Characters / Alan Partridge Alan

Alan Gordon Partridge

"My face was designed as a leisure accessory."

Played By: Steve Coogan

"Go to London, I guarantee you’ll either be mugged or not appreciated. Catch the train to London, stopping at Rejection, Disappointment, Backstabbing Central and Shattered Dreams Parkway."

The main character of the series, Alan, a former sports commentator and host of the BBC chat show Knowing Me, Knowing You... with Alan Partridge, was dismissed from the BBC partly for punching Chief Commissioning Editor Tony Hayers in the face with a stuffed partridge and partly because his programmes were of a low standard, delivering ever-declining ratings. In series one he is divorced from his wife Carol, lives in the Linton Travel Tavern and is reduced to working the graveyard shift on Radio Norwich whilst desperately trying to get back on television in any capacity.

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• Abusive Parents: Parodied. He claims this in his autobiography, but he's clearly trying to cash in on the trend of 'misery lit' and the incidents he describes are clearly utterly normal. If anything, his parents — while apparently not the most caring, devoted and loving parental figures if the way their son turned out is any indication — seem to have been quite boring.
• Ambiguously Bi: Though he really only shows interest in women, he often has weird dreams where he dances to a crowd of men wearing a codpiece, and he has shown some curiosity towards "ladyboys". However, Alan generally has right-wing leanings and has in the past described himself as a 'homo-skeptic', but has lately become more accepting of it in his attempts to be more politically correct.
• Attention Whore: His desperate need to be seen and admired is pretty much what drives his every action.
• Awesome Moments: In-Universe - after acting out the opening of The Spy Who Loved Me in Never Say Alan Again he gets a deserved round of applause with even Lynne's boyfriend Gordon [who hates Alan] joining in.
• Bad Boss: He's too much of a coward to tell his production staff that he didn't get a second series, instead choosing to abruptly fire them one at a time for absurd random reasons. He doesn't tell his secretary she's been fired so he can date her, and later announces she was sacked on the radio. He would even be able to retain two of his staff if he swapped his big Rover 800 for a Rover 100 aka Metro, but he absolutely will not drive a "Mini-Metro", so he opts for a Rover 200 and everyone gets sacked.
• The Bully: Toward Lynn and Phillip Schofield. He frequently belittles Lynn's appearance and usefulness despite relying on her for everything and never shows a shred of gratitude. With Phillip Schofield, he refers to having bullied him with his colleagues during his younger days, which included filling his shoes with piss. Several of his interactions with his guests on Knowing Me, Knowing You can often take on a bullying, hectoring tone, especially if they've somehow annoyed him or if he's trying to get them to do something they don't want to do.
  • Bullying a Dragon: He often stumbles onto this.
• Captain Obvious: Especially during his clip segments, where he points out the Eiffel Tower.
• Catchphrase: "A-ha!"
• The Chew Toy: His complete failure as an entertainment professional and his endless buffoonery and misery off-stage are almost always Played for Laughs.
• Conspiracy Theorist: He's deeply convinced that there's a conspiracy within the BBC to sabotage his career. He also tends to credulously buy into conspiracy theories that he's seen in movies such as JFK and Capricorn One.]
• Deadpan Snarker: He does get many.
• The Determinator: Once he's got an idea in his head he can be quite determined to see it through to the bitter end. Often deconstructed however, since (a) the idea is often not that great to begin with, (b) he also tends to put himself through a lot of unnecessary suffering as a result, and (c) the goal that he's aiming for isn't really worth it to begin with. For example, in I'm Alan Partridge his determination to see out a low-rent corporate awards gig for a fireplace manufacturer ends up with him impaling his left foot on a spike while trying to climb a fence and refusing to go to the hospital until the gig's over, resulting in him repeatedly vomiting out of sheer pain in front of the audience, completely humiliating himself and tanking his latest business venture.
• Dirty Coward: He frequently tries to avoid confrontations by either getting his assistant Lynn to handle it (and the resulting bad feelings on the part of the person being confronted) or running away.
• Disappeared Dad: He's a minor, unwanted presence in the lives of his kids at best, partly because of his divorce but mainly because, not entirely unreasonably, they don't want anything to do with him.
