feeling, I hope I don’t get overlooked in all this given that I’ve spent the last eighteen months of my life devoted to it.’

In March 1994 he told the
Sunday Times
: ‘I never set out to be a producer and I’d like to get out of it, really. I’m going to take maybe a year away from producing to concentrate on writing. Producing takes time. It can lead to me being frustrated because I feel that I’m not giving a hundred per cent to each project and it can also make the people I’m working with feel frustrated, so I’m trying to pare it down, not do two things at once.’
⁵¹
But it would always be hard to get away from something he was so suited for. He finally got to return to presenting with 1995’s
Saturday Night Armistice
: ‘I have an ego. I do like performing. I like hearing my voice,’ Iannucci told
The Times
.
⁵²
The show also featured old friends Peter Baynham and Dave Schneider, with writers including Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews suggesting ideas that Iannucci developed. The show was recorded the night before broadcast to get in topical news as well as pranks and more personal material.

‘There are more traditional satirists like Rory Bremner who look at politics, and their agenda is set by the
Daily Telegraph
, the
Independent
or the
Sun
,’ said Iannucci. ‘We wanted to look at stuff beyond that – your day-to-day life, what it is like working in offices, the lottery phenomenon – things that are more the stuff of conversation at that time.’
⁵³
The show moved to a Friday night for its second and third series, but the formula remained the same. The series producer was Sarah Smith, an old friend of Iannucci’s from back when she’d been president of the Oxford Revue and her Small and Intimate female double act had performed with Iannucci and Andrew Glover’s A Pair of Shorts. She moved into production, working in regional theatre for three years before joining BBC light entertainment, working with Iannucci again and later coming into Chris Morris’s orbit.

‘We were all part of the same gang, really,’ says Smith. ‘We were nicking each other’s writers. I worked with Pete and Rich and Stew and so did Armando. We were across the corridor from one another.’ She was also a master of detail and would regularly pull a couple of all-nighters just to edit everything together. When
Friday Night Armistice
took on politics, they hit New Labour as much as the Right, managing to attract complaints from both main parties, to Iannucci’s pride. But although it took on current affairs, the show was always played with much less intensity than
The Day Today
. ‘I think Chris thought it was rubbish, but there you go,’ confesses Smith. ‘I don’t think he liked it very much. He saw it as much more lightweight. The whole idea of
Armistice
was to dress the political stuff up in a light entertainment format, and that was a deliberate decision. It was for an audience and had all sorts of different material, and I think Chris was more purist. That’s just a difference of taste.’

Iannucci was not overconfident about his own abilities in front of the cameras: ‘I am not comfortable in the limelight. It takes a bit of getting used to,’ he said. ‘But it makes a nice change working on television and hearing the reaction of a studio audience. I like my privacy. I enjoy performing, but I don’t like the idea of becoming famous. I don’t like what comes with it. I am the least cool person. I have only been to a few celebrity parties and left early because I was tired.’
⁵⁴
But even he found himself in the tabloids in time, though it was for nothing more scandalous than being called the funniest man in Britain. In 1996 the
Mirror
made the rather weak observation that his ‘name conjures up a wacky vision of a sharp-suited ice-cream seller’, though readers were doubtless reassured to learn that, in reality, ‘It belongs to a sharp-witted Glaswegian Italian who flogs laughter’.
⁵⁵

But if there were tabloid headlines that went unused by either Iannucci or Morris, Steve Coogan was ready to take them up. For a while he was rarely out of the press, displaying a difference in personality which his colleagues regarded with a kind of awe and incomprehension. Patrick Marber and he were in outlook the complete reverse of their colleagues: ‘Were it not for the fact that he has this fantastic gift for comedy,’ said Iannucci, ‘Steve is fundamentally a guy who reads a lot of car magazines.’
⁵⁶
He and Marber were the most visible, very close and very eager to get on. ‘For a while it was kind of like a big brother/little brother relationship. I wouldn’t do anything without asking Patrick what he thought,’ said Coogan.
⁵⁷
And when Iannucci was being pulled between the radio Alan and
The Day Today
pilot, it was Patrick Marber who guided his friend and acted as a champion of the potential of Partridge. But as Alan peaked, their partnership, too, was beginning to wind down. Steve Coogan looked to Hollywood, and Marber began to concentrate on writing drama. ‘It’s been a great luxury to be able to think, Oh, I can write on my own,’ he said, ‘because when you’ve written collaboratively, you start to wonder whether you can do it any other way. I’m saying what I want to say about the world directly rather than filtering it through one of Steve’s characters, or one of my own.’
⁵⁸
By February 1995 he was directing his first play,
Dealer’s Choice
, at the National Theatre, whose Richard Eyre had been a fan of Alan Partridge and
The Day Today
. Eyre was interested in the transition Marber had made from comedy to drama. The play was first performed in the National’s studio and then transferred to the Cottesloe.

