I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [102]
I felt like a new person. Younger, fitter, wiser, louder. I took to wearing the three old reliables: stone-wash baby blue denim jeans, oversized white training shoes and a wearable microphone.
Quick digression for the AV nerds out there. I absolutely insisted on presenting with a Sennheiser 152 G2 Headset microphone. If any of you are in the market for a headset mic – aerobic instructors, business leaders, the people at the market who sell chipped crockery – let me give you a piece of solid gold advice. This is the Piat d’Or of headset mics. Used by the likes of Mr Motivator and – weirdly – Terry Nutkins, the Sennheiser is the official headmic for both product demonstrators at the Ideal Home Exhibition and Gabrielle.
I’m not going to go on about headmics, and bulk out my word count with technical details243 – other than to say it’s lightweight but packs a punch. And its supercardioid microphone produces crystal clear sound.
Some of the lesser headmics out there – I’m thinking of your Radnor CL-07s – muffle certain consonants so that an S sounds like an F.244 I gave a version of this presentation to the children of a local primary school and caused uproar by repeatedly using the phrase ‘You can’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs.’
So avoid the Radnor range. That’s my advice.
I would also advise you to avoid wearing a headmic on one side of your head and a Bluetooth mobile phone headset on the other. Because during the same presentation, Carol called – she was angry that I’d cancelled a long-standing direct debit, suspending her subscription to BBC Good Food magazine. And the sound from the call vibrated through my head and was picked up on mic.245
I had bigger plans for the project than drafty staff rooms, though. My aim was to take the presentation on a tour of the major theatres around the country. Provisional chats were initiated with the Norwich Playhouse, but they said their only free slot was the Christmas season, and they normally fill that with a pantomime. Kein problem, I said! My presentation was loose enough that it could easily have been re-purposed to become a fun family-based show in the best traditions of the UK pantomime. For example, the hero would be on stage and he’d say to the audience, ‘Where aren’t my best years?’ And they’d say, ‘Behind you!!’
They never got back to me. No matter!
At least I was showing ambition. All you need to do is aim high. As Jimi Hendrix once said, ‘Excuse me, while I kiss the sky.’ And I echoed that. Of course, Jimi was found dead in his own sick shortly afterwards. He’d probably been listening to Stuart Blender’s CD.
It’s all about belief. I had a chap called Alvin visit me who’d struggled to hold down a job. He was in a hostel and at a low ebb. He believed he would one day learn how to travel forwards and backwards through time.
‘In that case, you will,’ I said. ‘Just hold on to that belief. You can achieve whatever you want to achieve.’
‘Really?’ he said. ‘My psychiatrist says I’m being weird. I’ve been prescribed pills.’ And at that moment he looked so sad – his will crushed by medical science. I told him to lose the pills and follow his dreams.
And as a result of that advice, Alvin came on in leaps and bounds. He was soon dreaming of even greater feats – intergalactic real estate deals, breeding humans with mermaids, an invisibility cloak, flying from one high-rise building to another.
Surprise, surprise, his psychiatrist pleaded with me to stop. ‘It’s irresponsible,’ he said during one particularly shirty phone call. ‘He can’t travel through time.’
‘Oh? Why?’ I said. ‘Because you say he can’t? Because society has decided he can’t?’
Defeated, he mumbled something about the laws of physics prohibiting it and hung up. And it’s that attitude, that ‘prohibit’ word, that idea of ‘can’t’ that I was trying to break down. You can’t travel through time. You can’t have a second series. You can’t have time off your show