I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [29]
Except when we’d all bid each other good night, jumped in our cars and driven home, the same conclusion had always been reached. Farley could not be toppled.
And then one day along came On the Hour. All of a sudden, Alan Gordon Partridge was box office (in Norwich). No longer a quiet little mouse, now I would roar like a lion.67 Gone were the days of doing second-tier work for a few shekels here and there. Now some of the biggest names in corporate Norfolk were wangling four-figure deals in my face like a large willy. And believe me, it felt good.
The other day I pulled out my 1992 diary. I dusted it down, buffed it off and allowed myself a peek inside at the companies I’d lent my voice to. It read like a Who’s Who of the companies I’d done work for in ’92.
Work literally rolled in that year – most of it enjoyable. There was the odd engagement that I found unsettling, but you take the rough with the smooth. One spring evening, for example, I provided commentary over the PA for a private greyhound racing event for a group of local businessmen, at a track I’m not able to name. I was well paid and given unlimited buffet access but only realised at the last minute that the dogs were chasing an actual rabbit. And by then, I’d already committed to doing the commentary.
I fulfilled the commitment to the best of my abilities, consoling myself at the end of each race with the knowledge that I was being given a small window into what it would have been like in medieval times to be hung, drawn and quartered.
Yes, it was a busy time for me. To manage my affairs and also because I deserved one, I took on a personal assistant, a local spinster who lived with her mother. She’d worked in a very junior capacity at Radio Broadland in Great Yarmouth during my six months there, and while I wasn’t exactly blown away by her ability or attitude, I noticed that she was affordable.
But it wasn’t just in my VO work that things were changing. I was receiving the kind of countywide exposure that few of the Norfolk alumni had ever experienced. Okay, I wasn’t yet in Delia Smith’s league but I was certainly in Bernard Matthews territory. And when you’re being spoken of in the same breath as the country’s leading farmyard-to-table strategist, how could you not become a monster?
As the months rolled by, keeping my feet on the ground was becoming ever harder. I remember picking up the post from the mat one day and just standing there, stunned. I’d opened an innocuous-looking envelope to find – and I’m shaking just to think about it – a Burton’s Gold Card. The grand-daddy of all high-street store cards, it not only came with a complimentary shoe horn, but also entitled the bearer to free alterations on every suit purchased.
Yet something wasn’t adding up. I hadn’t even come close to hitting the £500 annual spending threshold required to ‘go gold’. And they knew it. I just couldn’t get my head around it. It couldn’t be real. It was probably just an admin error or a cruel wheeze dreamt up by some of the lads at Radio Norwich. But the more I looked at it, the more I realised it was the real deal. No, there was no getting away from it. Someone very senior at BHQ (Burton Headquarters) had decided that, just to curry favour with Alan Partridge, it was worth breaking one of the most non-negotiable rules in UK retailing.
I felt my legs start to buckle beneath me and reached out to steady myself on the bannister. I had dreamt of this moment for years. I tried to call out to Carol and the kids, but my voice failed. All that came out was a strangled whisper: ‘Guys, I’ve gone gold.’
And with that, I lost consciousness.
I remember boarding a Norwich-to-London train one Friday morning in late 1991 when something extraordinary happened. On the platform I’d come across a young man who’d just returned from fighting