‘I know I couldn’t have ever written a single play had I not done
On the Hour
and
The Day Today
and Alan Partridge,’ says Marber. ‘It was all stuff that built up some sense of self in the world and a kind of confidence and a sense of who I might be as a writer which was absolutely formative in my brain.’ With
Dealer’s Choice
Marber had developed the writing voice he had always wanted, and its arrival was singled out in the
Observer
as a theatrical highlight of the year: ‘unbeatable ensemble acting’ and a ‘marvellous comedy debut’.
⁵⁹
By the time of
I’m Alan Partridge
, Marber was too busy with his theatrical career to work on it for long. With Marber on his way out, Peter Baynham was drafted in on the writing side.

It was in
I’m Alan Partridge
that Morris at last made a guest appearance. Even then, Iannucci says, ‘It took a little bit of persuading,’ as Morris still wasn’t sure he’d be good at acting. But by then his own mark had been made with the safe engineering of
Brass Eye
into the world, and he had been developing his own material and style through three years of intensive work, operating undercover for most of one of them.

THE RECORDING STUDIO IN WHICH PETER COOK AND CHRIS Morris sat was uncluttered. There were no scripts and no props, just the ever-present smog from Peter Cook’s cheap cigarettes and a couple of mikes on the table. The tape machines ran continuously in the control room where the sound engineers monitored the recording and Peter Fincham gazed through the window at the men whose expressions remained composed no matter how absurd their conversation. But of the two it was Peter Cook who needed the reassurance of an audience, glancing occasionally through the window to where the engineers, lost in the stream of invention, needed the prompt to remember where they were and smile back their approval. Morris never looked up. Still weeks away from the broadcast of
The Day Today
and by comparison hardly known, he was assured and confident even when the infinitely more experienced older comic tried a verbal ambush, which was quite a lot of the time.

Why Bother?
had been Peter Fincham’s idea. Peter Cook played his established character, dissolute rogue Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, discussing his life over the course of five conversations. The series went out over consecutive evenings from 10 January 1994, each broadcast lasting about ten minutes. Fincham did some preparatory work with Cook and played Morris a tape of him with comedy producer John Lloyd. Following an initial lunch meeting, work began at Aquarium Studios in Primrose Hill, north London. Cook travelled the short distance from his home in Hampstead, arriving on the first day with the address scribbled on the cover of a copy of
Private Eye
. The studio was in a mews with enough room for Morris to park his old Merc. And then they just got on with it.

Accompanied by a supermarket bag of extra-strength lager, Cook ‘proceeded to skip about mentally with the agility of a grasshopper’, Morris later told the Peter Cook Appreciation Society. ‘Really quite extraordinary.’
⁶⁰
A pilot edition was recorded at the beginning of 1993, with a handful of others taking place towards the end of the year. The sessions were all held in the afternoons, each lasting a few hours, and Morris remembered them as ‘very merry’.

It was all improvised, though one of the initial areas for discussion had been around since
On the Hour.
It was an idea that had been taken on a particularly circuitous route in Morris’s imagination before finding its home in the third edition of
Why Bother?
, its journey providing an insight into how much development and reworking could go into Morris’s comedy. Steven Wells and David Quantick had suggested that the discovery of the fossilized remains of Christ as a small child would make a good headline for the Christmas special, for which it was smartly vetoed by Armando Iannucci.