  • 'From the Oasthouse' episode 10 covers the fact he never sees his grandchildren, Jack & Ruby [Fernando's children] Untill the end of the episode where Jack&Ruby arrive for a surprised visit [Jack even shouting 'Ah Ha!] in a rare heartwarming moment in the franchise.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: His early appearances in On The Hour and The Day Today take place in a very surreal and absurdist world of which he is, arguably, one of the sanest parts. Knowing Me Knowing You is still quite absurd and silly but more down-to-earth, and Alan is still relatively sensible (if still egocentric and bombastic). When I'm Alan Partridge comes along, things are a lot more naturalistic and most of the jokes are at his expense.
• Everyone Has Standards: He tells a racist old lady not to be racist on his show. Rather hypocritical, since he makes similar comments about Cameroonians in a later episode.
  • Also, when he actually kills Forbes Mccalister on TV by accident, he's as horrified as anyone else.
  • When invited to join Dan Moody and his wife in there swingers lifestyle, he is genuinely weirded out by it. He also firmly tells Kerry Moody he has a girlfriend in a deleted scene so isn't interested in cheating on Sonja.
  • And in Alpha Papa, he's genuinely sad to hear that Pat Farrell's wife died, and uses their favorite song to appeal to Pat so that he doesn't shoot Alan in murderous rage.
• Evil Is Petty: Okay, so 'evil' might be a bit strong, but Alan is a very spiteful and vindictive man who tends to delight in exacting petty and immature acts of vengeance for even quasi-imagined slights.
• Feigning Intelligence: And not convincingly.
• Freudian Excuse: In what little we've learnt about it (and keeping in mind Alan's obvious Unreliable Narrator tendencies), he doesn't appear to have had a particularly happy childhood. Although it was nowhere near as miserable as he claimed.
• Hidden Depths: Played with; Alan is an incredibly shallow and superficial person with a largely empty personal life, but there are occasionally hints about his backstory that go some way towards explaining why this is.
• Hypocrite: He's a relentless suck-up to the BBC but curses them with every other breath. He has no problem selling out his principles for a little extra piece of temporary fame.
• Hypno Fool: He's hypnotized on one of his shows, inadvertently reliving a past bullying incident.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: As I'm Alan Partridge shows, underneath Alan's bombastic and egotistical preening there's clearly a lot of bitterness, insecurity and self-loathing deep within him. This tends to express itself in thin-skinned defensiveness and overly combative responses whenever someone challenges his ego.
• Jaded Washout: He would never admit it, but he's still incredibly bitter about his failed career at the BBC.
• Jerkass: As part of his smarmy persona, and even more so in private.
• Karma Houdini: Reconstructed. While Alan's career has taken a nosedive, it's often out of proportion to some of his on-screen antics that would have likely earned him a prison sentence in real life. Low ratings were implied to be as much the death blow to Knowing Me Knowing You as insulting, assaulting or even killing his guests on air.
• Manchild: Alan's personality, mental processes and attitudes are basically those of a rather spoiled yet simultaneously attention-starved ten-year-old who doesn't fully understand how the world works, is both fascinated with and slightly frightened of feelings and sex, and constructs elaborate fantasy worlds in his head because he's got no friends or anyone to talk to. He reacts childishly to challenges and crises and his relationship with Lynn revolves around her mothering him to a ridiculous degree.
• Never My Fault: If Alan can find a way to deflect blame from his own failures and shortcomings on to someone or something else, he will.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Alan's portrayal is partly based on TV personality and Factory Records founder Tony Wilson, to the point where Steve Coogan used Alan as a reference for his performance of Wilson in 24-Hour Party People. Other British TV presenters with a reputation for being rather bumbling, egotistical and inept are also in the mix, such as Richard Madeley and Piers Morgan.
• No Social Skills: The great irony of Alan's life is that he's desperate to be a famous celebrity, in particular a chat-show host, yet possesses almost no social skills that would help him with this whatsoever. He's chronically lacking in charm and charisma, he's no good at small talk, he's boring, pedantic and obsessed with inane trivial minutiae, his interpersonal skills come off as smarmy, he tends to say inappropriate things at the wrong time and has very little filter, he doesn't really seem to understand how the world works, he's thin-skinned and tends to get overly combative at the slightest provocation, he's arrogant and smug with very little justification, he's childish, he doesn't care about other people beyond what they can do for him, and so on.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: Although Alan hails from Norfolk, Mancunian Steve Coogan just gives Alan a more smarmy, arrogant version of his own voice. This may be justified by the fact that Alan is a broadcaster, and so has adopted a 'professional' voice as many tend to do; his autobiography details his attempts to develop a professional voice after being criticised for speaking too nasally by former sports commentator Des Lynam. In a meta-sense, Alan's Norfolk roots were only created/revealed several years after Coogan had already started playing Partridge, by which time his voice performance was pretty much locked in despite the incongruity.
