I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [67]
I just manage to stagger to a public phone box. I call my assistant and tell her to (a) collect my car and (b) deal with Maxwell personally. Hanging up, I slump against the side of the phone box and slide into a heap on the floor, the calling cards of a hundred local whores raining down on me like big drops of prostitute rain. I begin to weep. I have cheated death. I am free.
And today? I am stronger, wiser and happy. People assume the episode must have profoundly affected me but I can honestly say it’s not something I ever think about. Move on. (You may now remove your Kevlar body armour.)
157 Press play on Track 30.
158 I’ve got a lot of time for Ireland. Its economy was known as the Celtic Tiger, which I loved. Then, of course, it hit the wall, much like that sleeping dog on YouTube. Very funny. Just type in ‘sleeping dog runs into wall’. If you don’t watch it about ten times back-to-back, there’s something wrong with you. I also like sneezing panda, keyboard cat, dramatic chipmunk, skateboarding dog, otters holding hands and ‘Don’t Taze Me, Bro’.
159 Each to his own and all that, but the idea of a man looking at my rock-hard buttocks and salivating makes me want to run home and dead-lock the doors. And please don’t infer from that that I’m a homophobe. I’m not and haven’t been since I attended The Boat Show with Dale Winton, Paul O’Grady and Noel Edmonds – he’s not gay but you get the picture.
160 It’s a strange feeling that only people with high-level self-defence capabilities can ever really experience. I once discussed this with some sumo wrestlers who I interviewed with a translator, and they completely agreed.
161 I’m shocked by my own strength. I feel like those women who lift cars to free their trapped children. I’ve always thought it’s odd how little press attention these stories generate. Maybe they are just urban myths, but I’m very interested in the argument of my friend Michael. He believes the truth is that the government deliberately keep a lid on these stories because they don’t want housewives to know how strong they really are. Food for thought certainly.
Chapter 21
Hayers: Dead
SUE COOK’S VOICE WAS shaking. Ordinarily, it’d be hard to tell whether it was through emotion or because the pubs had yet to open, but this was 3pm so I knew it was the former.
It was five months after the now totally forgotten Maxwell incident and I’d just been MCing over the public address system at the Swaffham Country Fayre, one of the red-letter dates on the Norfolk agricultural calendar but smaller than the Norfolk Show. I didn’t care about that. I was and am a positive person – an arialator-half-full kinda guy.
FYI – this was agriculture with the emphasis very much on ‘culture’. Face-painting and craft stalls were the order of the day, and an accordion player was on site, playing television theme tunes to delighted passers-by. I was happy to be there and soak all this up – it was proof positive that ‘culture’ isn’t confined to London. In fact, the only time I’ve ever seen an accordion in the Big Smoke was one strapped to a Romany woman162 outside a tube station. I enjoyed the fayre, although I left early because people were hassling me to return to TV.
No sooner was I back at the TravTav, than Sue phoned.163 She’d been phoning for an hour. Something must be wrong. But something wasn’t wrong. Something was right.
‘Tony Hayers is dead,’ she said. ‘Tony Hayers. Dead.’
This was the sort of thing Sue did for a laugh all the time, but on this occasion I knew she was genuine. Hayers was dead. I bowed my head for a full minute to spare a thought for his loved ones. A tear tumbled down my cheek as I pitied his younglings.164 Only then did I begin to smile. Whatever your views on human death, this was a good thing to happen. The world, the medium of TV and more specifically my mental wellbeing were all improved by the death of Tony Hayers, 41.
I mined Sue for the key pieces of info. He