Following on from this speculative news story, would it work?
What other characters have made the transition on to the big screen?
Bean...
ohn Harlow
ALAN PARTRIDGE, the cheesy chat show host created by the comic actor Steve Coogan, is to return - this time to the big screen.
Five years after his last comedy series, when the socially inept disc jockey was left stranded in the backwaters of regional radio, he is to make the big time. But Partridge’s fictional comeback is sabotaged when a Middle Eastern terrorist cell hijacks the BBC head office, according to an outline of the proposed big-screen debut for Alan Partridge: The Movie.
Coogan returned to Britain last week after filming projects in California and Hawaii and knowing that in the US he is regarded as the talent who, alongside Ricky Gervais and Sacha Baron Cohen, will finally stop Americans talking about Monty Python and Benny Hill.
Larry David, who co-created Seinfeld and invited Coogan to act as a destructive family guidance counsellor on his Curb Your Enthusiasm, said he is now unable to speak to Coogan without cracking up laughing.
In the last series of Partridge, the thin-skinned narcissist suffered a series of blows to his ego as he swapped his digs at the Linton Travel Tavern in Norwich for a “static home”, or caravan.
However, new characters such as Saxondale, his portly ex-roadie, have failed to match the appeal of Partridge, which has generated DVD sales of 500,000.
Coogan, 42, has rejected pleas to revive some of Partridge’s most treasured judgments, such as “Paul McCartney’s Wings – the band the Beatles could have been”, but has already written some of the film dialogue for his “negotiations” with the terrorists: “Your position is that you want to destroy the West. The West’s position is that, broadly speaking, they don’t want to be destroyed.
“Is there a midway between those two positions that could satisfy us both? Rather than suicide bombings, you achieve so much more with a sternly worded letter.” The actor said recently: “Part of me wants to do it, part of me wants to do other things.”
Patrick Marber, the Oscar-nominated playwright who directed some of Coogan’s early comedy shows, will work on the Partridge movie. Universal, the Hollywood film studio, has expressed interest in bankrolling the film alongside talkback-Thames, the British firm.
In recent years Coogan was in danger of becoming more of a tabloid target, with tales of drug use and sexual excess, than a writer of the peculiarly British comedy of embarrassment.
In 2002 he was caught with strippers in his bedroom: “I was shocked to find out they were lap dancers. I was under the impression that they were Latvian refugees who needed shelter for the night,” he said, poker-faced.
He was infuriated by claims from Courtney Love, the rock singer, that he had impregnated her during a brief affair. She went on to allege that he had driven his friend, the actor Owen Wilson, to attempt suicide.
