Back in the early 2000s, it looked like Steve Coogan could kill Alan Partridge. He spent a decade playing the popular Norwich announcer in television and radio projects such as On the Hour, The Day Today and Knowing Me Know You, culminating in a second series of sitcoms. by BBC I’m Alan Partridge. The series earned him two Baftas, but Coogan later admitted that at one point he saw the character as a “gull” wrapped around his neck. But 20 years later — after countless TV series, one feature film, one book deal, one podcast, and two live shows — the idea of Partridge simply vanished in the early Noughties. inconceivable. The character has become Coogan’s lifelong work. Far from being an albatross, he becomes an integral part of Coogan’s identity – much like Rod Hull and Emu, if Emu were surgically grafted onto Rod Hull’s face.
In fact, Alan Partridge has begun to outlive his time of sale. Of course, this is always part of the joke – he is a man with despair on his sleeve, running after relevance as if it had stolen his watch. There is no doubt Partridge’s excellence as a satire of British connoisseurship and pettiness, but there is always a character to Partridge that makes him more than just a two-way caricature. afternoon. His disdain for the local farmers. His love for the Longstanton Spice Museum. But Britain has changed dramatically in the last 20 years, and Partridge’s latent satire hasn’t always caught on.
Since the days of I’m Alan Partridge, the country became more polarized than ever; Years of economic hardship, political upheaval, crumbling infrastructure and cultural grievances have left the UK in a completely different place. Did Alan Partridge’s social commentary ever hope to reflect this? Partridge’s latest TV outing, two series A program Send up This time with Alan Partridgemore or less a recreated version of Know me Know you, with a few contemporary jokes about social media and #MeToo thrown in for good results. Even its biggest fans will surely admit the segments are a bit of a hit and miss.
While the web series Mid-morning problems was a great revival of the character – for my money, the tightest and funniest Partridge ever – it was followed with a host of other projects. It is inevitable that profits will decrease. The lingering ups and downs of Partridge’s fictional career also began to be related to the joke: why a tired man in the dismal state of a North Norfolk radio station suddenly landed a contract. BBC One TV show? By the time it got to his stadium-filled live tour (which I felt painful to watch), it was hard to say exactly what “Alan Partridge” was even supposed to be.
But the problem isn’t just with Partridge himself – it’s everything that comes with him. Believers. Endless impressions. Account “Random Partridge” on social networks. Usually, pages like this will miss the whole point. Of course, Richard Madeley sometimes has a tendency to “go all the way to Alan Partridge”: it was presenters like him who assumed that Coogan was shining in the first place.
It’s not like Coogan won’t have other things to go on when he puts Partridge to rest. Whether it’s through self-parody comedy series TripFeature films like Oscar nominations Philomenaor TV series like the upcoming Jimmy Savile series Receipt, Coogan established himself as a respected playwright and writer outside the world of Partridge. He doesn’t want to take the chance. But at this point, there can be no stopping Partridge. The character is approaching the kind of revered “national treasure” status reserved for real-life TV icons. Thirty years on the BBC will do it for you – but it strikes a rather discordant note with what his character is oriented to.
I’m Alan Partridge it feels like it comes from a completely different era, the time before the internet took over the world. The kind of man Partridge is parodying – a car geek, James Bond military fantasy – of course still exists, but the satire no longer speaks to our sociopolitical realities. Fortunately, people like Partridge are no longer the dominant cultural voices. What does mocking them really achieve? It’s clear that Coogan has too much love for the character to actually turn around; In the end, Partridge is almost always framed as a sympathetic idiot. But in a world where the real Alan Partridges is out there voting for Nigel Farage and rallying against the “wake up,” this gentle touch would be gone. To really satirize Britain in 2022, things would have to get a lot uglier.
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