I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [80]
188 There’s a clever pun in here.
189 Press play on Track 34.
Chapter 26
My Drink and Drugs Heck
‘ARGH. GWAAG. HUUUH.’
These noises, these gurgles and barks and grunts, they’re coming from me. They’re coming from my mouth. How long have I been making them? I do not know. Where on earth am I? I do not know. Where’s my assistant? I do not know.
One thing I did know was that my face was in considerable pain. Sharp-cornered objects were jostling for space in my mouth, spearing my inner cheeks and stabbing the roof of my mouth. Mixed with the taste of blood was an unmistakable cocktail of chocolate and nougat.
I gasped for breath, feeling my life force waning. ‘Is this it then, Alan?’ I thought. ‘Is this where you’re finally going to die?’
I gathered my bearings. I was sat in my car, door open, belt on. It was dark, cold. Pitter-patter went the rain, as if bookending my short and ultimately unhappy life (see Chapter One for the left-hand bookend). I was alone, and felt it.
‘[My assistant]!’ I called out through the semi-masticated confectionery. Where was she? ‘[My assistant]!’ Nothing.
I caught a glimpse of myself in the rear-view mirror – my mouth and chin were stained brown from all the binged chocolate. My eyes peeped out, redly, from a pair of collapsed lids. My face – my lovely face – was now unspeakably bloated, blotchy skin struggling to contain the expanding Alan within. It was as if bread was being baked in my cheeks. Like a good-looking John Merrick, mine was a face that looked really shit. Ravaged by addiction, it was now home to jowls, eyes and chin that were being dragged torso-wards by the weight of their gelatinous content.
Fat, tired, confused, cold, obese, alone, with chilly feet. I had hit rock bottom. I forced another two prisms of chocolate into my already over-subscribed mouth and waited for death to come.
The human brain comprises 70% water, which means it’s a similar consistency to tofu. Picture that for a second – a blob of tofu the size and shape of a brain. Now imagine taking that piece of tofu, and forcing your thumbs into it hard.190 It would burst, wouldn’t it?
Okay, now imagine those thumbs weren’t thumbs but thumb-shaped pieces of bad news. And there weren’t two of them, they were about half a dozen. Imagine you were forcing all six pieces of bad news – a divorce, multiple career snubs, accusations from the family of a dead celebrity, estranged kids, borderline homelessness, that kind of thing – into a piece of tofu.
With me? Good. Now imagine that it’s not tofu, but a human brain. And they’re not pieces of bad news but six human thumbs. That’s what happened to me. In 2001, my brain had half a dozen thumbs pushed into it.191 I was trying to ignore these thumbs by making three television shows a day, six days a week. And like a civilian hospital targeted by a contestant on Skirmish, my brain basically exploded.
It makes me laugh when people suggest that I’m exaggerating my psychological distress to cash in on the craze for ‘misery lit’. Actually, no, it doesn’t make me laugh. It makes me sigh. What I went through was real, and incredibly tough, and would have broken a lesser man like a gingerbread man being thwacked with a meat tenderiser. That it didn’t speaks to my fortitude and ability to bounce back.
The naysayers who try to downplay the very real horror of chocolate addiction, or scoff at a naked man crying in the bath, or intimate that I’m some kind of wally can frankly eff off. And the suggestion that I would resort to hyperbole to sensationalise what I went through literally makes me pass out with nausea.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me take you back in time. Come. Come with me, through the fog-clad mists of time to 1987.
We’re in the unnecessarily large studio of Our Price radio. And who’s this guy? With the strut and the swagger and the spunk? It’s a young Alan Partridge, one of the hottest broadcasters in in-store radio. He sets down his headphones, and heads for the door, high-fiving a succession of pleased staff.
A head pops round