I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [44]
But, as I say, no excuses. At the show’s denouement – trust Mr Professional here to time the slaying so it gave the show a neat conclusion! – Forbes gave me his sweat-drenched guns to inspect and shocked me with a loud bark of ‘Be careful with that!’ One thing led to another, and a bullet led to his heart.
I covered him with a plastic replica of my face and did my best to close the show. The two lesbians, Wanda Harvey and Bridie McMahon, went a bit hysterical. They’d been told to stick around on the sofa until the credits rolled, but when Forbes’s remains slumped in their general direction, they bolted – in a pretty craven attempt to spoil the series sign-off. For that, I’ve never forgiven them.
It was a bit of a blur after that. My producer Rupert Summers lost his head and said a few mean things to me. I let that go. He was in shock and needed help not censure.
The police arrived and with Forbes bleeding over the sofas, which we’d actually only hired,108 I signed off series one.
Then I looked over to where a policeman was putting the pistols carefully into transparent freezer bags. Those flippin’ guns, I thought. I hated them just then. In the intervening years, I have received a great many letters from gunsmiths who have said that the greatest professional sadness a gunmaker endures lies in spending hours perfecting the release mechanism of a flintlock pistol, only for a collector to display it ornamentally. This was exactly what Forbes had in mind for them. I had at least prevented that. (I always think that like a dangerous dog sinking its teeth into the waddling rump of a fat postman, a pistol must experience the bittersweet bliss of fulfilled destiny at the moment of discharge – before quite rightly being destroyed.)
At least, my gunmaking friends seem to suggest, Lord Byron’s beautiful and ballistically awesome pistols were allowed to perform the task for which they were painstakingly created – killing a man.
This was reality TV before the term was invented – real and raw and red in tooth and claw. Peter Bazalgette of Endemol fame is sometimes wrongly credited with the invention of reality TV.109 In fact, it was Alan Partridge.
I’ve been asked many, many times what happened next. When the cameras stopped rolling and the audience filed out, what happened to muggins here? Well, I’ll now do my best to describe it.
For added drama, I’ll be slipping into the present tense, but I don’t want that to suggest in any way that this took place anything other than a long, long time ago.110
‘Why did you do it? Huh? Why the eff did you do it, Partridge?’
A bad-breathed copper shouts in my face and I turn my head away from what I think is the odour of Walker’s Smoky Bacon – which I usually quite enjoy.
‘What’s your motive, Alan?’ says a woman detective constable. ‘Whatcha kill the victim for?’
I’m in a dark, dank room deep in the nick, handcuffed like a common criminal. A strip light flickers and buzzes as a rat scuttles across the floor.111 The woman detective constable screams in frustration and slaps me across the face.112 My eye closes up but I look back at her defiantly.113
The interrogation goes on for ages. ‘Please,’ I hear myself say. ‘I’ve told you all I know. Can I please just go home? I’m doing a store opening at ten for World of Leather.’
‘The only thing you’ll be in tomorrow is a World of Trouble,’ says the copper, a line that even at the time I thought was pretty good for someone who probably didn’t get any A-levels.
Truth is, there is no store opening. With negotiations for a second series of KMKY going well, I have two other meetings the next morning that could shape my career. A current affairs show for a soon-to-be-launched TV channel from the mind of Kelvin McKenzie (alongside Derek Jameson), and a quiz show for Maltese television that was based on Blockbusters. Both meetings are slated to take place in the same branch of Harry Ramsdens. I need to be there.
The interrogators don’t let up, though. The torment lasts for hours before I’m thrown into a cold cell, and pick