Steve Coogan: "The only threat to Alan Partridge is reality"

“Initially, the idea was to launch [the new series of the From the Oasthouse podcast] in a garden centre but then the Flower Show came along. That’s as good as anything. It gives Alan something to say about gardens, not that he knows much…” Coogan gives a shrug that Partridge’s longtime fans will immediately recognise. “What inspired it? Audible marketing people,” he says, unusually transparent for a celebrity fronting a campaign. I start to wonder if I’m speaking to Steve or Alan? “The line blurs sometimes,” he acknowledges.

In the 34 years since he hatched, fully formed, as the Pringle-sweatered sports reporter on Radio 4’s On the Hour, Partridge has surfed the waves of evolving media platforms: primetime chat-show host (who accidentally shot a guest), radio DJ (from Radio Norwich to North Norfolk Digital), film star (Alpha Papa) and YouTuber (Mid Morning Matters). Since 2020, he’s been sharing his adventures from home in his Kent oasthouse via podcast, a medium that suits both Partridge and Coogan perfectly.

“The podcast is stuff we want to do, that we’re passionate about and we think is funny and relevant,” says Coogan, who writes the show with his longtime collaborators, brothers Neil and Rob Gibbons. “If we’re wondering what to do next, we just ask, ‘What would Alan do?’ and it doesn’t matter if it looks a bit desperate.” The more slightly naff it is, the more in keeping with Alan’s nose-for-a-freebie, bomber-jacketed brand? “Exactly. Any marketing idea that comes along, we have Alan react how we’d react. He reluctantly goes along with it, and that’s sort of what we’re doing.” His hands go up. “All roads lead to Rome!”

Over a decade ago, Coogan described to me why an encounter between two people on the Channel 4 archaeology series Time Team summed up, to him, comedic perfection – “the awkwardness was the delight”. I wonder if he’s identified a similar trope in the blitz of podcasts, particularly those hosted by celebrities?

“Alan said something that made me laugh,” Coogan responds. “He says, ‘I decided to interview some experts rather than just confident people with podcasts’ – of which there is a tsunami, frankly. Anyone with any confidence or conviction gets a podcast and their followers flock to them.

“We used in Partridge what I said recently to a friend of mine, ‘I won’t do your podcast, but why don’t you and I travel the length and breadth of Britain trying to find someone with a high profile who isn’t doing a podcast?’ That might make a series.” He pauses. “I do think the podcast bubble might be about to burst.”

The difference between these “intimate chat” celebrity podcasts and Partridge’s is that, for the latter, every word is meticulously scripted and rehearsed. “People forget it’s not real, it’s all written. Even when Alan is going away on a train of thought, all that’s been crafted so it’s funny.”

What does Coogan listen to himself? “Sometimes Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell [The Rest Is Politics] which is both informative and infuriating. I can’t bear it when they have listeners ask them creepily sycophantic, fawning, jokey-jokey questions. I think, ‘Get a life’.”

More generally, he reflects: “The problem with political podcasts is there are no solutions. There used to be proper analysis, that was evidence-based with references and research. Now it’s loads of people’s gut feelings everywhere. They just like talking about politics, the game of it.”

Before the Gibbons brothers came along in 2010 and coaxed Partridge out of retirement, I sat down with Coogan to discuss a raft of other projects he was developing. Then, he expressed dissatisfaction with the success of his alter ego, that his creation had become something of an albatross crowding out his other ideas. Now, with acting work under his belt, including the films Stan and Ollie and the Oscar-nominated Philomena, and his Bafta-nominated turn as Jimmy Savile in the TV drama The Reckoning, Coogan appears a lot more at peace with Partridge’s place in the firmament.

“I like doing Alan because of the other stuff,” he agrees. “Doing Alan is like putting my slippers and pyjamas on. I get to channel those unfiltered, unexpurgated, petty prejudices. When you’re grown up, you think things intuitively but your intellect says, ‘Don’t do that, it’s immature’. Alan has that chromosome missing so it comes out.

“I’m fortunate to do the things I want to do in a way that entertains enough people to make it viable. I don’t take that for granted, ever. I try to get the balance between doing stuff that has some substance, without vanishing up my own arse, and doing things that are entertaining. If you go one way or the other, for me that’s failing. I want it to be about something, but I don’t want to be a bore.”

In his 34 years, Partridge has evolved from a niche pleasure to something far more culturally significant, a one-man reference point for so much that we see in the media, something his creator acknowledges: “The only threat to Partridge is reality.” And Richard Madeley? Coogan smiles. “And a number of other people. I don’t want to drop them in it. There is a handful of people, not all of whom I dislike. I don’t dislike Alan either, he’s not mean, he’s just ill-informed, nakedly ambitious and trying to decide which way the wind is blowing in terms of his career relevance.”

Appreciation such as the Accidental Partridge social media account is something Coogan says he and his writers try to ignore: “Otherwise pop eats itself. I see lots of people looking at how they’re depicted in the media and thinking, ‘Oh they want that. I’ll be that then. Tell me what you want me to be and I’ll be that.’

“They look around and ask, ‘What can I say that will annoy the least number of people, and be liked by the largest number of people?’ It’s that simple, and that can change from week to week depending on what’s in the air. If you were being kind, you’d call it being mercurial and, if you weren’t, there are a load of other words.

“That’s really unhealthy. At one point they had something. It might keep your career going for a few years but it’s a fool’s errand. We just ignore the noise and do what we think is good, which is not foolproof but a better way to go.”

For example, his podcast sees Partridge and his writers flexing more esoteric muscles than in previous film and radio outings. “In the TV show, I made it more physical, throwing a bone to the clever people but keeping it accessible,” Coogan explains. “The podcast is quite purist. We just indulge ourselves in the hope enough other people will get it.”

Coogan himself stays away from chat platforms. “A family member told me recently, ‘Loads of people are slating you on social media.’ It was the first I’d heard of it. I was walking the dog. I don’t care, and I don’t need to care. Anything I have that’s bothering me, I secrete it and post it under the door of whatever I’m doing, whether it’s Partridge or drama. It’s a far better way.”

And creatively fertile, too. “When I write with the Gibbons pair, I’ll say something and they’ll just write it down, unfiltered, and I’m horrified,” he says. “Then, as long as it’s not too exposing, I’m OK with that.”

Surely, by now, he accepts that osmosis is inevitable between Steve Coogan and Alan Partridge? “During the last TV series, I went into the trailer to put Alan’s clothes on and I was wearing a shirt that was identical to the one they had hanging up for Alan. I don’t mean similar, I mean same pattern, same label. It was the same shirt.

“I still had to take my shirt off and put his on, just for my own sanity. Then, at the end of the day, I took it off and put it back on the hanger.

I needed to do that to reassure myself there hadn’t been this moment of singularity where the Venn diagram becomes just one circle. I like to think it’s still a figure eight, at least.”

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Steve Coogan is back with series 4 of From the Oasthouse: The Alan Partridge Podcast, available now, exclusively on Audible.

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