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‘Hello, Alan,’ said Carol’s mum, Stella, not bothering to think of a greeting of her own.
Within seconds, I had nodded back at them. I would have spoken, but I’d just cycled the equivalent of a full marathon.
‘What brings you out this way?’
I put my hand up as if to say, ‘Give me a minute, will you, Keith? I’ve just cycled the equivalent of a full marathon.’
Yet no sooner had I got my breath back than I spotted something truly incredible. Sat on the lawn, as bold as brass, was a brand new FlyMo. Now not only did I not know Keith was getting a FlyMo, I didn’t even know he was considering it.
I was completely floored. This machine was science fiction brought to life. It was based, of course, on the original design for Sir Christopher Cockerell’s hovercraft. And you really did get a sense of that – apparently it simply glided across the turf, as light as a feather, as nimble as a ballerina. I’d even heard rumours that owners didn’t mind the back-breaking job of collecting up the cuttings afterwards. And that speaks volumes. Clearly, it was an honour to mow with.
Of course I was so distracted by this turn of events that I never did get his permission. I did make another attempt the following month, though. I faxed through a request to his office. But I’d got the extension number wrong and it went to a different man.
The most profound moment of my life was still to come, though.
(#ulink_01a0a6af-5f32-5409-ac35-ad846cb8ddd6) And I’ll never forget the moment I heard the news.
I was banging about in the cellar, trying to find a pewter tankard that a friend of mine, Pete Gabitas, had suggested could be worth a fair bit of money. Sweaty, angry and pretty pissed off, I was not in the best of moods. Carol approached with a glass of lemonade, but it was homemade and I preferred the bottled fizzy kind so I took it without saying anything. Straight away, she looked hurt and I could tell she was troubled by something.
‘Out with it, Carol,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to find a ruddy tankard here.’
‘Alan,’ she said. ‘I’ve fallen –’
Freezeframe!
Let me tell you something about Carol. Over the years I spent with her, I learnt that ‘I’ve fallen’ was an opening gambit that could go one of two ways. One was very good, the other very bad. There was no middle ground. On the bad side, the sentence could end, ‘… off some step-ladders’ or ‘… out of love with you’. On the good? ‘… for one of your practical jokes’ or …
Unfreeze!
‘… pregnant.’
She was with child, and I was to be a dad. I’m told that some men have written entire books about the experience of becoming a father. And while that’s clearly too much, there’s certainly plenty to be said on the subject.
This child, my first, was Fernando. He was conceived in January 1980, the same month that President Carter announced a grain embargo against the USSR. Carol and I had been hiking and stopped for a toilet break behind a large boulder on Helvellyn. One thing led to another and soon we’d taken off our Gore-Tex trousers
(#ulink_3145061e-fb29-55cb-aaa8-f0975f1ad60d) and were having, for want of a better phrase, full sexual intercourse. (I should add that before getting ‘hot and heavy’ we’d moved a good metre due east of the piddle zone.)
As to how it happened? Well, Carol hadn’t been on the pill, so I can only hazard a guess that the prophylactic had got punctured in the cut and thrust of what was some fairly robust lovemaking. Not that we cared. We were to be parents! In just under nine months I would be welcoming a child into the world in much the same way as I would one day welcome the guests on to my primetime BBC chat show. Namely, very warmly indeed. (And ideally with the musical backing of a 22-piece house band.)
The early stages of the pregnancy were equally tough for both of us. For the first ten weeks Carol suffered from almost incessant nausea, not to mention frequent bouts of oral vomiting. While, for my part, I was having hell’s own job getting a reasonable quote for a new fan belt.
Eventually, though, things settled down (I ended up going with NDB Autos on King Street) and we could begin to enjoy learning about the different stages of the foetus’s growth. One week it was the size of a pea, another a walnut, then a plum, an apple, a beef tomato, by which time the novelty of being able to equate my child’s size to the mass of a common fruit or vegetable had really started to razz me off.
