There were sections of Alan Patridge's autobiography (ghost-written by Rob & Neil Gibbons, Steve Coogan and Armanda Iannucci) which I found heartbreakingly sad. The foreword, for example, is little more than a bland employer's reference which describes our hero as "honest and trustworthy... a relatively good ambassador for the station... with an average of 1.5 sick days taken per year of employment". The joke, of course, is that for all Alan's supposed celebrity pals (Bill Oddie and Sue Cook among them), the best he can get anyone to write about the chronicle of his life is "I would have no hesitation in recommending him". That's funny, yes, but I also find it terribly pathetic (in all possible definitions of that word), and it's that pathos which makes the character of Alan Patridge more than just an egomaniac media monster. It makes him tragically real. Especially for someone who's worked in the awful industry of local radio where Alan has spent the majority of his career since he "shot a man through the heart with a gun" on the final episode of his ill-fated BBC TV chat show.
I, Partridge is a hilarious pastiche of the kind of woeful celebrity memoir that clogs the bestseller lists around Christmas, and like many such books it's most successful in the earlier chapters (revealing insight's into Alan's childhood) and the mid-section (the material already immortalised in Alan's various TV outings). The gags-per-page ratio drops towards the end as Alan's career slumps further into obscurity as mid-morning present on North Norfolk Digital (North Norfolk's Best Music Mix), but there are some very funny moments along the way and plenty of hideously overwitten prose. My favourite bit was the blackly comic role call of young Alan's first radio comrades, including...
Brian Golding. 'Bonkers' Bri combined a wacky sense of humour with a genuine mental illness and went on to co-host Drive Time on Signal Radio before killing himself in 1991.
There's something to Alan's pompous, self-important tone that makes me cringe for myself too. Reading his book comes a little too close to reading a really bad blog (say, for example, this one). He's even included his own playlist, to be enjoyed during specific chapters, featuring all the usual suspects (Midge Ure, Fleetwood Mac, Classix Nouveau, and, of course, Abba) having long since reached "a startling but unshakeable conclusion: no genuinely good music has been created since 1988". It almost me want to chuck in blogging and go find something less embarrassing to do with my time. Maybe we've all got a little bit of Alan in us...
