Characters / Alan Partridge

aka: Im Alan Partridge

Alan

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 shooting a guest live on air (accidentally), 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 mundane. 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. Overall, Alan is probably mostly straight, but at the very least seems to have some latent-if-suppressed bi-curiosity at least, with a corresponding amount of gay panic to compensate. His creators have tended to describe him as "a man who's not gay but is very worried that he might be".
• 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. And, of course, he treats Lynn like a downtrodden indentured servant every chance he gets.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Alan tries extremely hard to come across as the usual friendly talk-show host but it takes very little for his more unpleasant character traits to show up.
• 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.
• Cannot Tell Fiction from Reality: Downplayed, but there are several hints that Alan tends to credulously believe anything he sees in films or on television. For example, in Knowing Me Knowing You, an interview with a famous author gradually makes it clear that he genuinely believes Sherlock Holmes was a real person.
• Captain Obvious: Especially during his clip segments, where he points out the Eiffel Tower.
• Character 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.
• Competition Freak: As part of his overall Inferiority Superiority Complex, he seems to be utterly convinced that he's in a zero-sum competition with practically everyone around him in almost every situation. In Sceptred Isle, when temporarily manning a supermarket check-out station he is convinced that another server, apparently the shop's top employee, is riddled with jealousy about how much better at it he is than her, when the viewer can plainly see that she's utterly unbothered and just focussing on doing her own job. And in Nomad he becomes fixated on what he views as a competitive sports rivalry with a perfectly pleasant old woman who he keeps meeting in the swimming pool he frequents; he acts as if she's his nemesis when in fact she's just getting some exercise and barely pays any attention to him beyond exchanging pleasantries.
• 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.
• Daddy Issues: He seems to have some serious gripes against his father if I, Partridge and Nomad are to be believed. That said, it's played with; the "to be believed" part is a pretty big ask given Alan's Unreliable Narrator tendencies, self-absorption, tendencies to hold excessive grudges over relatively minor slights, and cynical attempts to try and tap into "misery lit" to make his books more marketable. Alan discusses his father as if he were a cold, heartless and irredeemably abusive monster, but reading between the lines and accounting for Alan's skewed perspectives and outright lies suggests that while he probably was somewhat repressed, aloof and hard-to-like, ultimately he was likely just an otherwise perfectly average middle-class man of his time whose "abuse" was just then-normal and appropriate parenting that Alan has distorted and blown out of proportion for his own reasons.
• 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.
• Don't Explain the Joke: A recurring gag is that due to a combination of immense pedantry, a condescending dismissiveness of the intelligence of almost everyone around him and a chronic case of No Sense of Humor, Alan will almost inevitably explain the punchline of every attempt at a joke he makes as soon as he's made it, no matter how obvious it is.
• 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.
• Era-Specific Personality: As noted above under Early-Installment Weirdness, while the throughline of "hapless and incompetent media personality" is always there Alan's personality has shifted a bit depending on which series you're watching:
  • On The Hour / The Day Today shows his "sports commentator" days. As he's merely part of an ensemble there's less focus on his character and individual neuroses. While not exactly an Only Sane Man, he's a lot less weird and manic than most of the other characters, frequently seems puzzled by what's going on, and is less aggressive and confrontational. A bit more good-natured and jocular, he tends to be the victim of Christopher Morris's bullying and mind-games. His primary comic trait is that he has next-to-no knowledge of the sports he's reporting on.
  • Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge (both radio and TV) shows his "chat show host" life. Becoming the main focus comes with an accompanying spike in Alan's ego and narcissism, but his incompetence is accordingly also dialled up. He's also a lot of more of an aggressive, confrontational bully. Nevertheless, there's still a hint of Only Sane Man there, and he frequently has to put up with even worse people.
  • I'm Alan Partridge is gives us a fly-on-the-wall look at the Jaded Washout version of Alan and is probably the darkest take on him, making him much more of an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist (and he wasn't hugely sympathetic previously). He's still egotistical and narcissistic, but is a lot more pathetic and bitter on top of it following his fall from grace. The series also highlights — to an almost cruel degree at times (but he's so horrible you won't mind much) — what an empty, hollow and superficial life he leads. The second series is much the same, but also tends to amp up the slapstick elements a bit more than the first.
  • Mid-Morning Matters draws on the previous version more than the others, but as it focuses on his job at the radio station it provides less of a deep-dive into what an insufferable Jerkass he can be in his personal life. As such, he's still egotistical and narcissistic, but less focus is given on his personal life.
  • A series of one-off specials, culminating in Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa, build on the I'm Alan Partridge version of the character but start to sand down his more gratingly horrible character traits a bit. While he's still a massive bellend, there are a lot more moments where the audience is encouraged to feel some empathy towards him, and he's shown to be capable of some compassion and decency. These versions tend to be depicted more as an overgrown ten-year-old with No Social Skills.
  • The "autobiographies" (I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan and Nomad), This Time With Alan Partridge and From The Oasthouse tend to focus more on squaring all of these versions into a unified singular version of Alan, while at the same time dialing back the "utter failure" aspects of his character. As such, he's a lot more successful and still an egocentric ass, but is not always the worst person in any given room.
