I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [45]
Through a hatch comes a tray of food. I paw at it listlessly until I notice that it contains chicken nuggets. And what chicken nuggets! These boast all the smoky zing of McCain Southern coating with the tenderest cuts of white meat. The beans are lukewarm but not overcooked115 and a generous dollop of smash adds a buttery finish that sets the plate off beautifully. To drink, a mug of steaming tea. A really, really good meal.
My solicitor arrives. By his own admission, he’s better equipped to handle employment tribunals than homicide but it’s a pleasure to see him. He’s a massive fan of the show and insists that until the last five minutes it had been ‘very good’.
I suffer the indignity of giving fingerprints – a relatively straightforward task that took longer than it should have because my hands were by now very, very sweaty and it was hard to produce a clear print.
Once released in the glaring sunlight of the sun, I’m hauled into the BBC for crisis talks, without a care for my other meetings. Hayers is quiet and it’s really hard to work out how he feels the series has gone. A health and safety officer has a lot to say, which feels like bolting the stable door after the horse has legged it in a hail of gunfire.
As the exec producer, it turns out I have ultimate responsibility, which seems unfair to me – and I say so. We craft a press release and then I try to arrange a meeting with Hayers to discuss ‘not just a second series, but other potential projects’. Everyone pipes up with ‘For fuck’s sake, Alan,’ as if my career should die just because Forbes has.
Then I go home. People are quick to claim the credit when things go well, but journalists’ calls to the BBC were met with an officious: ‘Alan Partridge is not and never has been an employee of the BBC. He is a private contractor and all such contracts are under constant review.’
The shooting of Forbes McAllister was, without question, the pivotal moment in my life. I often think it’s like that film The Sliding Doors with Gwenyth Paltrow. But instead of tube doors shutting, it was a bullet fired directly into a celebrity’s heart. Not deliberately, or even recklessly. (Even after all these years, I feel compelled to add that caveat …)
You know, there were two victims that day. Me, because of everything I went through. But Forbes McAllister is also a victim in a way, because of course he died.
102 Scott has continued acting, but now stars exclusively in gay pornography. Fortuitously, he has grown into the spitting image of Richard Gere, so has made a lucrative series of films that pay sodomical homage to Gere’s back catalogue: Gays of Heaven, Pretty Man and An Orifice and a Gentlehand.
103 Or rather: one of two. Don’t forget that I killed a man. Keep reading!! LOL.
104 I’m not going to waste time thinking about this.
105 Abba-dabba-doo!
106 I didn’t kill him! Or rather: I didn’t kill him.
107 You have to say that.
108 One deposit: gone.
109 It’s a little known fact that Peter’s grandfather Joseph designed the London sewer network. Some people have very unkindly suggested Peter has simply taken what his granddad did literally and continued it metaphorically, delivering an unending torrent of human filth and waste into our homes. But I’m not one of those people. I think he’s quite good and has made a reasonable contribution.
110 Press play on Track 23.
111 Legal disclaimer: Not all of these things definitely happened.
112 See above.
113 See above.
114 Now I do remember there being straw.
115 Few things are more depressing than beans that have been over-boiled and stirred until the structural integrity of the beans have broken down into a kind of pulse mush.
Chapter 15
Splitting From Carol
TRUTH BE TOLD, I knew it was probably curtains for me and Carol in 1989, when I asked her to act more demurely at a Radio Norwich summer roadshow and she responded by downing her glass of wine and getting another one. You don’t piss about with a guy’s career like that.
We lasted another six years – six years which for