This Time With Alan Partridge
Monday, BBC1
Warren
Monday, BBC1
Rating: 
A while ago now – it must have been 1994, can you believe – I was driving home from work and was tuned in to Radio 4, of course, in preparation for The Archers, when I first caught Alan Partridge’s Knowing Me, Knowing You. It was like your first Ali G moment or first David Brent moment: is this for real? All I knew, for sure, is that it was so sensationally funny – do look up his exchange with Lawrence Camley, ‘Britain’s greatest living author’ – I had to be careful not to drive off the road. And miraculously, plus thankfully, Partridge still has it 25 years on. He is still a genius creation and multi-layered and compelling, in all the ways that, for instance, Warren is so clearly not.
Steve Coogan and Susannah Fielding creating co-host chemistry in This Time With Alan Partridge
I’d always heard that Partridge was originally based on Alan Titchmarsh and his Pebble Mill At One (God, I’m so old) interviewing style (‘Wow, Kylie, smashing frock!’), but when I once put this to Titchmarsh he was quite offended. ‘Me and Michael Aspel,’ he corrected. Anyway, whatever Partridge’s origins, the deal with This Time With Alan Partridge is that Alan is hauled out of obscurity to sit in as a temporary replacement on a One Show-style magazine programme. I say ‘obscurity’ but Alan would beg to differ, because, as he made clear in the essay he recently penned for Radio Times, North Norfolk Digital kept him in work, as did his corporate videos, which included, he stated proudly, How To Be The Best Fire Warden and Tell Me About Debenhams. A partridge is a small bird whose chest puffs out, let us not forget.
His co-host on This Time is Jennie, a Susanna Reid/Alex Jones type played with brilliantly bland efficiency by Susannah Fielding, and the half-hour was crammed with jokes. It was Alan putting his foot in it. It was Alan and his links. (On introducing a rural story: ‘…a tumbled down farmhouse nestled in the cleavage of soft bosomy downs… Can you say bosom? It might not be a woman! It might be a smooth, fat teenage boy!’) It was Alan dispatched to interview an expert on hygiene called Jean. (‘Hi Jean!’) It was Alan interviewing a hacktavist who knew everything Alan had lately been Googling. (‘How much is John Inverdale paid?’)
Yet the genius isn’t in the gags as such, even though they are fine gags, as in the small details like the fact it took him slightly too long to walk across the studio to conduct an interview. Also, at one point, a propos of nothing, he asked needily: ‘Do you think Paul McCartney is watching this?’ (You may remember he once described Wings as ‘the group The Beatles could have been’.) Alan is thin-skinned, self-important, status-seeking and narcissistic, but the writing also allows vulnerability; also allows you to know that, while he’s trying to be professional and is desperate to be admired, one prod and he will collapse. So you actually care for him and, like Basil Fawlty, want it to go right for him, and want him to avoid humiliation, even though there is never any chance of that. So he’s ridiculous, yet also touching, is what I’m trying to say, and therein lies the brilliance.
Meanwhile, I forgot to mention that the character is played by Steve Coogan, which is an understandable oversight as Partridge does seem to exist, so fully and completely, in his own right. And if there is a higher compliment than that, I don’t know what it might be.
Over to Warren, which is Martin Clunes’s first sitcom for a decade. Clunes has done some fine work recently (Vanity Fair, Manhunt), so quite why he didn’t toss this script into the bin, or say, ‘If it’s all right with you, I’ll just do another travelogue until something better comes along’, is anyone’s guess. Warren is a curmudgeonly driving instructor who has moved up north to be nearer his partner’s parents. It opened quite well with Warren being annoyed when he couldn’t round up the price on the petrol pump to the nearest zero while filling up his car – I always get annoyed about that! – and arguing with one of his stepsons about the fact they still have dialup internet. ‘Even Nanna and Grandad have broadband,’ said the stepson. ‘Let’s be like your grandparents,’ responded Warren, ‘you say something racist, I’ll get diabetes.’
Not bad, but thenceforward the script did everything possible to make Warren the least funny, most terrible human being ever. He flytips toxic waste. He humiliates his stepsons. He engages in puerile one-upmanship with his neighbours. And all the while, it isn’t sufficiently written so you might ever feel his pain, as you do with Partridge (or Fawlty or Brent). As for the female characters, the less said the better, as they are all so stupid. I don’t think we’ll be meeting again, Warren and I, but I wish him luck with all his future endeavours, which is just something I’m saying to be polite, admittedly. Honest truth? Truly don’t care.
