I, Partridge (25 page)

I worked with the same company on a number of other projects but ultimately our relationship was doomed. It came to my attention that some of their other business interests were not a good match with Brand Partridge.

I’ll give you a prime example: wet t-shirt contests. Becoming quietly aroused as you watch a couple of young tits slowly reveal themselves though a piss-wet t-shirt might have been acceptable family fare in the 1950s, but no more. Modern women are very different beasts. And I use the word ‘beast’ in its most complimentary possible sense.

One can hardly imagine a quintessentially 21st-century lady like Carol Vorderman allowing her lady breasts to become sodden solely for the amusement of the nation’s sell-through-video-buying public. Not that it wouldn’t be a pleasant sight. The last thing I want to do is cause Mrs Vorderman any offence. I’ve absolutely no doubt that her chest is every bit as impressive and accurate as her maths.

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Not even Mrs Kelly.

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They sort that out in the dub.

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This pun will become more enjoyable as the paragraph progresses.

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See?

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The previous week I had got myself caught up in a row with the local farming community over some comments I may or may not have made (I did make them) about intensive farming techniques. For the record I’d like to say once again that these comments were made in the heat of the moment and that I fully and categorically retract many of them. And actually, issues of slander aside (remember the slush fund mentioned above), it made for some scintillating radio.

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I’ll get to that! Calm down.

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For overseas readers not familiar with
Doctor Who
, the Tardis is a very small police station that can travel through time.

Chapter 25
Marching On: Skirmish

A HUSH DESCENDED OVER
the studio. I took a breath and spoke.

‘You have two phosphorous bombs, a confiscated IED, two fin-stabilised mortars and a German MG3 machine gun with a full magazine. The target is a missile silo. What are you opting to play with?’

‘Phosphorous bomb, please.’

‘I can tell you that the silo is adjacent to a hospital. Play or rearm?’

‘Play.’

‘He’s gone for play, which means this is a high-risk question. Your topic is American sitcoms. Get this wrong and you wipe out the hospital and are back down to £100. Get it right and the dishwasher is yours …’

Well, any viewer of UK Conquest/serious fans of dishwashers knows what happened next and I won’t spoil the excitement for others by revealing it now. Suffice to say that all 208 episodes of military-based quiz
Skirmish
are available on DVD, and they definitely bear rewatching.

The format was absorbing, high-brow but brilliantly simple: players would vie to complete fictional or historical military operations with the fewest casualties, answering general knowledge questions to gain territorial advantage, tot up Gung-ho Points or accrue weaponry. I’d honestly never been this excited about a format since Noel Edmonds sat me down with a pen and paper and explained the winning strategy for
Deal or No Deal
.
¹⁸²

The attention to military detail was second to none, with our armed forces consultant Dave Harrier free to work full-time for the show after his dishonourable discharge from the Scots Guards. It lent the show a quite terrifying realism which in turn gave us wonderful moments of drama. Although never aired, the tension on
Celebrity Skirmish
was such that Yvette Fielding soiled herself.

Skirmish
, then, was a runaway success, on a good day achieving its target regional digital optional share of 2% of the regional digital available audience, which is eight thousand people.

It was a new stage of my career. A new show, on a new channel and time I felt to experiment with a new look – not least because I was starting to swell grotesquely in weight. So I began to grow a beard, going so far as to invest in a miniature comb and a gentle wax. I’m told that Matthew Kelly uses conditioner on his but that felt stupid to me. I did order a quality beard trimmer, though – recommended on Eric Clapton’s website.

The facial hair didn’t last long of course. As well as causing an itch that called for perpetual and frenzied scratching, it wasn’t to everyone’s taste. Plus, Bill Oddie threw a tantrum when he heard I was growing it and sent me a very, very curt letter.

No matter, I was back on the telly, and things were better than ever. Better than ever? Come off it, Partridge. Yes, better than ever, so shut your mouth. It was better because it was TV without the restrictive, choking, stifling, suffocating bureaucracy and creativity-aborting compliance culture of the BBC.

The BBC is like an uncaring sow, lying there fat and impassive as a host of piglets jostle to suck calcium-rich milk from her many jaded teats. (The metaphor probably doesn’t need explaining but, on the off chance that this book finds itself in one of those municipal libraries populated by adult learners, let me explain: the piglets are TV presenters, the milk is cash and the teats are job opportunities.)

TV talent chases BBC presenting work as if it’s the be-all
and
the end-all. NOT me though. Unlike your average piglet, Alan Partridge had the gumption to look beyond the udders of this particular swine and monetise his talent via other channels.

My Radio Norwich contract forbade me from moonlighting on rival stations, but I was free to engage in other commercial TV work.

I’d had a damn good go at the Hamilton’s Water Breaks vid and maintain that my attempt was as good as if not better than the Cliff Thorburn version eventually used. Cliff is a decent guy and a heck of a billiards-player, but his thick Australian accent (he pronounces Norfolk as Norfoke) cheapened the depiction of what were actually really good water breaks.

But appearing in front of the camera again had literally lit a fire in my belly, and I suddenly had a renewed appetite for on-screen work.

