I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [86]
Finally it was time to commence the total annihilation of all the un-needed flab within the body of Alan Gordon Partridge. In terms of weight I effectively had a large midget wrapped around my internal organs. And I wanted him gone. I looked into liposuction but it was too expensive. Besides, while I knew it could do a good job on tummies and thighs, I wasn’t 100% convinced of its ability to cure a fat back. I would have thought about the stomach stapling technique used to such great effect by Fearne Cotton, but it was yet to be introduced at that stage. Probably still being tested on rats.
My only option was to hit the exercise, hard. I started with a regime I found in my assistant’s copy of Bella magazine. She very kindly offered to do it with me, but when I thought about her in a leotard it made me feel all cold inside. I went for a drive to clear my head but at one point I nearly had to pull over because I was shaking. In the end we compromised. I would do the exercises and rather than be joined by her I would just watch Oz Aerobics on Sky Sports One. How that programme has not won awards I will never know.
The other big problem was the squat thrusts I was supposed to do. It was a simple question of physics. With the best will in the world, the only way my knees would have been able to cope with the sheer poundage was with the aid of a Silverline SE9 hydraulic jack.
I turned my attention to swimming, and it was fun for a while. We figured out that I displaced the same amount of water as half a Ford Fiesta! Not bad for a little lad from Norwich. Not bad at all. But soon enough the local kids started calling me Moby Alan. I gave the swimming up. It was the straw that broke the whale’s back.
The thing is, I knew one of their mums and I’d seen her leaving a local hotel the other week with a man who wasn’t her husband. Now I could have mentioned that to her catcalling child, but I didn’t. Well I did, but it gave me no great pleasure.
My emphasis changed again, this time to running. I was a bit nervous as I hadn’t been jogging for years and wasn’t sure I’d be able to remember what to do. But as long as you keep telling yourself to move your right arm in time with your left leg (and vice versa) and to push off with sufficient propulsion to travel part of each stride airborne, you literally won’t put a foot wrong.203
I used to run along the country lanes with my assistant driving behind like a Baptist kerb crawler. The idea was that if I went below a certain speed she would just blast the horn. The shock of it would lead to a sudden burst of acceleration. We called it the ‘toot and shoot’ technique. Yet such was the agony of running that I soon learnt to ignore the horn. (I only wish the same could have been said for the many, many horses that we spooked.)
No, we needed something more drastic, otherwise I would never lose the weight. With a heavy heart I decided on a new plan. If I consistently dropped below my target speed my assistant was to pull forward and slightly run me over. Well it worked famously. Believe me, when you’ve nearly been trapped under the front left wheel of a car driven by an unbalanced Cliff Richard fan, you soon speed up.
Once I got to grips with exercising, though, my excess baggage just melted just away. I was like a snowman in the sun. (One day I lost five pounds, although that was partly because I’d eaten some bad ham.) And within three months I was more or less back to my pre-Toblerone weight. It had been a slim-down as dramatic as it had been medically inadvisable. But I had succeeded.
How I longed to go back to the swimming baths and show those young boys my body. I used to lie in bed imagining them staring at me, my skin glistening under the changing room lights, my body covered in a veil of twinkling, chlorinated droplets. And it felt good, it felt right.
I would have done too, were it not for one thing – the sudden weight loss had left me with masses of excess skin. When I was clothed it wasn’t a problem – I’d just tuck it into my jeans.