I'm Alan Partridge : Complete BBC Series 1 [1997] [DVD]

Steve Coogan

I'm Alan Partridge finds Steve Coogan's media creation back in his native Norwich, having lost his beloved chat show Knowing Me, Knowing You, and now reduced to the pre-Breakfast slot playing old T'Pau and Soft Cell singles to an audience of farmers and all-night bakery workers. He's also lodged at the Linton Travel tavern, whose permanently smiling manageress, bland decor and themed buffets are redolent of what vast tracts of England have become. He's very much at home there. While there's much media satire in Partridge's pitiful pitches of programme ideas to the BBC ("Inner city sumo? Monkey tennis?"), I'm Alan Partridge is more a bleakly hilarious take on Modern Middle English Man, irascible and profoundly bored. Between innumerable moments of high, wild comedy, such as a disastrous video Partridge does for a boating agency and an encounter with his one (insane) fan, the most telling moments of the series come with his efforts to fill his dismally empty days, taking a trouser press to pieces, staring at the astro turf at an owl sanctuary or walking to a service station to buy windscreen cleaning fluid just for something to do. All this proved a little too darkly uncomfortable for mainstream audiences--yet Alan Partridge was probably the finest British comic creation of the 1990s. --David Stubbs