I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [49]
120 Known in the international diving community as the OK sign – the left hand bit, I mean. For god’s sake, don’t do the sex mime to indicate you’re able to breathe.
121 Must get up to speed on this royalty thing.
122 Any.
123 These are Carol’s actual words in the sense that I ghost-jotted them and faxed them to her I don’t know how many times for her to sign off. She had ample opportunity to make amendments but declined to do so – ergo, she’s happy with it.
Chapter 16
Yule Be Sorry!
THE DAY AFTER I confronted her, Carol had said to me she wanted to clear her head so moved out just before Christmas. I sat on the edge of the bath, sobbing and eating a pork pie until the pie was gone – at which point I felt a heck of a lot better.124
Don’t get me wrong, the prospect of spending Christmas in unbroken solitude didn’t fill me with cheer, but it actually turned out to be alright. Brilliant even. I’ve subsequently done the same (out of choice) on four other occasions.
The benefits once you think about them are obvious. You’re free to break the rules. That year I had a glass of beer at 10am. Imagine that! A glass of beer and a piece of toast on Christmas morn. I didn’t finish it – it was horrible – but I chortled as I thought of what the ‘ball and chain’ would have said. Stupid cow.
Then there’s the almost overwhelming sense of liberation that comes with wearing a dressing gown (nude beneath) without having to anxiously reknot the string every few minutes. The gown flops open and reveals your goolies? Big deal! No one’s there! It just feels good. After a few more glasses of beer, I put on a CD of Christmas songs and marched up and down my landing to ‘Stop the Cavalry’ by Jona Lewie.125 After a few minutes of brisk promenading, my gown spread apart, like the curtain of an old proscenium arch theatre to reveal a one-man show by John Thomas. I let it.
There were other reasons why Christmas alone was enjoyable too but I can’t remember them at the moment.
Besides, bugger all that, I had a TV show to make!
I had been given a chance of redemption – a Christmas special of KMKY which had been agreed as part of the initial series commission. And with the internal inquiry into the regrettable death of Forbes McAllister still ongoing, I had yet to be deemed culpable of anything.
The upshot: the BBC was duty bound to honour my contract and broadcast Knowing Me Knowing Yule. Not that this was the only consideration. I’d argued strongly that we must respect the memory of Forbes and plough on. We owed it to him to treat his death with the tact and decorum it deserved. Besides, I’m confident the Beeb would have wanted an hour-long special from me anyway. I’d proved myself over the course of Knowing Me Knowing You to be someone who makes television as unmissable as Forbes McAllister’s aorta.
So, for all my domestic problems, I had to push on. Carol had left on Christmas Eve 1995. Knowing Me Knowing Yule was to be broadcast five days later. Bring it on, as American peacekeeping soldiers scream when given backchat by unarmed natives.
The knowledge I could switch from the bony chest of my wife to the fleshy welcoming bosom of the British viewing public provided sweet, sweet, sweet succour.
Emotionally, I’d invested a great deal in the success of the show. And nothing was going to go wrong.126 I spent Christmas Day alone, practising my musical number again and again and again until I my throat swelled up and I couldn’t fit Christmas pudding down it.
The show was conceived by me as a kind of televised mulled-wine-and-mince-pies party that would take place in an exact studio mock-up of my house.127 There’d be guests milling around, food being cooked, an air of festive cheer and three lovelies dressed as Mother Christmas. (Bit misleading that. They were basically models dressed in Santa outfits, on stand-by to hand out mulled wine and mince pies.128 It’s wrong to call them ‘mothers’. There’s no way any of them had been through pregnancy or suckled young.