When the birth came, though, I have to confess that I didn’t find it especially traumatic. After all, I’d been through it myself some 25 years earlier, and that experience (see page 3) seemed to stand me in good stead. Carol, on the other hand, wasn’t quite so keen. It took her two days and two nights to deposit our first-born from her loins. But finally, almost as if he knew there were only minutes left on my car-park ticket, Fernando Partridge was born, weighing in at 9lbs 4oz (roughly the size of nine one-pound bags of sugar).
There he was, his skin covered in a thick film of my wife’s innards. Tears streamed down my face. I was so happy I wanted to shout it from the rooftop. But at the same time I knew that that afternoon’s downpour would have made the slate tiles so slippery that achieving any kind of purchase would have been impossible. Equally, I was acutely aware of the car-parking situation mentioned above.
After a while (a bit too long actually) I was awarded my child and I cradled him against the crook of my elbow. He was well swaddled so I didn’t have to worry about getting any of Carol’s guts on my shirt. We stood at the window, me and my son, my son and I. The night sky was straining to get into the room but couldn’t because of the glass. I could at least protect him from that.
I looked up at the starry night and knew what I must do. I closed my eyes and began to sing very, very quietly, for the first time, to my infant son.
‘There was something in the air that night, the stars were bright, Fernando. They were shining there for you and me …’
And at that point, I broke down. To this day, my inability to sing the full chorus irks me because I’d just realised that I could change the next bit, ‘for liberty’, to ‘for Carol P’, which I thought would be quite nice. But I’d turned to look at Carol and she looked so happy and proud, it made my throat constrict and fill up with tears. I handed the child back to a nurse and ran off to the toilets so I wouldn’t be seen, throwing my head back on the way to shout, ‘I’m a father, you mothers!’
I also have a daughter, whose birth invoked similar feelings.
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37 (#ulink_a938e1e2-6662-5e19-b92f-b7ad47d78a21) With the exception of a Hoseasons holiday to Bournemouth in 1979. Consistently excellent intercourse.
38 (#ulink_a6cb24b6-6629-5d19-a40f-17eaece771c5) Press play on Track 7.
39 (#ulink_ea89e1a5-e61d-5330-8fc2-a391beefe536) Press play on Track 8.
40 (#ulink_8f910944-e52c-5a09-a655-54dfebbb01f4) But not our boots – there was a fair bit of shingle underfoot.
41 (#ulink_b554dd60-4790-59e2-bf4f-5b4d3dd08985) Denise.
Chapter 5
Hospital Radio
IN 1967 I MISDIAGNOSED myself with cancer of the ball bag. In every other respect I was a perfectly normal youth – I was active, I had a good diet, I was pubing well – but one day I found a lump.
For three long days, I felt the cold hand of death on my shoulder. Lost in the depths of despair I tried to figure out what I had done to deserve this. I wasn’t an evil person. The worst thing I’d ever done was kick a pig.
(#ulink_57e1fe9e-0065-5a48-b5e5-9c04bb3c87b4) It’s not even as if I wanted to live a particularly long life. As a child I would have been satisfied to reach my mid 30s. To be honest, I just wanted to best Christ.
Yet it seemed I wouldn’t get the chance. As I sat in the doctor’s waiting room, I pulled out a notepad and began to draw up my final will and testament. It was almost as if, even at the age of 12, I was somehow aware of the tax implications of dying intestate.
But before the pencil lead had dried on the paper, I was spared. A quick medical fondle by Dr Armitage had identified that the suspected tumour was nothing more sinister than an infected paper cut – a result, I later realised, of a clandestine word-search puzzle done under my duvet after lights off. The heat from my head-mounted caver’s torch had made it impractical to continue without removing my jim-jams. And it was then that I must have nicked my scrotum.
I may have cheated death on that bitter February morn, but I had learnt a valuable lesson. I had learnt what it felt like to stare death in the face (and also what it felt like to have its cold hand on your shoulder). And I believe it was this knowledge that helped me make such an unmitigated success of my first job in broadcasting (read on).
(#ulink_c0ee726b-d77b-5f4c-a901-6064a23c3b15)
Snowflakes fell from the sky like tiny pieces of a snowman who had stood on a landmine.
