Alan Partridge: Welcome To The Places Of My Life

Alan Partridge review

Make no mistake about it, Welcome was the funniest thing Alan Partridge has been involved with since 2002's dicey second series of I'm Alan Partridge.

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.

Alan Partridge makes a comeback

Alan Partridge's return for Welcome To The Places Of My Life took us on a test drive back to Knowing Me, Knowing You's glory years.

"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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Alan Partridge: Places of My Life - exclusive video

In this exclusive clip from Alan Partridge's new Sky Atlantic show Welcome to the Places of My Life, he shows us round Norwich market. Where once there were 'bearskins and quivers', now there are 'monkey hats and tat'.

The graceless chancer has morphed into a Daily Mail-addled misanthrope. But rarely has a comedy trajectory been so beautifully sustained - Partridge has reached the stage where a mere glimpse of his face, his strangely acrylic-looking hair, his 'man at C&A' wardrobe, is enough to render us helpless with laughter. But to the writers' eternal credit, they don't rest on their laurels. This venture doubles as a perfectly pitched parody of every self-indulgent heritage Britain doc you've ever seen. Partridge bestrides his beloved Norfolk, musing on market traders ('people living on the very fringes of society'), the possibility of Hitler addressing occupied Norwich from the balcony of City Hall and the plague ('very much the HIV of its day. But airborne... Flying Aids.') Alan, we salute you.

Steve Coogan's enduring monster crashes in with a one-off special that starts with him huffing and puffing around the countryside of north Norfolk ('the Wales of the East') to the strains of a tin whistle. He's on a Partridge Pilgrimage to wax lyrical about his stomping ground and, much like everything else Coogan's done with the character, this spoof vanity project is hilarious and hideous in equal measure. Though grammar pedants will secretly sympathise with his radio campaign promoting the correct use of the words 'obligate' and 'repulse'.