I was approached by Matt and Mario from a production company called AAA Productions, a name that was such a brazen attempt to appear first in telephone directories I couldn’t help but be impressed. They met me in the meeting room of a Regus office facility which you can hire by the hour, telegraphing the fact that they weren’t even based in the building but were a back-bedroom operation masquerading as a properly established company.
¹⁸³

They talked me through the idea of
Skirmish
,
¹⁸⁴
about their vision for the show, and ITV’s keen interest. They even showed me some marketing material they’d mocked up to promote my agreement to present in the show. It was a photoshopped image of me as John Rambo, armed to the nines with high-grade weaponry and question cards. They’d super-imposed that over an actual screenshot of the moment I shot Forbes McAllister, and included a speech bubble of him saying ‘Be careful with that.’
¹⁸⁵

Well, I absolutely hooted with laughter. This was an inspired piece of show marketing that was incredibly crass/inventive,
¹⁸⁶
and boded well for the quality of the show. I agreed to take the job there and then, shaking hands and then leaving their hired meeting room, still laughing my head off.
¹⁸⁷

ITV got cold feet
¹⁸⁸
in the end and decided not to take the show, even though Matt and Mario assured me the channel had definitely been interested and they’d definitely had a meeting there, even if they couldn’t remember who with.

No matter, because new satellite channel UK Conquest were sniffing around like a randy dog who’s picked up the musky excellence of another dog’s vagina. The channel’s ethos – ‘guns, girls, guys, grrrr!’ – seemed ideally suited to
Skirmish
.

At first, we were to be its flagship show, broadcast on Monday, Wednesday and Friday (the Wednesday and Friday shows were repeats of the Monday one). Alongside me was glamorous assistant Susie Dent, better known as the resident lexicographer from
Countdown
. Susie resigned after the first show, pointing out politely that the actual format hadn’t been explained to her.

Although the loss of such a talented bookworm was a major blow, it proved to be the making of us. It probably suited the tone of the hard-nosed show to have someone a bit rougher, and urban DJ Lisa l’Anson brought a Westwood-style glamour to proceedings.

Before long, we’d massively upped our output and – on my insistence – we were making three shows a day, six days a week. This was to be my undoing.
¹⁸⁹

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You’d kick yourself if you knew!

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I’ve done the same many, many times.

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To be honest, they had me at the name ‘Skirmish’ but I listened politely all the same.

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His final words.

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Depending on your point of view.

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A fit of giggles that only stopped on my drive home when I realised I was also crying.

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There’s a clever pun in here.

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Press play on Track 34.

Chapter 26
My Drink and Drugs Heck

‘ARGH. GWAAG. HUUUH.’

These noises, these gurgles and barks and grunts, they’re coming from me. They’re coming from my mouth. How long have I been making them? I do not know. Where on earth am I? I do not know. Where’s my assistant? I do not know.

One thing I did know was that my face was in considerable pain. Sharp-cornered objects were jostling for space in my mouth, spearing my inner cheeks and stabbing the roof of my mouth. Mixed with the taste of blood was an unmistakable cocktail of chocolate and nougat.

I gasped for breath, feeling my life force waning. ‘Is this it then, Alan?’ I thought. ‘Is this where you’re finally going to die?’

I gathered my bearings. I was sat in my car, door open, belt on. It was dark, cold. Pitter-patter went the rain, as if bookending my short and ultimately unhappy life (see Chapter One for the left-hand bookend). I was alone, and felt it.

‘[My assistant]!’ I called out through the semi-masticated confectionery. Where was she? ‘[My assistant]!’ Nothing.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the rear-view mirror – my mouth and chin were stained brown from all the binged chocolate. My eyes peeped out, redly, from a pair of collapsed lids. My face – my lovely face – was now unspeakably bloated, blotchy skin struggling to contain the expanding Alan within. It was as if bread was being baked in my cheeks. Like a good-looking John Merrick, mine was a face that looked really shit. Ravaged by addiction, it was now home to jowls, eyes and chin that were being dragged torso-wards by the weight of their gelatinous content.

Fat, tired, confused, cold, obese, alone, with chilly feet. I had hit rock bottom. I forced another two prisms of chocolate into my already over-subscribed mouth and waited for death to come.

The human brain comprises 70% water, which means it’s a similar consistency to tofu. Picture that for a second – a blob of tofu the size and shape of a brain. Now imagine taking that piece of tofu, and forcing your thumbs into it hard.
¹⁹⁰
It would burst, wouldn’t it?

Okay, now imagine those thumbs weren’t thumbs but thumb-shaped pieces of bad news. And there weren’t two of them, they were about half a dozen. Imagine you were forcing all six pieces of bad news – a divorce, multiple career snubs, accusations from the family of a dead celebrity, estranged kids, borderline homelessness, that kind of thing – into a piece of tofu.

With me? Good. Now imagine that it’s not tofu, but a human brain. And they’re not pieces of bad news but six human thumbs. That’s what happened to me. In 2001, my brain had half a dozen thumbs pushed into it.
¹⁹¹
I was trying to ignore these thumbs by making three television shows a day, six days a week. And like a civilian hospital targeted by a contestant on
Skirmish
, my brain basically exploded.

It makes me laugh when people suggest that I’m exaggerating my psychological distress to cash in on the craze for ‘misery lit’. Actually, no, it doesn’t make me laugh. It makes me sigh. What I went through was real, and incredibly tough, and would have broken a lesser man like a gingerbread man being thwacked with a meat tenderiser. That it didn’t speaks to my fortitude and ability to bounce back.

The naysayers who try to downplay the very real horror of chocolate addiction, or scoff at a naked man crying in the bath, or intimate that I’m some kind of wally can frankly eff off. And the suggestion that I would resort to hyperbole to sensationalise what I went through literally makes me pass out with nausea.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me take you back in time. Come. Come with me, through the fog-clad mists of time to 1987.

We’re in the unnecessarily large studio of Our Price radio. And who’s this guy? With the strut and the swagger and the spunk? It’s a young Alan Partridge, one of the hottest broadcasters in in-store radio. He sets down his headphones, and heads for the door, high-fiving a succession of pleased staff.