(#ulink_63ff3ed8-11ce-5308-a2ca-74c8ff16c816) My wipers scurried across my windscreen, back and forth, back and forth, back and – my god, was that the time? I had just five minutes to get to work. And so help me god, nothing (other than perhaps the weather, the roadworks at the top of Chalk Hill Road, and the distance I still had to travel) was going to stop me.
For the last three years I had been a hospital radio DJ at St Luke’s in Norwich. It was a smashing little hospital and many of the people who went in there didn’t end up dead. I loved my job, though. And despite being unpaid, I’d been quick to negotiate free parking and the right to jump the queue in the canteen – this never went down well, but the patients were often too weak to oppose me.
But I hated being late, because the inmates needed me. And while no one would be silly enough to claim that my trademark mix of great chat, decent pop and amusing home-made jingles could take all their pain away, it did take the edge off and was definitely more helpful than homeopathy.
Six minutes later I pressed the red button and spoke into the mic(rophone).
‘Whoa! Yeah! Call off the search party. I’m here. It’s one minute past eight and this is Alan Partridge! Or should I say the late Alan Partridge! Perhaps not, because that would suggest I was dead. And I am not! But here’s a list of people who are …’
You’ll notice from this that I had a much brasher broadcasting style in my early days, my speech peppered with laughs and shouts and whoops. Soon after Good Morning Vietnam came out, I’d even begin shows with the holler: ‘Gooood morning St Luuuuuke’s!!!!!!’ However, I was upbraided for this and told it called to mind a war zone littered with the injured and diseased – which was precisely why I’d thought it was so appropriate.
As DJing gigs go, it was far harder than people realise. Yes, you have a captive audience, but you also have a listenership that is almost exclusively poorly. And that makes song selection a delicate business. One wrong step and you could instantly offend a fairly meaty percentage of patients. Just take the number one singles from my first year in the job, 1975. Almost all of them were capable of upsetting someone. Art Garfunkel’s ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ (the recently blinded); David Essex’s ‘Hold Me Close’ (burns victims); The Stylistics’ ‘Can’t Give You Anything’ (the terminally ill); Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand By Your Man’ (paralysed women, paralysed homosexual men).
In my time at the hospital, I was broadcasting live during the deaths of some 800 patients. It’s a record that stands to this day. Industry awards and repeated praise from TV Quick magazine are all very well, but it gives me immense pride to think that the final voice those 800+ people heard may have been mine, as I read the traffic and travel or introduced a clip from my favourite Goon Show LP.
I spent 94 wonderful months behind the mic at St Luke’s. But by autumn 1983, much like most of the patients on the Marie Curie wing, my days were numbered. I guess I always knew that as word of my competence leaked out across Anglia, my head might be hunted. And so it was that in September I answered the phone to local media mogul Rich Shayers.
‘Alan, you’ve done your time on hospital radio. It’s time to spread your wings.’
‘What, like a bird?’ I asked, keen to know more.
‘I’m starting a new station and I want you on board.’
‘Will I get loads of salary?’ I blurted. I was young and unsure how to phrase questions relating to remuneration.
‘Just swing by my office tomorrow and we can hammer all that out.’
‘Great,’ I replied. ‘I’ll bring the hammers!’ And with that, my career changed forever.
But there was to be a moving post-script to this chapter in my life. And I’ll tell you about it now. At my leaving do, with the party in full swing, I stopped the music, climbed atop a chair and gave the hospital staff an emotional, heartfelt guarantee. I pledged, no matter how famous I became, that while there was still air in my lungs, I would come back and do my show for a minimum of one week every year.
I may not have been able to donate money, but in some ways I was able to donate something far more powerful. I was able to donate chat (to a maximum value of one week each year). And with that, I picked up my coat and left the building, the warm applause of my colleagues still ringing in my ears like a big church bell.
Sadly, circumstance has meant that I’ve not been able to get back to the hospital in the intervening 31 years. In the main that’s down to me – work commitments have made it simply unfeasible. But for the record I’d like to point out that the hospital is not entirely blameless itself. In 2001 it moved to a new site around the corner from the University of East Anglia. The studios from where I used to broadcast my show were reduced to rubble. And I think most reasonable people would agree that by allowing that to happen the NHS Trust effectively voided my promise.
42 (#ulink_35081702-cd43-575c-ab87-a0be5697814f) School trip to Heston Farm, 1964. I maintain it was self-defence.
43 (#ulink_27de70d6-cdbf-5efd-a1e7-630061b25a70) Press play on Track 9.
44 (#ulink_83a2e0b0-0c68-5d54-8dd0-f702b9cfe8fd) If he was particularly unlucky it would have been a Bouncing Betty. These horrible little devices are designed to spring three feet into the air before exploding and inflicting the maximum number of casualties on an enemy. I think they’ve won awards.
Chapter 6
Local/Commercial Radio
RICH SHAYERS HAD CONVINCED me to do something more worthwhile than providing a soothing backdrop of music and companionship for those in need
(#ulink_89c3de6b-6697-5bfe-8e24-893b2bf3808f) – so I’d accepted his offer of a job DJing for a fledgling station. The set-up reminded me very much of the buccaneering can-do spirit of Radio Caroline – maverick disc jockeys flouting regulations to give listeners something new and fresh. My job wasn’t on pirate radio – that would have been a criminal offence. It was the in-store radio station for a branch of record shop Our Price.
It was a pilot scheme way, way, way, way ahead of its time (indeed, it folded within weeks). But the team! It’s my privilege to say that these were some of the most dazzling young broadcasters I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. They were scientific in their understanding of good radio – they were radiologists.
Check out this roll call.
Paul Stubbs. An aficionado of US shock jocks and personality DJs, he sadly never knew what he had. He left the business shortly after Our Price and now works for Hertz car rental. Still follows the US game and is a fountain of knowledge on call-ins and quiz ideas. Invaluable.
Phil Schofield. Phil was always the baby of the group and had a snotty-nosed quality that we bullied out of him. Now better known as the presenter of TV’s This Morning, Phil was back then a bit of a know-it-all and was brought down a peg or two by off-air pranks such as having his new shoes filled with piss. There was no smoking gun/dripping willy, so Stubbs got away with it. It was a tough time for Phil and he never talks about it. Phil, if you’re reading, why not give me a call?
Jon Boyd. That voice! Warm, reassuring and deliciously transatlantic, Jon later turned his back on radio and has made quite the name for himself as a voiceover artist with, by his own admission, a pretty limited range. His voice can be heard in the lift of an art gallery in Bath. He tells me he takes women there and then mimes the words ‘Doors Closing’ or ‘Third Floor’ over the sound of the recording. Freaks them out. Cracking SOH.
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.
As a team, I think we all knew then that we had something special, and that sense of worth was a shot in the arm for a young, thrusting Alan Partridge. With that shot – easily as powerful as an intravenous drug like ‘heroin’, ‘smack’ or ‘gear’ – I was driven to go out into the world of broadcasting and succeed. Nothin’ was gonna stop me!
1984–1987. Not much happened here.
It’s 1988 and a young, side-parted young radio reporter is pinning a pretty rude lower-division football manager down on his team’s disgraceful disciplinary record.
‘Six red cards in as many games,’ says the reporter. ‘Why do you continue to tolerate this culture of hooliganism?’
The manager tries to worm his way off the hook by disputing the figures. ‘They’re yellow cards,’ he says, ‘And that’s actually a pretty good behaviour record.’
But the reporter has the figures written down on a notepad and won’t be deterred. In the end, the manager loses his rag – ‘You bloody idiot’ – pulls the top off the microphone and throws it at the reporter, but it doesn’t hurt anyway because it’s made of grey foam. The reporter broadcasts the story that night. It was, everyone agreed, great radio – and although the reporter had to issue a full apology and retraction for the red/yellow card error, it burnished his reputation as one to watch.
(#ulink_2434a2b6-60ac-59c5-aecd-d7ccec895d1a)
That reporter was Alan Partridge. The manager? The name escapes me, but it must have been fairly local because I remember being pleased I’d driven there without stopping for a toilet break. I can’t remember what he looked like either or what colour his team played in, just that he had a strong regional accent and used such a hilarious mix of tenses – ‘he gets the ball and he’s gone and kicked it’ – that he sounded like a malfunctioning robot at the end of a space-fi movie.
