alan partridge
Neil and Rob Gibbons
“You’ll titter and then realise that that’s Steve Coogan talking, not Alan Partridge...” straightforward. “The biggest challenge in taking Alan to the big screen was that sitcoms are about character and films are about story,” says Neil. “In a sitcom you don’t really want the character to go on any sort of journey or to be altered by the end of the episode, because you need them to be reset and ready to go again in the next one.” “In film, you can’t have that. You need a development of the character as it goes on, but you don’t want to lose the Alan-ness of Alan during that process. You don’t want him to suddenly see that he’s been a knob all his life and he’s turned into a better person. You’d be effectively killing off the character. Him ending up suddenly with all the riches and adulation that he always wanted, that would be the death of Alan Partridge.” But presumably that’s how it’ll all end for Alan one day, though? With him getting the things he’s always wanted, only for them to be snatched away by tragedy? “Probably, yeah. He’ll probably get everything he wants and then he’ll slip and smack his head on the corner of a work surface. He’ll only be able to appreciate it all the-fly.co.uk
for a split second and then he’ll be dead.” Though that sounds a bit depressing (even if it might be deserved, thanks to Alan’s life of relentless tactlessness) it hints at the appreciation the Gibbons have for the dark side of the Partridge. With Alan, says Rob, it’s all about teasing the mirth from his misery. “Quite a lot of it is us being able to scratch the surface a bit more. To scratch at the dark underbelly - that’s where a lot of the comedy comes from,” he says. “There’s a little scene in Mid Morning Matters where we see what Alan’s up to in the studio while a song’s playing. He’s phoning the cinema and he’s on one of those automated phone lines booking a ticket to see Inception. The comedy comes from the fact that he keeps repeating the word ‘inception’, but if you read between the lines, this is a bloke who is phoning up to book a single ticket on a weekday afternoon. That is, in itself, almost suicidally depressing.” The film has been an idea for nearly ten years, and in development for around eight. Rob and Neil were there at the beginning (“Armando [Iannucci] and Steve had come up with the basic story but there wasn’t a script in place,” says Rob) and have worked through a few concepts. One might have seen Alan go to Dubai, another would have followed him to America. Ultimately, as Neil explains, Alan’s just a lot safer in Norwich. “We realised very early on that it all had to stay very local. Alan doesn’t leave Norfolk in the film. Once you’ve set your parameters you can still do the same kind of stories that you would do on a global stage, you’ve just got to scale everything down to the geographical location.” “Alan works best when you see him rub up against normal people. You get to see how he would behave differently to how you would behave - well, we hope so. If it feels too familiar, then you’re probably a bit too Partridge.” Have the brothers had any “Partridge moments”? “In the writing room when we’re sat round with just the two of us and Steve, a lot of the conversation does tend to be Alan Partridgey,”
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