I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [58]
It’s a strange truism that people tend to feel sorry for a man whose house is a Travel Tavern. But for AGP (Alan Gordon Partridge) things were pretty ruddy swell. This was one of the most creatively fecund periods of my entire life. I was absolutely fizzing. I was like an Alka-Seltzer. Or a Berocca. Or to be honest just a bog-standard soluble aspirin – they’ve all got baking soda in. I remember once bringing this metaphor to life in a meeting with a senior executive from Fenway Plastics. I was on a short-list of two to front a corporate video. Seeing that he was wavering, I went for broke. I went right up to him, bared my gums and made a very loud fizzing noise in his face. It backfired. Not least because my mouth was still littered with bits of recently consumed banana.
It wasn’t just corporate stuff keeping me choc-a-block busy. I also had projects on the boil with 24 broadcasters around the world. How many of the UK’s other blue riband presenters could say that? And although the exact level of commitment from these channels was hard to gauge, they had at least taken my calls.
I was also injecting seed capital into a number of exciting business ventures. In the days before Dragons’ Den, this was Partridge’s Nest. Local entrepreneurs would come and meet me in my room. I’d lie on my bed eating grapes like an emperor and quietly listen to their pitches. I could tell they were nervous – after all, get through this and they were staring down the barrel of an investment in the high three figures – but I remained stony-faced. Again, like an emperor.
When they were done I’d put down my transparent bag of fruit and begin my questioning. Within minutes I would almost always have found their flaw. And I’d tell them too. ‘Your business isn’t scalable.’ ‘Your sales projections are gubbins.’ ‘I don’t like your face.’ Occasionally, though, very occasionally, someone would leave the Partridge’s Nest having struck gold (up to a ceiling of £999).
In late 1997 I was ball-deep in a project that looked set to revolutionise the business travel market. A local man (don’t recall his name, think it was either Jim or Tom, so I’ll call him Jom) had come to me with the idea of ripping out the back seats of tens of thousands of company cars. If this had just been mindless vandalism against cars I would have laid him out there and then. Seriously, I’d have knocked his teeth out. But it wasn’t, it was much more than that. It was an ingenious way to save businesses millions of pounds (or billions of pence) a year.
Why spend all that dosh paying for travelling employees to stay in expensive motorway hotels when you could just replace their back seats with beds?151
But it got better. The discarded back seats could be re-purposed as cut-price sofas for low-income families. You were helping the poor and creating a secondary revenue stream (revenue river more like!). I was so blown away by Jom’s pitch I don’t think I ate a single grape.
Right there and then I wrote him a cheque for £300. I would have gone higher, much higher. I would have pumped that man so full of seed capital it would have been coming out of his bum (up to a ceiling of £999), but I couldn’t because it was the end of the month and I still had a few standing orders to come out.
There was just one hurdle to overcome: the rather delicate subject of (say it quietly) waste disposal. There was no question that travelling employees could park up in a service station and get a genuinely great night’s sleep in the comfort of their own cars, but how to deal with a call of nature in the middle of the night?
Now I knew for a fact that truck drivers just climbed down and did it on the tarmac. In the morning the cleaners would find neat little piles of it next to where the lorries had been. I was once lucky enough to have dinner with the general manager of Newport Pagnell Services (M1). I couldn’t believe how unfazed he was by it. I think his exact words were ‘that’s just the way