I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [74]
I see Swallow as something of an enigma. He has the largest collection of samurai swords in Europe, but no one knows where he got them from. And when not cooking or tending to his gardens or completing jigsaws or finding words or watching rare wetland birds, he plays kendo – the Japanese martial art with body armour and big sticks of bamboo (shinai). His sparring partner and friend is Chan, a Chinese widower who owns a laundry next to Wallis Shoes on Exchange Street in Norwich.174 He’s a useful foil to Swallow because, as a laundryman, he doesn’t think like a police officer.
Throughout the pilot episode, we see Swallow constantly harassing a circus even though left-wing university-educated police chiefs reprimand him for it. But at the end of the pilot episode, his right-wing views are vindicated when he blows the lid on a drug smuggling racket. He works out that drugs are being smuggled in the collective recta of circus elephants when he spots bags of drugs among the grassy balls of dung on the circus floor.
He lives alone. His marriage broke down because his wife was too selfish to recognise his cleverness.
Is he politically correct? Who, Swallow?? No chance. He’s old school, and is aware that a disproportionately high amount of crime is committed by the unemployed and asylum seekers so why not stop them and shake them down? The squares at Police HQ can swivel.
In the pilot episode, Swallow suddenly notices there are no black people in Norfolk. Have they been spirited away or were they never there? He has to crack the case.
Also in the pilot episode, he wages a war against the travelling community who almost never have the correct documentation for their vehicles. He frequently impounds them to get them off the road.
The pilot episode follows Swallow as he’s assigned a naïve young sidekick, DC Wide-Eye, a stickler for the rules. Together, this odd couple have to come together to find out who’s been fly-tipping in a residential area.
It goes without saying that the show will look terrific. The series will be peppered with skyscapes of Norfolk while the opening sequence will be shots of huge deciduous oaks intercut with two masked men playing kendo intercut with a drive-by shooting intercut with two hands playing a jigsaw. The reveal at the end is that the kenshi are Swallow and Chan and the jigsaw player is also Swallow.
Incredibly, the rights to Swallow are still available for purchase. I can be contacted through the publishers.
170 I’ve stopped doing it now.
171 I can’t speak for Pete of course, but my early interest in these floating vehicles was sparked by the chase sequence in Live and Let Die. Sometimes you forget films, don’t you, but this scene has always stayed with me. It’s up there with classic scenes such as the Union Jack parachute bit in The Spy Who Loved Me and the scene in Sophie’s Choice when she has to choose which of her children to send to their certain death. As you can see, I love movies.
172 I have similarly strong views on the death of Princess Diana (indeed, when she died I wanted to ring up the media and say, ‘Happy now??’ but I didn’t have their number).
To this day, there are so many questions that don’t add up. When I hear people refer to it as an ‘accident’, I shake my head and chuckle at them. Ditto when people say the twin towers were not detonated by the CIA.
By a similar token, I’m proud to say that one of my favourite books is Erich Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods which alleges that Jesus was genuinely an alien. And people may scoff, but I’m yet to meet anyone who can provide a compelling argument that the ascension into heaven was anything other than Christ taking off back to some kind of mothercraft.
Of course, I don’t believe every word he writes, but Von Daniken himself says 2% is conjecture and 98% is probable fact.
173 Press play on Track 33.
174 Don’t bother looking for it. It’s a Halifax!
Chapter 24
Other, Better TV Work
PEOPLE WHO WORK IN broadcasting hate to admit this but it’s true: