I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [12]
‘W-w-w-w-what does it s-s-s-say?’ my parents whispered in absolute unison.
I opened it as gingerly as a rookie bomb disposal operative would open a fat letter bomb in a crèche. In a funny sort of way, the contents were just as explosive as a powdered acetone peroxide. They spelt the difference between me attending tertiary education and being consigned to the heap marked ‘Don’t have A-levels’, and that was a mound of slag I did not want to be on.
Like the bomb disposal man31 mentioned above, I swallowed hard and began to remove the letter within the ’lope. A single bead of sweat sprinted down my face, skirting round my temple and pausing at the jaw before throwing itself to its death.
I pulled the paper out further, until I could make out the letters it bore, letters that had been formed into words by a kindly typist. I gulped again and looked at my parents, before emitting a sigh.
‘Bad news,’ I muttered. ‘Your son has failed … at failing his exams!!!’
They were confused momentarily by the clever double negative, so I added: ‘I passed!’ (The it’s-bad-news-ha-no-actually-it’s-good-news technique is one I’ve always enjoyed. It was really pioneered by David Coleman on Question of Sport when he’d tonally suggest Bill Beaumont had got an answer wrong … only to reveal at the end of the sentence that he’d got it right! The judges on ITV’s X Factor32 use a similar technique to reveal that a singer has made it to ‘boot camp’.)
My parents were elated. Mum patted me and Dad joined me in one of the first high-fives that Norwich had seen.
‘I passed!’ I kept saying. ‘I passed them both!’33
The exact grading isn’t important. Suffice to say, I was the proud owner of two shiny A-levels and nobody could take them away from me.34
1974 was a crazy, hazy time for Alan Partridge. The Sixties had come to East Anglia and it was a time of free thinking, free love and in my case free university accommodation.
I was quite the man about Norwich,35 striding confidently through the dreaming spires and hallowed halls of East Anglia Polytechnic – whose alumni included news woman Selina Scott and meteorology whizz Penny Tranter – and soaking up all the knowledge that this seat of learning had to offer.
The free accommodation? Well, enigmatically, I had decided to stay not in the woodworm-infested squalor of university halls, but to commute in from my home (my parents’ home). Although misinterpreted by some of my peers as reluctance to cut the apron strings and live independently, the decision to reside at home was a canny marshalling of my resources. It enabled me to avoid the scruffiness of my shaggy-haired, sandal-wearing colleagues. By using my ‘rent money’ wisely, I was never less than beautifully shod.
Of course, it also meant that I was something of a ‘mystery man’ on campus. While my fellow students lived in each other’s pockets and played out their debauched lifestyles for all to see, I was far less known. I’d be glimpsed at the back of lecture halls, ghosting through the student union with a glass of cider or shushing idiots in the library. And then I’d be gone. This all added to my aura. As did my idiosyncratic dress sense. Thick-knit zip-up cardigans, flared brown corduroys and shiny black pepperpot brogues set me apart from the long-haired layabouts who bore an uncanny resemblance to the Guildford Four and some of the Birmingham Six – Irish long-haired layabouts ‘wrongfully’ convicted of bombing England.
It was a time of sex, drums and rock and roll, and these three things (or four things depending on whether you count ‘rock and roll’ as one item or two) provided the backdrop to a very crazy time. I know for a fact that I would have developed a pretty impressive booze habit and had full sex had it not been for the fact I was expected home for 6 to 6.30.
You’ll notice I said ‘full sex’. Oh, I’d dabbled alright.