I, Partridge (9 page)

And by the time someone started banging on the door wondering what all the noise was about, I had reached a zen-like state of calm. As it turns out, though, I was right to be anxious about the editorial meeting. There were some seriously large-brained people in that room. Those in attendance included Christopher Morris (anchor), Rosie May (environment), Kevin Smear (roving reporter), Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan (economics editor) and yours truly (sport, plus the Paralympics).

I picked a chair and sat down quietly and effectively. It was a good start but I needed to do more. I took a deep breath and prepared to introduce myself. But as soon as I heard the level of their chit-chat, I froze. They were using words, ideas and concepts that you simply never heard in Norfolk. Not even in Norwich.

I resolved to keep my mouth shut until I’d acclimatised. Phrases swirled around the room. ‘Where does Labour stand on that?’ ‘It’s over for Milosevic.’ ‘Alan, could you pass the biscuits?’ ‘This Rodney King thing is going to be massive.’ ‘GDP’s down by 0.5% this quarter.’ ‘Alan? The biscuits.’ ‘The Home Office aren’t going to comment apparently.’ ‘Fine, I’ll get them myself then.’

How in the name of holy living heck was I going to bust my way into this conversation? I don’t know, I answered, inside my head. On the table next to me was the tea urn. Now this was a plus point because I loved tea urns. Still do. There’s something very reassuring about the concept of hot beverages dispensed from a lovely big drum.
⁶²
Of course your problem with any kind of communal drinks station is the sugar bowl. People put the spoon back in the bowl after stirring in their sugar. No problem with that, you might think. Well think again. The residual moisture acts as a caking agent, forming the granules into unsightly asymmetric clumps. Worse still, those clumps are stained a grubby brown by the tannin-rich tea. Not nice, not nice at all.

And let’s not forget the germ issue. Putting a damp spoon back in the bowl is the tea-drinking equivalent of sharing a needle. And I did
not
want to end up with the tea-drinking equivalent of AIDS.

Instantly it struck me that if their ‘thing’ was intimidating intellect, my ‘thing’ could be beverage-related hygiene. Of course I later remembered that I already had a ‘thing’, namely sport (plus the Paralympics). But I wasn’t thinking straight, which should go some way to explaining what happened next.

Kevin Smear (roving reporter) approached. This seemed somehow appropriate because while the others had stayed where they were, he had quite literally roved over.

‘Hello, Alan.’

‘Hello.’

‘Guys, I’m just saying hello to Alan.’

The rest of them nodded in my direction, using their heads.

‘What are you doing sat over there?’ said Rosie May (environment).

‘Nothing much,’ I smiled. ‘Just thinking that you lot have probably got tea AIDS!!’

Wham! I knew it was a winner as soon as it’d left my lips. If you’d stuck me in a room with a typewriter for ten years I would never have come up with one that good. But in that room, fuelled by nothing other than raw nerves, out it plopped, fully-formed and ready to go.

Of course it wasn’t a winner at all. Not being privy to my train of thought, they had no idea what this ‘tea’ prefix was. As far as they were concerned their new colleague had just accused them all of having AIDS. Yet they didn’t have AIDS. And though the colourful lifestyle of one of them certainly put him in the ‘at risk’ category, he wouldn’t go full-blown until 2003.

No, I was wrong to suggest they all suffered from a terminal beverage-based illness, whether that was tea AIDS, coffee cancer or hot chocolate tumours. I was so ashamed by my behaviour that I retreated into my shell like a turtle would if it realised it was about to have a car reverse over its head. (And for the record, Fernando shouldn’t have let it out of its cage in the first place.) And it was in my shell that I would stay for most of my time on
On the Hour
.

