I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [108]
Yet ‘Sidekick Simon’s’ first show did not go well. I’d given him the perfect tee-up, advising listeners that major laughs were guaranteed: ‘If you’re standing, sit down. If you’re driving, pull over. And if you’re in a wheelchair, for god’s sake keep away from the top of the stairs.’
In the event I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. Denton didn’t just let me down, he let himself down too. He was riddled with nerves, his usually hilarious asides turning into little more than muttered rubbish. I’d advised to him to have a couple of drinks before he came on, to loosen himself up a bit. But he hadn’t. He said he didn’t want to start drinking when it wasn’t even ten o’clock. I was absolutely furious. It was so unprofessional.
Time after time I was forced to intervene and send my audience into fits of uncontrollable laughter after another one of Denton’s gags had fallen horribly flat. It was easy enough for me to do this, but that wasn’t the point. That night I thanked my lucky stars that the Wisbech nuclear scenario had not come to pass. I’d had an incredibly lucky escape.
We limped on for the rest of the week, but on Sunday I told him to meet me for brunch. It was a session we’d go on to repeat many times in the future. I’d canter in with the Sundays under my arm and plonk myself down by the fire. There’d always be a tussle over the motoring section, which I would invariably win, either through brute force or just by invoking the Paper Purchaser’s Prerogative (my capitals, my whole phrase actually). Yet this particularly Sunday, it was serious. It was time for showdown talks.
I made my position clear. The nerves had to be dealt with. He was free to do as he wished at the weekends, but as long as he was appearing on my weekday show, I needed to know that he had been drinking. I obviously wasn’t going to enforce this with a daily breathaliser test (couldn’t get hold of a breathaliser) but, believe me, I would just know.
Happily it was a solution that seemed to work. He got over his nerves and I survived with my reputation intact. Other than those moments when I have either punched or shot people live on air, the name Alan Partridge has come to be a byword for broadcasting excellence, and I didn’t want that to be compromised.
Denton’s morning drinking did end up costing him his driving licence, but despite his incessant moaning both he and I knew that he could still make it into the station by using as few as three buses. While he and his fellow passengers could just sit back and effectively be chauffeured into work, the rest of us had to undergo the daily headache of changing gear, looking in our mirrors and turning the steering wheel.
I liked having a sidekick, though. It was a rush. It took me back to my days at hospital radio. I didn’t have a wingman as such, but we used to do a feature where any child that was recovering from an operation could be wheeled down to the studio. They’d pick a few songs and read the traffic and travel (subject to their voice having the requisite clarity and authority). It was a really lovely part of the show actually. And while the music played they’d have the chance to tuck into Alan’s Cookie Jar (a ‘biscuit barrel’ in old money). Of course, kids will never say no to a sugary treat, so they used to love this, though I did have a strict rule of no more than two biscuits per child. The last thing they needed was to be brought back into hospital the next month for a gastric band or a filling.
Plus, they didn’t come cheap. It’s not like biscuits grow on trees (note to self: possible film idea). You might think that buying a bag of broken bourbons from Norwich market doesn’t cost much, and you’d be right, but when it goes on for week after week after week, the financial burden