• 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 (though he does quickly switch into "back-covering" mode).
  • He's genuinely appalled when Michael describes an incident when he threw a monkey off a cliff into the sea in a fit of rage.
  • 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.
  • Played with in This Time; he genuinely seems to dislike John Baskell, but his exposing of the man's sordid personal history when it comes up on the show's Twitter feed is clearly driven at least partly to secure his new role on the show as much as any genuine moral outrage.
  • In "Alpha Papa", for all his cowardice, he makes little secret of his disgust at Greg Frampton saving his own skin first and leaving the female hostages behind.
• 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.
• It's All About Me: Probably his defining character trait. Alan's ego and narcissism is all consuming. He believes he's entitled to be the centre of all attention, tries to make every situation revolve around him, gets petulant and angry whenever anyone else is the focus of the limelight and does anything he can to sabotage other people so that they don't outshine him. One suspects that deep down he actually doesn't particularly want to be a broadcaster at all (he's certainly not very good at it, and he seems to genuinely hate the general public and having to interact with them), it's just that it's the one career which guarantees that he will be the central focus and that people will be paying attention to him no matter what he does.
• 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.
  • Years later, of course, he returns to the BBC to co-present This Time.
• 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 girls, 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.
• Neat Freak: Downplayed, but there is a rather subtle running gag throughout the franchise suggesting that Alan is a bit weirdly obsessed with his personal cleanliness. On one occasion he mentions that he likes to put a couple of cups of Dettol antiseptic fluid into his bath, on another he mentions a preference for showering both immediately before and after sex, and his childhood nickname "Smelly Alan Fartridge" is a significant Berserk Button that immediately provokes over-defensive ranting about how his personal hygiene standards were never less than impeccable when it comes up, suggesting that being taunted on the grounds of subpar cleanliness has left some psychological scars.
• 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 Sense of Humor: He thinks he has one, but he doesn't. His jokes are nearly always terrible, laboured and obvious puns, made worse by the fact that he has no concept of Don't Explain the Joke. On top of that, he has very little tolerance for other people's jokes and seems to hate the idea of people having any kind of fun at all, certainly if it doesn't revolve around him in some way. He's also thin-skinned and bristles easily any time someone either makes a joke at his expense or he just thinks someone has done so, no matter how mild (or deserved) it is.
• 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 awkward and ill-at-ease in other people's company, 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 believes that he should be the centre of all attention, 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 in-universe 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, which may act as a lampshade hanging. In a Doylist, 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 somehow 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 occasionally, albeit unsuccessfully.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: Well, "protagonist" at least, but Alan's the main character most of the time and many of his views on many social and cultural issues tend to be somewhat retrograde. He describes himself as "homoskeptical" on one occasion, and generally tends to have somewhat outdated views on many social, ethnic and cultural minorities. Though it is played with, as Alan doesn't seem to be malicious in terms of his prejudices (which tend to spring more from ignorance and a sheltered lifestyle than anything else) and seems to have some awareness that he should at least try to present himself as more politically correct than he apparently is, though that seems to be more for the cynical reasons of trying to ingratiate himself into a media culture which in his mind tends to skew somewhat left-wing (in public at least). His creators describe him as someone who understands that he has to move with the times and tries to, but keeps getting it badly wrong.
• Pungeon Master: He's deeply fond of puns. Although even he seems disgusted with "chatty-chatty-bang-bang".
• Small Name, Big Ego: Alan is a megastar of broadcasting and a legend of the medium only in his own head and he 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 though Alan believes himself to be more progressive.
• 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.
• Too Much Information: Alan has a tendency to overshare regarding his personal hygiene methods and physical ailments, be it his fungal based foot complaints, his flaky skin problems, or his focus on anal cleanliness.
• 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. At least, on the surface; there are plenty of hints that he hasn't "bounced back" nearly as much as he claims to have.
  • 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.
  • Also applies in From the Oasthouse with Alan Partridge, particularly to his grandchildren. While he's still Alan Partridge, he puts a lot of genuine effort into trying to connect with them, even creating a model of the solar system (that fills his garage) for their visits with him, and seems to treat them much better than he did his own children.
• 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.
• 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 as with Lynne in Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa).
• 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!".
• Wicked Cultured: Downplayed and inverted. While Alan isn't exactly evil, he is a massive jerkass ... and his tastes are almost uniformly awful, tacky and lame. He dresses like a Top Gear presenter having a midlife crisis, enthusiastically celebrates superficial advertising and marketing, embraces corporate speak to the max, and once unironically described Wings as "the band The Beatles could have been."

