I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [50]
And yes, we did have some last-minute gremlins. We had an eleventh-hour panic sourcing wheelchair ramps for [CHECK]-aplegic former golfer Gordon Heron, while star guest Raquel Welch cancelled three hours before we went live. Far from knocking me off course this provided a much-needed emotional outlet, as I was able to spend 30 minutes venting down the phone to her. I spewed all my bile into Raquel’s delicate ear, sometimes confusing her name with that of my ex-wife, sometimes not. Referring to her appearance in One Million Years BC, I called her a historically inaccurate sexy bikini sex woman, spitting that dinosaurs had long since been extinct before the arrival of admittedly sexy hunter-gatherer cavemen’s girlfriends that she’d played.
Still! We still had a great show lined up. The now permanent chief commissioning editor for BBC TV Tony Hayers was going to come and chat, we had bell ringers, the world’s biggest Christmas cracker, TV chef Peter Willis,129 a sexy trio of models I called Christmas Crackers and Mick Hucknall had agreed to perform because he was, in his words, ‘trying to bang one of them’.
An appealing line-up certainly. And yes, there were a few glitches, but most of them occurred in the final four minutes of the show, and so I’m still satisfied that we produced a piece of high-quality television.
Admittedly, I left the studio a little shaken and with a hurt hand – but my spirits were up. As I’d walked on set that day I had no inkling whatsoever as to what a seminal moment this was. It would be my last show on BBC television.
I won’t dwell on what happened other than to say our attempt to enter the Guinness Book of Records by pulling the world’s biggest ever cracker went wrong due to the unbelievably shoddy workmanship of its makers, White City Pyrotechnics.130
That upset me to a disproportionate degree. One thing led to another and I ended up punching a golfing cripple in the face after he’d made an off-colour joke at my expense, and then responding to Tony Hayers’s have-a-go intervention by belting him a couple of times too. But the rest of the show was nothing like that.
In retrospect, I’d taken my eye off the ball and allowed certain boundaries of acceptable behaviour to become blurred. I know – of course I know – that punching a wheelchair-bound former golfer in the face with a turkey-encased fist was wrong, just as twatting a BBC executive, twice, is inadvisable.131 But I was operating on about four hours’ sleep since Christmas Eve and I had set myself and the show unrealistically high standards.
But let’s not get hysterical. Some people assume it’s always wrong to smash a cripple in the face. But is it? Let me paint a hypothesis: what if the cripple, like the Jackal from ‘Day of the’ fame, actually had a false leg and was using a hollowed prosthetic limb to hide a specially adapted American bolt action Savage 120 rifle. What then? Is he still off-limits, fist-wise? I’m not saying Gordon Heron was an assassin necessarily. But you can see the point I’m making.
What if Osama bin Laden had been in a wheelchair when crack US forces entered his compound and, with no concern for their safety, bravely shot him in the head and neck? Similarly, a Zimmer frame could easily be four tommy guns in disguise with fake rubber feet on the bottom which the bullet could pass through once the Zimmer was aimed horizontally. What if he had one of them? Yes, there’d be an outcry from disabled pressure groups but would his killing have been wrong? It’s not black and white. I’m just saying, sometimes – sometimes – not to hit a man in a wheelchair is an abrogation of responsibility as member of the public or the US military.
Besides, the realisation mid-broadcast that certain participants were attempting to sabotage the show had got on my wick so, yes, I responded. I make no apology for that. I was like a wounded animal. If you step up to me, you better brace your ass for a genuine smackdown. They stepped, I smacked. Down.
I couldn’t face going home. So after unwinding with