Steve Coogan

Alan Partridge has been around for over 20 years, since he first began life as On the Hour's sports reporter. Watching his latest TV outing, he is still going as strongly (or rather tactlessly) as ever.

This is the first in a series of programmes featuring Steve Coogan's most famous character being broadcast on Sky Atlantic. Luckily, for those of us who don't have Sky Atlantic, this particular programme was repeated on Sky1, mostly in an annoying attempt to promote a channel lots of people can't afford to pay for.

Watching this, it's nice to see that some of the Partridge magic is still there. It's amazing that after so long there are still laughs that you can get out of it. In this mockumentary, he gives viewers a quick tour of Norwich, also known as "The Wales of the East".

Partridge is still as ignorant as ever. For example, he somehow managed to persuade his local leisure centre to get rid of a disabled parking space so he could park closer to the building. Then there is his rather disturbing description of the plague as "Flying AIDS."

My favourite moment, though, was when Partridge was in a swimming pool, talking about the sort of people who use it. Well, when I say favourite, I mean harrowing, because it was at this point I realised that I do actually think a bit like Partridge when I go swimming...

Welcome To The Places Of My Life was a great show. I just hope it and the others eventually get released on DVD, because I'm still not planning to buy Sky Atlantic.

A good week for sharp writing included Alan Partridge: Welcome To The Places Of My Life wherein Steve Coogan's chat chump took us on a personal tour which included his radio station ("My coalface, my canvas, my lathe"), the fitness centre ("A diet of Tracker Bars means I'm able to lead the kind of physically active life that's simply out of reach for many men my age such as Eamonn Holmes") and his favourite beauty-spot ("For some Thetford Forest means dogging and suicide but I'm old-school and I'm off for a walk!").

There was a glorious reprise for Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge. Older, yes; wiser, emphatically no. As he took us through the "places of my life" around Norfolk, yet again we marvelled at how his confident asides manage to combine the shiveringly banal with the roundly offensive. We started at North Norfolk Digital Radio. "Many are surprised at how small the offices are. But at 800 square metres that's larger than a good-quality dentist's, and could house a Tesco Express." Then Norwich town hall, opened in 1938 by King George VI, "the stammering monarch made famous by hit movie The King's Speech". And his favourite car dealership. "Whether you buy British, or have a short memory and are happy to buy Japanese..." and then the woods. "For some, Thetford Forest means dogging, or suicide. But I'm old-school, and I'm off for a walk." Not one sentence technically wholly untrue, but all supremely wrong, and the whole of it supremely right. It was a wistful, spot-on return for Alan and his leisureware, and at this rate he'll end up a kind of bathetic national treasure.

Welcome to the Places of My Life review

Some of the best bits of Welcome to the Places of My Life are when we get a sense of the cameras rolling for about four seconds longer than they should have done, just like in Knowing Me, Knowing You, Partridge's first TV outing, but also to what Steve Coogan himself is mocking - the overblown ceremony and rubbish incompetence of low-budget telly.

If you could forgive the hypocrisy of Steve Coogan selling out to his supposed nemesis Rupert Murdoch then Sky Atlantic was the place to be on Monday.

However, I found Welcome To The Places Of My Life, Coogan's latest Alan Partridge project, the least impressive of its three new comedies. It had some fine moments, but it just wasn't vintage Partridge.

I worry how much mileage the old guy has left, even if he does buy the new Range Rover (with the tan interior) in time for next year's movie.

Alan Partridge, Sky Atlantic, review

Egotistical, bombastic, bigoted, insecure, lonely, needy. Partridge remains a brilliant, monstrous, pathetic creation who can still raise a smile in his audience. If Partridge was once merely a figure of fun, he is now a character of true bathos, and Steve Coogan must take the credit for that.

"The more I learn about Hitler the more I dislike him," said Alan Partridge sagely in Welcome to the Places of My Life, his personal guide to "Albion's hindquarters", "the Wales of the East"- or Norfolk, as the rest of us know it.

Hitler had come up because of the Führer's plans to make Norwich Town Hall a centre of regional government in the event of a successful German invasion of England, a historical detail that Partridge the film-maker (his name was on the credits as "director") took as a cue to fade up an echoey Hitler speech as Partridge the presenter stared pensively out over Norwich market. He'd already done a priceless bit of Schama-ing inside the building - storming through the corridors as he vividly recreated the terrible night on which Norwich came within a whisker of getting a blanket imposition of night-time parking fees. And now here he was tackling Norwich's place in global history. Is there nothing this man can't handle?

Steve Coogan can probably now do Partridge in his sleep. The character is fully there, with all its tics and grace notes, from the little sideways skitter of the eyes at the camera that betrays his essential amateurishness to the wildly inappropriate grandiosity. "This is my coalface, my canvas, my lathe," said Alan, leading the camera into the microphone-rigged broom cupboard that is his centre of operations at North Norfolk Digital. If he wasn't such a creep there would be something almost heroic about his determination to finesse his come-down into a professional choice, and the eagerness with which he enlists any detail, however banal, to help him do it. Introducing us to the second of the significant locations in his life, the Riverside Leisure Centre, he noted that it "boasts a controversial swooped roof" and then unwisely conducted an in-pool interview with the resident hydrotherapist, his questions getting increasingly spluttery as his energy flagged.

Real Partridge purists, though, may have felt that offered an image of the programme itself, which started confidently but later had some difficulty keeping its head above water. It wasn't that it wasn't funny - there were wonderful moments all the way through. It was just that it was muddled and a little impure, in a way the Iannucci-scripted series almost never were. So, while you could certainly imagine a Partridge-directed documentary including his pontifications about how to make your own walking stick ("rather than one of those aluminium ones made in China by kids, I prefer a traditional one, made in Britain... by trees"), it was harder to work out why he would have included a shot of him drooling all over the Range Rover salesman. Both funny, but not quite funny in compatible ways. Which, I can quite see, may well come across as unnecessarily picky.

Alan Partridge: Welcone To The Places in My Life a supremely funny one-off special in which Steve Coogan confirms his renewed mastery of one British comedy's greatest creations.

Kicking off Sky's new Monday night comedy schedule, it follows the embittered broadcaster on a typically banal odyssey through his beloved East Anglia, including visits to his North Norfolk Digital workplace, Norwich Town Hall, the local swimming baths - his butterfly crawl is hysterical - and a field full of sheep where, often for up to 45 minutes, he likes to imagine them as people who've wronged him in the past.

Presented within Alan's fictional universe as a self-financed vanity project, it's packed with the great lines and attention to detail we've come to expect from this character at his best. You know you're on safe ground with a fake documentary where even the credits, captions and graphics are jokes in themselves. And Coogan's performance is impeccable throughout.

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