I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [52]
Anyway, Nick was helming Radio Norwich and had always been a pretty solid guy. So in between bouts, Nick and I found a quiet corner of the warehouse and I broached the subject of returning to Radio Norwich, in a role over and above and away from my erstwhile sports brief.
Sports reporting had been fun – I think I mentioned the evening I spent with Gunnell – but my horizons had broadened. People now looked to me to provide a much fuller ‘broadcast experience’.136 Merely providing award-winning snippets of sporting headlines would have left them short-changed and angry.
No, I’d lanced the all-rounder bubble, and the pus of mainstream acclaim had been all that it emitted – any sport that had been around had scabbed up and dropped off. I said to him, ‘Nick, what can I do?’
He said, ‘Do what you want.’137
Bloody hell, I thought. This is ideal. Nick wants me to do it, the listeners want me to do it, I want to do it.
‘Oh, I’m not sure the listeners want you to do it,’ he said. (I’d thought it out loud.) ‘But tits to all that, I’m sure we can sort something out.’
It was such a refreshing attitude, I agreed to re-138 sign there and then.139 Listeners are important, certainly, but automatically placing them on some kind of raised plinth (or ‘pedestal’) is tiresome. Sometimes people need to put the DJs first.
Nick was ballsy. He’d been in charge of the big revamp of Radio Norwich, which to the naked eye comprised of a new aluminium handrail by the steps, and a slightly bigger sans-serif font on the signage. He said there was much more to it than that and said he’d overseen a major organisational restructure which I wouldn’t understand. Try me, I said, and he reeled off some high-falutin corporate speak which I won’t bore you with now but which I did understand.
There were plenty of familiar faces still at Radio Norwich and I was confident I’d be welcomed back by the guys there. No one had had a problem with me when I left the station back in 1991.140 In fact, I’d seen some of them in bars and restaurants in Norwich during my chat show heyday and I’d frequently arrange for a glass of wine and an autographed napkin to be sent over, which I’d then acknowledge with a smile and a nod.141 That was something I didn’t have to do. But I did because at the end of the day I’m a good guy. As my mother used to say: it’s nice to be important but it’s more important to be nice. FYI – she was neither.
Don’t get me wrong, I knew that there’d be the odd snide comment from people who think that a two-and-a-half-hour radio show five days a week is – I’m laughing as I write this – somehow a step down from presenting a half-hour TV talk show once a week (12.5 hours of weekly output, versus 0.5 hours). But there are idiots in all walks of life.
No, I wasn’t worried about being welcomed back into the fold. Employees at a London station like LBC or Radio London or London FM might have been a bit sniffy about it, but people in Norwich are warmer-of-heart than their bitter London counterparts with their negative-equity and their stab wounds.
No, I wasn’t worried about being welcomed back into the fold.142 I was fully prepared to be the big man and chat to each employee individually to ensure there were no hard feelings, so I made sure I sidled up to each member of the team – in the kitchenette, outside the lavs, jogging after them in the car park. I was making the effort and it paid off. At the end of each of these conversations, I said: ‘Right, point blank. Do you like me?’ And they all said yes.
It was good to be back. I was pleased that I wasn’t making television programmes. I was happy. This was good and I liked it. In short, I was glad to be back working for the radio station I’d been at five years earlier.
Had things changed at Radio Norwich in the time I’d been away? Not a great deal. While a few of the faces were different, the people who owned them were the same. By that I mean, the intervening years hadn’t been kind. For example, the girls on reception had sagged in the jowls a little and while