So what had happened to me? How had I gone from the cossetted glamour of Our Price radio to the snarling, balls-out toughness of sports reporting? Well, I’d always been a keen sports fan. It seemed to me that the world of sport – with its reliance on stats, facts, trivia and rules – provided modern man with certainty and structure. Just as a well-fitting jockstrap cups the cock and balls of a sportsman, so sport cradled me. You know where you are with sport. It’s good.
And it’s all so logical. Watch a play by Shakespeare or go to a modern art gallery, and no one has the faintest idea what the hell is going on.
Take Shakespeare. Not a play goes by without one character whispering something about another character that is clearly audible to that character. By virtue of the fact it has to be loud enough for the audience to hear it, it’s inconceivable that it can’t also be heard by the character in question. It’s such an established technique in Shakespeare’s canon people just think no one will notice. Well I’ve got news for you – this guy did.
Sport, on the other hand, is straightforward. In badminton, if you win a rally, you get one point. In volleyball, if you win a rally, you get one point. In tennis, if you win a rally, you get 15 points for the first or second rallies you’ve won in that game, or 10 for the third, with an indeterminate amount assigned to the fourth rally other than the knowledge that the game is won, providing one player is two 10-point (or 15-point) segments clear of his opponent. It’s clear and simple.
But that wasn’t what catapulted me to local radio glory. No, what catapulted me to local radio glory was the fact I’d been uninvited to a wedding at the eleventh hour (reason not given), and had a day to kill. Happily, I received a call from a friend called Barry Hethersett, who moonlit as a radio reporter on Saxon Radio in Bury St Edmunds. He’d heard I was free that day and asked me to fill in on his slot because he had to attend the funeral of one his parents. I agreed and he gave me a lift to the station, dressed in a smart suit but wearing a buttonhole flower, which I felt was in bad taste.
I was introduced to the station controller, Peter Crowther, very much one of the old school,
(#ulink_afc2d9a9-7870-5e18-9256-b8a6ad7b393f) and a man who could make or break careers like that.
(#ulink_eae53f95-6608-5edf-8ae2-517a1c9e3172) Eager to validate my sports credentials, I’d dug out a prize-winning thought-piece (or essay) I’d written on sport as a schoolboy. Labelled ‘brilliant’ by one of the finest headmasters I’ve worked under, the piece took as its starting point the truism that there are lots of sports, each of them different from each other, before providing a pretty thorough breakdown of the main ones and peppering it with facts and figures. Faux-leatherbound, I brought it with me.
Crowther read the first page with bemused interest before – in a clear indication that he was still on the sauce – bursting out laughing. Very much one of the old school. But it was a laugh that said, ‘Boy, this guy’s good.’ I’d proved I knew the subject inside out.
Within the hour, I was broadcasting to the whole of east East Anglia, reading out sports reports direct from Teletext, ‘throwing’ to a pre-recorded interview with a 15-year-old cycle champ and then reading out greyhound racing results, which I later learnt had been made up by the still-laughing Crowther.
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Hethersett – perhaps still crushed by the death of his mother or father – never returned to Saxon Radio. And they wouldn’t have wanted him anyway. I’d shown my mettle and taken to it like a duck to water. (Or, as former Olympic swimmer Duncan Goodhew says, ‘like a Dunc to water’, which isn’t that funny but forgivable as Duncan continues to be an inspiration to hairless children nationwide.)
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Sports reporting was a dizzying but exhilarating slog.
(#ulink_ffa43770-a337-5b44-abf0-583b564d5b9e) I was spending my Saturday and Sunday afternoons at horse trials, football matches, squash tournaments … I was becoming a familiar voice on radio and, yes, people wanted a piece of me.
I ascended the career ladder like a shaven Jesus ascending to his rightful place in the kingdom of Heaven. I was poached by Radio Broadland (Great Yarmouth), Hereward Radio (Peterborough), Radio Orwell (Ipswich) and eventually Radio Norwich.