• Only Sane Man: On occasion. Despite being, well, Alan Partridge, from time to time he deals with people who are even weirder and/or more obnoxious then he is, and at times like that he actually comes across pretty well. This rarely lasts long, however.
• The Paranoiac: A downplayed example; he's deeply convinced that almost everyone he encounters in the media and the BBC is somehow determined to sabotage his career, apparently without considering the fact that he's perfectly capable of sabotaging his own career entirely on his own. He also displays several other traits related to Paranoid Personality Disorder (failure to take blame or responsibility, holding grudges, intense Jerkassery, an overly-inflated view of his own importance, etc.).
• Parental Favouritism: Alan practices this, as it's made abundantly clear that he prefers his son Fernando and treats his daughter Denise as little more than an after-thought. It's also made pretty clear that Fernando doesn't particularly appreciate being his father's favourite and neither kid wants anything to do with him.
• Parental Neglect: Reading between the lines in his memoirs, this appears to have been the default mode of his parents towards him (although it probably wasn't anywhere near as abusive as he tries to make out). Alan himself also wasn't the most attentive father to his kids.
• Parental Substitute:Alan acts as Stepdad to Angela's sons. If Nomad is anything to go by, he didn't do a great job...
  • He also tries to be a mentor figure to Simon ocassionally [such as in the Mid Morning Maters episode 'Chef']...again unsuccessfully.
• Pungeon Master: He’s deeply fond of puns. Although even he seems disgusted with "chatty-chatty-bang-bang".
• Small Name, Big Ego: Alan gets very angry when people don't recognise his 'greatness'.
• Smarmy Host: Especially towards his attractive female guests.
• Smug Smiler: His smile tends to be a self-satisfied toothy rictus that blurs the lines between a smirk and a sneer.
• Spanner in the Works: Through all his self-sabotage, his lack of competence and poor sense of propriety often causes the professional veneer of other media-types in his sphere to break down, exposing their phoneyness or hypocrisy and occasionally giving rise to perceptive questions in his fluff interviews. The writers of This Time have said that, in a television world where Piers Morgan fronts a flagship breakfast show, Alan’s re-employment by the BBC makes sense.
• Strawman Political: Alan is basically a walking dictionary definition of the stereotypical small-minded "Little Englander" Tory.
• Stupid Boss: He disregards Lynn's often sensible advice, in one case refusing to switch from his big Rover 800 to a humble little Metro to help save his production company, but Alan is far too proud to be seen dead driving a "Mini-Metro". He settles for the second smallest car in the Rover range even though it still means sacking all his staff.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Despite his behaviour he does care about the people closets to him deep down [Lynne, Michael, Simon] and does make ameds when fallouts occure [such a with Lynne in Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa].
• Took a Level in Kindness:
  • While still a jerk, his breakdown between I'm Alan Partridge series 1+ 2 made him more sympathetic and he seems more content with his lot.
  • Has become a very slightly better person by the end of Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa. He still does plenty of nasty things but seems to feel a bit of guilt and actually has a couple of moments of empathy with others. Helping him is that there an even nastier figure like Jason Cresswell around.
  • Similarly, in This Time with Alan Partridge. While he's still narcissistic, attention-obsessed and inept, the point is made abundantly clear that there are far worse and far more undeserving people in positions of power and fame than Alan.
• Unreliable Narrator: This is particularly strong in his autobiography, I, Partridge: We Need To Talk About Alan. He goes off-topic, forgets his initial points, contradicts himself, always assumes people are out to get him, boasts about mistakes he doesn’t realize he’s made and outright lies about situations the reader knows about first-hand.
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: Bad things may happen to him, but he's such a smarmy arse that it's just funny when misfortune befalls him.
• Waking Non Sequitur: At one point he wakes up yelling, 'fight you!' (which would be a minor case of Wake Up Fighting). He does something similar while daydreaming in Alpha Papa, too. "It's Jason AND THE Argonauts!".

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