I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [82]
After the death of newly installed BBC commissioner Chris Feather, and a mean-spirited and unnecessary investigation by the BBC, my second series was snatched from my grasp. My reaction? Banging on the door of a BP garage at 2am, pleading for the hit of Toblerone (and getting it – it was open 24 hours. Also, my friend worked there). I was, by some distance, the most depressed and troubled man in the UK. Probably a lot worse than this sounds.
In retrosight, I guess the BBC snub was the real sickener. Until then, I’d been on a fairly even keel. Sure, I had had my share of ups and downs. That’s Partridge. Comes with the territory. But the unjustness of the BBC stopping me being on the television saw me shrink into a dark cranny of fed-upness.
And that’s when I really began to behave differently. I’d watch endless repeats of Birds of a Feather, a programme which I quite rightly despised. My assistant says I stopped checking her expense claims for some time – which really should not have happened – and all the while, of course, I was eating quite a bit of Toblerone. The self-destruction should by now be leaping off the page.
The upshot was that I gained a lot of weight. I mean, that’s science. I’m not denigrating the food – at all. But it’s just human physiology. Lethargy plus Toblerone equals obesity. Even the guys at Kraft can’t argue with that. I’m not having a pop at them or anything.
All of this made me very unhappy. In my mind, I was living in an old hill croft atop the Cuillin on the Isle of Skye. But I was no ‘wee bonnie boat like a bird on the wing’ over the sea to Skye.192
I was a big bonnie man. And if I was a kind of bird, it would be a turkey about to be incapacitated by one of Bernard Matthews’s henchmen for some poor family to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.
I sometimes thought the kindest thing would be to put me out of my misery, chop my head off, gut, truss and baste me, then cook me on gas mark 5 or 190C for three hours – check after two hours – and then place me centre table for a Christmas feast. In death at least, I’d be able to feed an extended family of say 20, what with me then weighing in at 230 pounds. Even allowing for shrinkage, I’m going to have had a cooked weight of the best part of 190lbs – easily enough to feed 20–30 guests with sandwiches lasting through to the Epiphany, aka the 12th day of Christmas.
And so, inexorably fatter and more housebound, I saw myself turning into a third bird of a feather, although others routinely mistook me for Eamonn Holmes. Routinely. Even my voice – once so agile and clear – was, like Eamonn’s, now muffled and cramped by throat fat.
And then one day, I lost control. It wasn’t a single trigger, but an accumulation of minor incidents. How to explain it? It was as if I was carrying a lot of straw on my back. And people kept adding another piece of straw and another piece until I couldn’t carry any more because my back had broken. One piece on its own seems harmless, doesn’t it? But when added to loads of other pieces of straw, it adds up – until one piece of straw crosses the divide between ‘can carry’ and ‘can’t carry, sorry’. That’s how I explain it anyway.193
I lost control. I lost control and I ended up driving to Dundee in bare feet.
I’d heard of addicts blacking out, but thought it was just one of the things people say to get attention. Yet so complete was my mental collapse, I remember literally nothing of my journey to Scotland. Not a flicker of memory, other than the fact it was A11 to Thetford, continuing to Ipswich on the A146, before a short hop on the A140 saw me join the A47 and later the A17, pretty much until the A1. It was A1 and A1(M) including a quick pit stop at Wetherby Services for petrol, more Toblerones and a face wash. Then on the A66 via Scotch Corner and on to the M6 which, after the Scottish border, became the A74. Then it went M74, M73, M80, M9, A9, M90, and then the A90.
It was only after arriving in