I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [20]
As a team, I think we all knew then that we had something special, and that sense of worth was a shot in the arm for a young, thrusting Alan Partridge. With that shot – easily as powerful as an intravenous drug like ‘heroin’, ‘smack’ or ‘gear’ – I was driven to go out into the world of broadcasting and succeed. Nothin’ was gonna stop me!
1984–1987. Not much happened here.
It’s 1988 and a young, side-parted young radio reporter is pinning a pretty rude lower-division football manager down on his team’s disgraceful disciplinary record.
‘Six red cards in as many games,’ says the reporter. ‘Why do you continue to tolerate this culture of hooliganism?’
The manager tries to worm his way off the hook by disputing the figures. ‘They’re yellow cards,’ he says, ‘And that’s actually a pretty good behaviour record.’
But the reporter has the figures written down on a notepad and won’t be deterred. In the end, the manager loses his rag – ‘You bloody idiot’ – pulls the top off the microphone and throws it at the reporter, but it doesn’t hurt anyway because it’s made of grey foam. The reporter broadcasts the story that night. It was, everyone agreed, great radio – and although the reporter had to issue a full apology and retraction for the red/yellow card error, it burnished his reputation as one to watch.46
That reporter was Alan Partridge. The manager? The name escapes me, but it must have been fairly local because I remember being pleased I’d driven there without stopping for a toilet break. I can’t remember what he looked like either or what colour his team played in, just that he had a strong regional accent and used such a hilarious mix of tenses – ‘he gets the ball and he’s gone and kicked it’ – that he sounded like a malfunctioning robot at the end of a space-fi movie.
So what had happened to me? How had I gone from the cossetted glamour of Our Price radio to the snarling, balls-out toughness of sports reporting? Well, I’d always been a keen sports fan. It seemed to me that the world of sport – with its reliance on stats, facts, trivia and rules – provided modern man with certainty and structure. Just as a well-fitting jockstrap cups the cock and balls of a sportsman, so sport cradled me. You know where you are with sport. It’s good.
And it’s all so logical. Watch a play by Shakespeare or go to a modern art gallery, and no one has the faintest idea what the hell is going on.
Take Shakespeare. Not a play goes by without one character whispering something about another character that is clearly audible to that character. By virtue of the fact it has to be loud enough for the audience to hear it, it’s inconceivable that it can’t also be heard by the character in question. It’s such an established technique in Shakespeare’s canon people just think no one will notice. Well I’ve got news for you – this guy did.
Sport, on the other hand, is straightforward. In badminton, if you win a rally, you get one point. In volleyball, if you win a rally, you get one point. In tennis, if you win a rally, you get 15 points for the first or second rallies you’ve won in that game, or 10 for the third, with an indeterminate amount assigned to the fourth rally other than the knowledge that the game is won, providing one player is two 10-point (or 15-point) segments clear of his opponent. It’s clear and simple.
But that wasn’t what catapulted me to local radio glory. No, what catapulted me to local radio glory was the fact I’d been uninvited to a wedding at the eleventh hour (reason not given), and had a day to kill. Happily, I received a call from a friend called Barry Hethersett, who moonlit as a radio reporter on Saxon Radio in Bury St Edmunds. He’d heard I was free that day and asked me to fill in on his slot because he had to attend the funeral of one his parents. I agreed and he gave me a lift to the station, dressed in a smart suit but wearing a buttonhole flower, which I felt was in bad taste.
I was introduced to the station controller,