His Assistant

Lynn

Lynn Benfield

Played By: Felicity Montagu

"Lynn's not my wife, she's my PA. Hard worker, but there's no affection."

—Alan Partridge

Alan's hard-working, long-suffering, personal assistant, Lynn appears to run Alan's life to such an extent that he cannot survive without her organisational skills; despite this, he usually treats her with little more than contempt. Besides dealing with Alan's working-life, Lynn's other duties range from the banal to the truly ridiculous — accompanying Alan to visit a show home, buying medicinal powder for Alan's fungal foot infections, cooling Alan with a hand-fan, and frequently listening patiently to Alan's pointless conversations and endless whining.

Lynn is a member of a local Baptist church, which Alan finds strange but is willing to tolerate. Her mother, with whom Lynn possibly lives, is apparently housebound, but Lynn seems able to balance her life between looking after her mother's affairs and those of Alan. When accompanying Alan, Lynn appears inhibited by him, but seems capable of easily blending into social situations when Alan is not present. Despite her intense and frequently ludicrous workload, Lynn receives a paltry £8,000 per year, due to Alan's greedy penny-pinching.

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• All Love Is Unrequited: Implied for Alan. There's little other reason for her to stick around, and she shows some jealousy of Alan's secretary Jill.
• Beleaguered Assistant: Alan treats her as little better than a downtrodden indentured servant and views her as barely competent, despite the fact that she runs his life to the extent that he'd probably starve to death in a gutter if she wasn't around. This said, she is clearly not the effortlessly efficient high-powered personal assistant he has deluded himself into believing he deserves.
• Beware the Quiet Ones: During a break in filming on the set of This Time, Alan recalls a time when they were driving along the road and came across an injured pheasant. Within ten second, Lynn had killed it, crossed herself and thrown it in the boot. On reflection, Alan notes, it wasn't actually that badly injured.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: For all her mousy personality when around Alan and the natural sympathy that his treatment of her engenders, there are several hints that Lynn is has a bit of a nasty streak. She's implied to have some Lady Macbeth tendencies whenever Alan's career is on an upward trajectory, and her political leanings appear to lean towards the hard-right, as suggested by her religious background and hero-worship of the right-wing Israeli politician Benjamin Netanyahu.
• Butt-Monkey: Her life revolves around taking care of a man who shows no gratitude, works her very hard, shows no concern for her wellbeing and pays her very little.
• The Dog Bites Back: After suffering a tirade from Alan when he overhears her and the hotel staff making jokes about him, she snaps back and points out how often he himself has walked all over her and took her for granted. This surprisingly humbles Alan.
• Extreme Doormat: She's at Alan's beck and call, and he treats her terribly.
• The Fundamentalist: She's a devoted member of a Baptist church and can come across as a God-bothering prude; some of what she says hints at a very reactionary, right-wing mindset.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: She's the only reason Alan gets work at all; if he were negotiating himself, he'd get nowhere. She's also very good at finding out background information that comes in useful for Alan.
• Moment Killer: Tries to be this between Alan and his secretary Jill, but he's such a social disaster that there wasn't much of a moment to kill.
• Not So Above It All: Despite being much more mild mannered and sociable than Alan, she still shows occasional characteristics of a showbiz ruthlessness like he does. She is equally ecstatic when she hears that Tony Hayers is dead, for example.
• Team Mom: A much downtrodden and taken-for-granted example. Lynn runs Alan's life to the extent that she might as well be his mother, yet receives barely a hint of gratitude or respect beyond withering tolerance.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: Her ex-policeman boyfriend quickly figures out what type of person Alan is, and while Lynn is out of the room, he successfully intimidates Alan into being nicer and giving her a much-deserved and long-overdue pay raise.

Other Characters

• Family, "Friends" & Others
• Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge
• Radio Norwich & North Norfolk Digital
• This Time with Alan Partridge

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