I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [110]
Apparently not. And so with the relationship visibly curdling by the hour, we limped on for another few weeks, before we decided to call it a day.268
His departure gave the show a new lease a life – you’d have to be deaf not to recognise that – and my listeners were grateful that they were getting more Alan in their mid-morning diet. I pledged never to allow a sidekick to eclipse, obscure or impinge ever again. I’ve stuck to that pledge too – although, on occasions, I’ve shared mic-space with a girl whose name, I think, was Zoe.
And what of Denton? Well, we bumped into each other in the King’s Arms three weeks ago, eyeing each other warily from across the bar, peeking out now and then from behind a strip of Scampi Fries.
With them in my eye-line, it was inevitable that I’d buy a packet and, once opened, I offered one to the woman I was having a drink with.
‘Would you like one Scampi Fry?’ I asked.
‘Just one?!’ she replied, greedily eyeing up my full bag of fish crunches. It may be that she’d forgotten that taking more than one would almost certainly compromise her appetite, which wasn’t really on given that I was buying dinner.
But no sooner had she eaten her Scampi Fry than Denton piped up with a joke about her having ‘fishy fingers’.
On the face of it, it pertained to the distinctive aroma of scampi, but Denton and I both knew it had vaginal overtones. And while the woman was unimpressed, Denton and I fell about. It was a reminder of what genuinely good comedy sounds like and we’ve been fairly inseparable since then. In a recent raffle, I won an afternoon driving saloon cars around Brands Hatch and Denton has asked if he can come and watch.
And when the day comes, I might swing round to his place and pick him up. Yes, I think I will.
259 Press play on Track 41.
260 Love that noise.
261 The Terminator, for example. Or Metal Mickey.
262 North Norfolk’s best music mix.
263 North Norfolk.
264 Provided he had first sought permission from me.
265 So long as he’d run the ideas past me during the previous song.
266 Unpaid.
267 Press play on Track 42.
268 I basically just stopped picking him up.
Chapter 34
Hanging Up the Headphones
EVERYONE HAS A SHELF-LIFE – whether they’re a finely tuned athlete, a surrogate mother, or a lady newsreader. Disc jockeys are no exceptions.
The last thing you want to do is plough on long past your sell-by date, trading on past glories (Simon Mayo) or pretending to like classical music (Simon Bates). The dignified approach is to recognise when your magic is gone, and serenely slip away, having negotiated a handsome severance package and delivered a stinging broadside against younger DJs and station controllers (also Simon Bates to be fair).
I’m perpetually analysing my relevance and fitness for purpose, angrily quizzing my assistant on the quality of each day’s show and sending tapes to Denise and Fernando to flag up anything that sounds dated or fogey-like. So far nothing has come back.
But sometimes there are whispers, nagging doubts, worries. I’m a human being – a good one, but human nonetheless – and the creeping concern that I am outstaying my welcome has lived alongside me in recent years, like a quiet wife or a sidelined application for planning permission.
This has taken on new badness in recent months, culminating in a bounce-back to where I was before I bounced back. I found myself walking through the valley of no confidence towards the desert of deep despair.
You see recently there have been whispers that the Partridge is past it. Naturally the naysayers haven’t had the testes to say this to my face, but you can just sense these things. Plus I’ve had my assistant sit behind them in the staff canteen and listen in to their conversations.
From whence did these hushed conversations arise, you ask (or at least, I