It has just occurred to me that this is a rather obvious new direction to take the character in. It would have to be handled quite carefully, but I can absolutely see him making some kind of clumsy and transparently calculated grab at the ‘anti-woke’ bandwagon and finding himself rapidly out of his depth.

Yeah, but I think that’s the point, isn’t it? The Essex girl gags were wearing thin because even in the late 90s people were starting to generally wonder if there wasn’t something a bit off about comedy based around working class women with regional accents being stereotyped as trashy and ignorant, particularly if the…

I think the other thing with the lesbian presenters bit is that he’s practically woke compared to Marber’s horrible Michael Winner-esque critic (‘Hello Alan. Hello lesbians.’)

Honestly, I would say the opposite. For all as it’s a fun film, it has to be said that Star Wars has been an absolute blight on cinematic science fiction until fairly recently. I’d say that far from lacking in nuance, SF cinema in the 60s and 70s was actually beginning to parallel its literary ‘new wave’ development:…

I think I recall an interview where Coogan says that the voice was an only slightly exaggerated version of one he developed for ad voice-overs

I think the deal is that he’s sort of hollow. He’s spent so long trying to be the kind of person he thinks will succeed in what he imagines the modern media landscape to be at any given time, ineptly copying trends and tropes that he hasn’t really bothered to understand in any depth, that if there ever was a ‘real…

I think that of all his characters, the Calfs (Calves?) are the ones that might reasonably be said to fall foul of contemporary media mores in a way that Partridge (pace the author of the original article) doesn’t. It’s somewhat poverty-shaming, and Pauline is on the edge of the wrong sort of drag act.

I think he tries to have a bit of banter about Christmas presents. Glenn says his partner bought him a kimono, Alan is visibly disgusted and cuts the segment off.

Huh, you might be right. It’s been a while. I vaguely remember Glenn bought his partner on to the show at one point, but that might have been the Christmas special.

It’s not really meant to be an ‘accusation’, it’s just one of those things where it really is in the eye of the beholder. On the one hand you’ve got Alan trailing this ‘sizzling’ dance troupe in increasingly sleazy ways and it’s just basic level funny that he gets his comeuppance as a result of him not having done his…

Yeah, but I think the fact that Alan’s response to him coming out on air is to instantly try and sack him is a thing you couldn’t play for laughs at all now, and which would render him instantly irredeemable.

I’m not saying that failure isn’t a source of comedy at all in the US. But as you say, it either has to come with a side order of sentiment, a kind of pyrrhic success on some other terms or some sort of moral lesson about being taken down a peg or two. And it’s often seen as some absurd cosmic joke, or the result of a…

Ehhhh...I think that’s overlaying a contemporary UK culture wars reading where it doesn’t belong. This was the 90/00s for a start - since Labour was in power the prevailing narrative was that the BBC was too right wing, particularly when Iraq/Afghanistan got going in earnest. It’s not to do with Alan feeling oppressed…

On reflection, there’s a bit more gay panic than would probably be acceptable these days. The dance troupe in the first episode (‘They’re all blokes! And on that bombshell...’) and his struggles with Glen Ponder. The joke is still mainly based on watching Alan struggle unsucessfully with his own deep seated prejudices,…

Welll...he’s not really pitched explicitly as a right wing media figure (we didn’t really have many of those in the public eye back then in the UK). He doesn’t do overtly political reporting and interviews: he thinks of himself as a light entertainer and chat show host. If you want a US equivalent of how he sees himse…

The 9/11 Peter O’Hanrahahanrahan bit, while probably written and aired a bit too soon, is an absolute masterpiece.

I’d say anything he does with Michael Winterbottom (particularly if Rob Brydon is also involved) is a winner. But I’ve always separated that out from the Partridge/Calf type stuff a bit because it’s mostly a heightened version of ‘Steve Coogan’ than an out-and-out character.

It’s not really the same. Colbert’s character is aggressive and successful, and a broad satire of a particular kind of American media villain - I don’t think he had much of an off-screen persona. Partridge is a sad-sack mediocre white dude whose ignorance, laziness and self-delusion result in acts of self-sabotage…

There’s not a lot of Coogan’s other work which I’d deem essential. Saxondale is quite funny, but it’s just a lesser variation on ‘white dude who’s let the world pass him by’. The various one-off character pieces are...they were OK, I suppose, but not that memorable. Tony Ferrino is somewhat misunderstood (in that he’s…

It’s amazing that he started out as this incredibly broad one-note character: in the early radio version he really is just a sports reporter who gets stuff wrong and has an obsessive interest in people’s groin injuries. The idea of him becoming a breakout character lasting for decades at that point would seem absurd.