I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [34]
72 Press play on Track 17.
73 Lynam may have been unencumbered by disability, but he was also a senior figure in the BBC of the 90s. As such, he was contractually entitled to use these roomier facilities whenever he wished.
Chapter 10
My Own Show
MY STAR WAS RISING, like the bubbles in the glasses of champagne I would have been enjoying if I liked the taste of champagne. I was being recognised in hotel bars, train station WH Smithses and the local branch of Do It All.
It was a pleasantly warming sensation at first, before a stern lecture-to-self in my bathroom mirror (bought from Do It All funnily enough!) made me wise up. ‘These people don’t care about you,’ I said. ‘You mean nothing to them. They’d sooner earn an extra £1,000 a year than worry about whether you’re going to be the next presenter of Sportsnight.’
And that realisation – that these people would stab me and spit on my jolting corpse – probably did colour my approach to the general public.
Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t become a recluse. But I steeled myself against hangers-on and well-wishers, typically meeting their so-called compliments with a snort or a stony silence.
In the BBC things were different. I worked on a style of glad-handing that I felt sure would ingratiate myself to more important people and earn me a reputation of being a charming TV personality. It had worked for Dale Winton, who could switch from air-kissing a commissioning editor to screaming hot spittle into the face of a researcher in about three seconds. But he was inhaling a lot of nail varnish remover around that time, I’m told.
Back to me. I was becoming known for my no-nonsense interview style, and my never-say-die attitude, certainly in my opinion and I’m sure in the opinions of a great many others.
Sometimes that meant being ruthless, a trait I demonstrated when grabbing the first interview with javelinner Steve Backley after a quite lovely throw at Crystal Palace. Seeing ITV’s Jim Rosenthal jostling for position, I sidled up behind him, muttered ‘Hello Jim’ and, as he turned to respond, he fell/was pushed off the media rostrum. He landed on a stack of hurdles, suffering cuts and bruises as well as some seriously duffed-up pride. Well, Gary Newbon went spastic.74 The two of them were the Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Doo of ITV Sport – great friends on and off camera – and our feud was real and long-standing.
Newbon tore his jacket off, then his shirt, pounding at his belly and tits and shouting ‘Come on then! Come on!’ It was incredibly unseemly and I know Gary was kept away from athletics events for a good while after that.
I secured the interview and asked Backley some searching questions about his training regime, skin-tight sportswear and marital status. The piece went out that night. You could see Newbon in the background, facing away from camera but slumped on a folding chair (by then in tears), but needless to say I had the last laugh.
I hated ITV back then – and that loathing spurred me on to be the man on the scene whenever a sports star or their attractive spouse had anything to say. I had an easy way with people, and much like Piers Morgan today, was able to flit effortlessly from the high-brow to the utterly juvenile, from the serious to the inconsequential in a heartbeat. Unlike Morgan, I can also flit back the other way, whereas he is often stranded in thick alley for the remainder of the conversation. You can actually see his eyes swivelling as he struggles to break free of the tabloid moorings. Still, he’s a good interviewer and a solid guy.
But I was a bloody good interviewer and a bloody solid guy.75 And I began to wonder if I was fulfilling my potential. My son was teaching me about quadratic equations at the time and although I convinced him that they were genuinely irrelevant in real life, it convinced me that I should look for a fresh challenge. Like so:
Alan asking sports questions = a bloody good sports interview.
Which means, if you divide both by ‘sport’:
Alan asking questions = a bloody good interview.
It went something