I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [77]
I sometimes flirt with the Telegraph or peep at the Times, but it’s with the Mail that I’ve stuck ever since. It really is a rock-solid daily. I especially love Richard Littlejohn. He doesn’t just shoot from the hip, he fires bazookas from it. Immigrants, travelling tinkers, and especially homosexuals – many of his pieces are so good I rip them out and laminate them. I keep them in my downstairs loo, a simple, wipe-clean tribute to one of the most progressive thinkers in the United Kingdom.
Anyway, sorry, I’m jumping around the years here (I’m like a ruddy Tardis!).181 My point was that as a youth I’d always read the paper. And I’d see stories about teenagers from broken homes joy-riding cars. Well it would turn me green with envy. Speeding round the council estate in somebody else’s car, spaffed off their faces on sniffed glue. It was the stuff of dreams. Apart from the glue. I always imagined that I’d trade my share of the Bostik for a bit longer behind the wheel. Besides, surely it sticks all your nose hairs together?
Of course joy-riding was just a crazy adolescent flight of fancy. In reality I didn’t drive a vehicle until I reached the legal age. I’ll always remember the morning of my 17th birthday. I was hoping to open the curtains and see a shiny new Triumph Dolomite gift-wrapped on the drive. But I didn’t get a car. That’s not to say I wasn’t pleased with my attaché case. The other kids in my class had to make do with satchels (boring!), whereas I looked quite the young professional, striding around with my nearly-new, jet-black Samsonite. It was a great feeling to arrive fashionably late, then make a show of flicking open the lock and pulling out my PE kit.
Mum was the one that took me out for driving lessons. Dad said he wanted to but couldn’t because of his temper. In reality, though, I got taken out very rarely, so I had to improvise. I’d sit on a chair in my bedroom, with a cushion for a steering wheel and upturned school shoes for the clutch, brake and accelerator. I guess these days you’d call it virtual reality. It might sound stupid, but I believe it’s as a direct consequence of my hours in the simulator that I was able to pass my test after just three or more attempts.
But it wasn’t just the driving I loved. I had a real reverence for the Highway Code too. Still do. If Gutenburg had known that one day his printing press would allow for the publication of the Highway Code, I’m sure he would have given us a pretty broad smile and an enthusiastic medieval thumbs-up. Because people forget that it doesn’t just save lives, it’s also a damn good read. More than that, it can help in social situations. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve broken into an impromptu braking distances quiz to plug an awkward silence at a cocktail party.
I remember once June Whitfield thought the braking distance for a car travelling at 50mph was 28 metres, not 38. Imagine that! Yet while her error quite understandably got one of the biggest laughs of the night, I was still duty-bound to tell her that those ten metres might be a harmless bit of fun at a drinks reception, but out on the open road they could mean the difference between a quiet Sunday drive and a dead baby.
I never heard back from the DVLA, but for the sake of all our children I can only pray they came down on her like a ton of bricks. That said, a ten-car pile-up triggered by the ignorance of June Whitfield would have been manna from heaven for Crash, Bang, Wallop.
I worked with the same company on a number of other projects but ultimately our relationship was doomed. It came to my attention that some of their other business interests were not a good match with Brand Partridge.
I’ll give you a prime example: wet t-shirt contests. Becoming quietly aroused as you watch a couple of young tits slowly reveal themselves though a piss-wet t-shirt might have been acceptable family fare in the 1950s, but no more. Modern women are very different beasts. And I use the word ‘beast’ in its