To be honest, you’d find this unfriendly attitude across the whole BBC News and Current Affairs team. It saddened me because the department was populated by heroes of mine, faces I’d watched time and again on the news while eating my dinner: pork chops and gravy, beans on toast, hot pot, chicken pie and chips, maybe even a
coq au vin
, sometimes just a quick can of soup. Any meal, it doesn’t matter really. I’ve just realised I’m listing things I have for dinner when I should be listing faces I’d seen on the news. But I’m just saying I’d seen these people on the news and respected them. But their reassuring televisual demeanour was, I realised, a facade. In person, they didn’t like to mingle at all. Not even with each other.
⁶³

So yes, in London, I was very much in my shell. But back in Norwich, things couldn’t have been more different. Anyway, this chapter’s over now.

58
Press play on Track 12.

59
For years, I guarded the Alan Desk Design jealously, but in 2007 I concluded reluctantly that I was never going to successfully monetise the concept and so I made it – and this isn’t arrogant – into my gift for the world.

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Press play on Track 13.

61
Comprised of a hidden network of mysterious subterranean tunnels – how did they get there? Where do they end? – it’s at work for 18 hours a day hurtling busy Londoners around their capital at almost twice the speed of walking. Meanwhile at night, with all the humans gone, it is said that the station platforms become a place for the capital’s innumerate rats to gather for bouts of high-energy unprotected sex. It’s basically dogging for rats.

62
For a long time I’d actually lobbied to get one at home. Carol and the kids had said no. With the best will in the world, those kettle-crazed Luddites wouldn’t know progress if it came up and scalded them in the face.

63
Many was the time I’d see Nicholas Witchell sitting all alone in the canteen. It was a shame, because years later I realised we both shared a love of collecting butterflies. He has an enormous collection in his London flat. I like to imagine that after a hard day following the royals, he returns home, sits in an armchair with a mug of cocoa and waits as his entire herd of butterflies greet him by flitter-fluttering their way over and landing on his naked body. But I know for a fact this can’t happen because his entire collection is dead, each one attached to a display case with a single pin through the heart.

Chapter 8
A Mighty Big Fish for A Pond this Size
64

‘WHO ARE YOU? I
don’t bloody know you any more!’

Carol was shouting at me, tears streaming down her ruddy
⁶⁵
cheeks, as I tried to barge past her. She grabbed at my jowls, imploring me to look at her. But she was right. This was a different Alan Partridge and he wasn’t in the mood.

I eased her out of the way and put the takeaway menus – the glossy food-describing documents that she’d so carefully placed in my hands – back into the top drawer. It should have been second drawer down but I wasn’t thinking straight.

She swung me around and fanned some of my breath into her nostrils. ‘Have you … been drinking??’ Her voice was shaking. I turned away. I’d had a half-bottle of wine – I don’t remember the colour – on the train back home and was out of control.

Friday would usually have been our takeaway night, but tonight I wasn’t hungry – I’d been in the BBC club, enjoying a buffet put on to celebrate 26 years of
Tomorrow’s World
. (For the uninitiated, the BBC club is a subsidised bar-cum-restaurant, laid on by licence fee payers for the talent and crew of the BBC alike. It provided a public-free environment for BBC staffers to carouse and unwind, to share ideas and to complain about working conditions. It was where a star-struck Alan Partridge would buy a sandwich most days in the hope of spotting Esther Rantzen, Andy Crane, Karl Howman.)

This was a new experience for me. I was starry-eyed, my mind addled with possibility and adventure, recognition and more adventure. Which is how I found myself seduced that night by the lure of glamour, sausage rolls and a chat with Maggie Philbin.

Not many people had turned up to the soiree – the 25th anniversary in 1990 had been a much bigger do – but I had lost track of time, arguing with Howard Stableford about the possibility of time travel, and had missed my usual train. On the next scheduled service, I thought I’d wash down the rolls with a drink. Frig it, I said aloud, why not? I work hard, it’s Friday night and I want a glass of wine (still can’t remember the colour).

I had some crisps as well, and the sliced potato snacks had lopped a fair bit off my appetite. I didn’t want a bloody take-away. I wanted another slice of quiche and another half of bitter. I wanted to be back in the BBC club, the happy filling in a Kate Bellingham/Judith Hann sandwich, not sat in with Carol as she decorates her face with spare rib sauce.

And when she handed me the menus, my response had been withering. ‘I’m not peckish. I don’t want to eat a take-away meal tonight.’

That’s when she shoved me and burst into uncontrollable (but still annoying) sobs. ‘Who
are
you? I don’t bloody know you any more!’

Yes, reader, London had changed me. My career was going stratospheric, with millions of radio listeners hungrily eating the sound of my voice as it fed them sports-centred info. It was all so new to me. New and intoxicating and fun.

I slumped in front of the TV and Carol sat next to me, ordering a takeaway for one. Armed with a new understanding of London broadcasting, I was able to provide a kind of Director’s Commentary on current affairs TV shows, pointing out what the presenters ordered from the BBC club, if they were taller/shorter than they appeared on TV and generally providing helpful info on the production process. Carol said nothing.

Sue Cook appeared on screen, and in my tipsiness I began to talk in gushing terms about her. She’d always reminded me of Jeff Archer’s wife, Lady Archer. Sophisticated and demure. But having got to know her a little bit, I’d realised she had a wonderful sense of humour and had a loathing of other presenters that I found quite wonderful. I mentioned this to Carol and she ran to the bedroom, really fast and loud. I climbed into bed next to her and thought it prudent to say nothing. You really can’t win with Carol sometimes.

I muttered something about heading off early the next morning to test drive the new Rover 800 with Gary who directs the Superdrug commercials and she just looked at me.

‘Don’t you know what day it is?’

I mentally rifled through the roller deck of red-letter days: birthdays, anniversaries, deaths. And then it hit me. I stumbled into the bathroom, splashing my face with water so cold it made me go ‘Ah! Ah!’ with each splash.

Tomorrow was the day of the Royal Norfolk Show, and we were to man the Elizabethan craft fair in period dress. This was a Partridge family fixture, absolutely utterly unmissable. And not just out of duty – we always had a really great day, adding ‘–eth’ to our words to sound more Elizabethan and having a bloody good laugh about it.

Carol was right. What had I become? A Royal Norfolk Fair-forgetting ogre of a man. I slumped into the shower (which was just a curtained-off area at one end of the bath), decided not to turn it on and sobbed.
⁶⁶

If you’d told me in the late 80s that one day my local branch of Tandy would shut its doors to the public so that Alan Partridge could browse its electricals in peace, I’d have thought you were mad. If you’d told me that they would do this at the height of the Christmas shopping period, I’d probably have spat on your back. Yet in December 1993 and December 1994 and December 1995, this is exactly what happened. The question of course, is how …

There was no doubt about it, Carol was on the money. I had become a monster. It was as if I was one kind of person in my London life (not a monster) and an altogether different type in my Norwich life (a monster). And I’d guess that the transition between the two would have taken place somewhere in between. Let’s say Manningtree if I was on the train and Newmarket if I was driving, defaulting to Silverley if I’d plumped for the B-roads.

In London I may have been just another face in an already star-studded media landscape, but in Norwich I was now a seriously big dog. I was receiving more sexual advances than ever before, many of them from women. Every time I entered a wine bar heads would turn. Or alternatively people would just swivel their stools round so they didn’t have to strain their necks.

If I’d been a philanderer, this period in my life would have been a turkey shoot. I could have gone out for a drink in any bar in Norwich and left with at least a dozen middle-aged woman plucked, gutted, and slung over my shoulder. With sex at my place to follow.

Of course the local men-folk didn’t like this. Even my old Our Price buddy Paul Stubbs seemed to have his nose put out of joint. He ambled over to me one night as I was picking through some bar snacks.

‘What size are your feet, Alan?’

‘I’m an 11,’ I replied, tossing an olive sky-ward.

‘Well I suggest you buy some 12s.’

‘Oh yeah? How come?’

‘Because you’re getting too big for your boots!’

Even accounting for the fact that I never wore boots, this was a good line. And as he ran up and down the wine bar high-fiving a random selection of other jealous males, Stubbs knew it. As I caught the olive – which admittedly had been in the air for a long time – in my mouth, I knew this had been a shot across the bows. But like so many others, it was a warning I chose to ignore.