Up with the Partridge
DVD review: "I'm Alan Partridge" (1997) BBC Video http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0129690/ "The bitter life of a failed talk show host turned early morning local radio presenter."
"I'd personally like to understand man's inhumanity to man. And then make a program about it."
Has there ever been a portrayal of social self-humiliation as unsparing and cringe-inducing as I'm Alan Partridge? A UK TV series, it is at times unbearable to watch. When Alan stumbled over his own words and emotions while doing his best trying to chat up the beautiful front desk clerk at the Linton Travel Tavern ("equidistant between London and Norwich") one must look away. When he bulldozes through a funeral reception in a black jacket emblazoned with the Castrol logo in hopes of putting the professional squeeze on a TV executive, the sheer dread makes the flesh creep.
I'm Alan Partridge follows the arch of Partridge's career as he scrambles to organize a professional comeback. The first Alan Partridge series, Knowing Me Knowing You depicted his dire chat-variety show and ended when Partridge accidentally shot and killed a guest while on the air. The prospect of someone expending such huge amounts of money and time and energy trying to get on TV is a hilarious achievement for actor/co-creator Steve Coogan and his collaborators. At every turn, when easy pathos comes close at hand, the show steers clear with another Partridgean outrage to human feeling. Indeed, at the end of the final series episode ("Towering Alan") Partridge triumphs when he takes up a dead BBC Chief Commissioning Editor's hand to forge a signature on the contract for his professional comeback.
Alan Partridge is more than a silly-ass Bertie Wooster without Jeeves. He is lightyears beyond Basil Fawlty in being socially beyond-the-pale. He is a man gifted with the ability to always share his worst thoughts and instincts at the wrong time. He tells RTE executives from Dublin this about the Irish Potato Famine: "You'll pay the price if you're a fussy eater. If they could afford to emigrate they could afford to eat in a modest restaurant." He castigates farmers on his late night radio show for animal experiments, only to end up trapped under a Holstein carcass on the deck of a canal boat.
If Partridge is a luckless Visigoth, those around him make out even worse. His receptionist finds out she has been fired when she hears it on Alan's radio show as she rides home in a taxi from their tryst. In each episode, the harrowing martyrdom of his PA Liz is explored and given a scale something close to the sufferings of Job. Liz never seems able to catch up to Alan's latest whim or mania. She is treat as what used to be called a "pen-wipe." Michael, a maintenance worker at the Linton Travel Tavern where Alan lives, is continually upbraided by Partridge for this "Jordy" accent.
I'm Alan Partridge is a quasi Samuel Beckett comedy about a man so corkscrewed by life that he cannot have a normal or typical social instinct about his circumstances or those of other people. His daydreams are abashedly homoerotic and his Linton Travel Tavern Pay per View orders run to Bangkok Chick Boys.
Partridge sees people around him as extensions of the cash nexus, step-stools for his own egomania. Perhaps they do not appear to him as human at all. In the episode "To Kill a Mocking Alan" he meets his #1 fan Jed Maxwell. Partridge takes it as perfectly natural that his talentless TV hackwork would earn him a fan. Not until the end of the episode does he realize the fan is a stalker psychopath, and that his adoration of Partridge is simply an expression of mental illness. "You're a mentalist!" Partridge yells at Jed as he flees from the man's house in horror.
The 2 disc DVD package from BBC Video is an affectless treat. In addition to the usual deleted scenes and outtakes, there is audio commentary by Alan Partridge himself, joined by Liz. The DVD menu itself recapitulates the TV menu system from the Linton Travel Tavern: adult PPV options, elevator music, and parking lot security camera footage included.
Watch and weep.
___________________________________________
DVD review: "I'm Alan Partridge" (1997) BBC Video http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0129690/ "The bitter life of a failed talk show host turned early morning local radio presenter."
"I'd personally like to understand man's inhumanity to man. And then make a program about it."
Has there ever been a portrayal of social self-humiliation as unsparing and cringe-inducing as I'm Alan Partridge? A UK TV series, it is at times unbearable to watch. When Alan stumbled over his own words and emotions while doing his best trying to chat up the beautiful front desk clerk at the Linton Travel Tavern ("equidistant between London and Norwich") one must look away. When he bulldozes through a funeral reception in a black jacket emblazoned with the Castrol logo in hopes of putting the professional squeeze on a TV executive, the sheer dread makes the flesh creep.
I'm Alan Partridge follows the arch of Partridge's career as he scrambles to organize a professional comeback. The first Alan Partridge series, Knowing Me Knowing You depicted his dire chat-variety show and ended when Partridge accidentally shot and killed a guest while on the air. The prospect of someone expending such huge amounts of money and time and energy trying to get on TV is a hilarious achievement for actor/co-creator Steve Coogan and his collaborators. At every turn, when easy pathos comes close at hand, the show steers clear with another Partridgean outrage to human feeling. Indeed, at the end of the final series episode ("Towering Alan") Partridge triumphs when he takes up a dead BBC Chief Commissioning Editor's hand to forge a signature on the contract for his professional comeback.
Alan Partridge is more than a silly-ass Bertie Wooster without Jeeves. He is lightyears beyond Basil Fawlty in being socially beyond-the-pale. He is a man gifted with the ability to always share his worst thoughts and instincts at the wrong time. He tells RTE executives from Dublin this about the Irish Potato Famine: "You'll pay the price if you're a fussy eater. If they could afford to emigrate they could afford to eat in a modest restaurant." He castigates farmers on his late night radio show for animal experiments, only to end up trapped under a Holstein carcass on the deck of a canal boat.
If Partridge is a luckless Visigoth, those around him make out even worse. His receptionist finds out she has been fired when she hears it on Alan's radio show as she rides home in a taxi from their tryst. In each episode, the harrowing martyrdom of his PA Liz is explored and given a scale something close to the sufferings of Job. Liz never seems able to catch up to Alan's latest whim or mania. She is treat as what used to be called a "pen-wipe." Michael, a maintenance worker at the Linton Travel Tavern where Alan lives, is continually upbraided by Partridge for this "Jordy" accent.
I'm Alan Partridge is a quasi Samuel Beckett comedy about a man so corkscrewed by life that he cannot have a normal or typical social instinct about his circumstances or those of other people. His daydreams are abashedly homoerotic and his Linton Travel Tavern Pay per View orders run to Bangkok Chick Boys.
Partridge sees people around him as extensions of the cash nexus, step-stools for his own egomania. Perhaps they do not appear to him as human at all. In the episode "To Kill a Mocking Alan" he meets his #1 fan Jed Maxwell. Partridge takes it as perfectly natural that his talentless TV hackwork would earn him a fan. Not until the end of the episode does he realize the fan is a stalker psychopath, and that his adoration of Partridge is simply an expression of mental illness. "You're a mentalist!" Partridge yells at Jed as he flees from the man's house in horror.
The 2 disc DVD package from BBC Video is an affectless treat. In addition to the usual deleted scenes and outtakes, there is audio commentary by Alan Partridge himself, joined by Liz. The DVD menu itself recapitulates the TV menu system from the Linton Travel Tavern: adult PPV options, elevator music, and parking lot security camera footage included.
Watch and weep.
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