In a sentenceA guided tour of Norfolk by a man who keeps mistaking the county for himself
Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan) presents a documentary tour of Norfolk, the county he regards as his own. He wants to show the camera the places that made him, chief among them Norwich City Hall, where he stands on the balcony and imagines addressing the city. Along the way he interviews locals who did not quite agree to the programme he has in mind, among them Annabel Swanson (Dolly Wells), Mike Greatbatch (Graham Duff), Atif (Harmage Singh Kalirai) and the Rev. Richard Hatcher (Robert Demeger). Each stop is meant to be about the place and ends up being about Alan. The whole thing runs 42 minutes.
Steve Coogan takes Alan Partridge round Norfolk for 42 minutes of mock travelogue and finds, under all the boasting, a frightened middle-aged man. It is as funny as anything the character has done, and sadder than we were ready for.
Alan Partridge: Welcome to the Places of My Life is a 42-minute mock travelogue in which Alan Partridge, Steve Coogan’s Norwich broadcaster, shows a camera crew round Norfolk. The joke, as it always has been, is the gap between how Alan thinks he comes across and how he does. Coogan wrote it with Rob Gibbons and Neil Gibbons, and the three of them have worked out that a guided tour is the right shape for him. He gets to stand in front of things and explain them, and the things keep answering back.
Our verdict is straightforward. This is as funny as Partridge has been in years, and it has something the earlier work mostly kept off camera: Alan is scared, and the programme knows it before he does. A couple of the stops are thin, and the last few minutes hurry. Neither spoils it.
The city hall sequence is the one people will talk about. Alan is on the balcony of Norwich City Hall, mid-lecture on the building, when the documentary slides into his daydream of addressing a grateful city, and the daydream turns out to be borrowed from newsreel of Hitler. We laughed at it for longer than was decent, partly because of how long Coogan holds his face, and partly because Nick Webb, the editor, lets it build one shot at a time instead of running at the punchline. Dave Lambert, who directs, shoots the fantasy in the same flat, slightly over-lit style as everything else, so the madness arrives without any change in weather.
Lambert and Webb have clearly watched a great many real regional travelogues. There are the wide shots of flat fields, the walk-and-talk to camera, the cutaway to a local who has plainly been asked the question four times. Webb’s habit is to hold on Alan for half a second after he has finished speaking, and that is where most of the laughs live. Dolly Wells, Graham Duff, Harmage Singh Kalirai and Robert Demeger play the people Alan corners, and all four understand that the job is not to react. They let him dig.
Then there is a stretch we will not describe in detail. The tour takes Alan somewhere he had not planned to be candid, and he is, almost by accident. Coogan plays the scenes around it without changing his voice, which is the right choice: Alan does not have a tone for fear, so he uses the one he has for everything else. It moved us more than we expected a Partridge programme to. The reason is specific. The camera, which has spent half an hour catching him being ridiculous, catches him being ordinary, and he does not notice the difference.
It is not flawless. The tour structure makes it a string of set pieces, and two or three of the stops exist to get Alan from one good idea to the next. At 42 minutes there is not enough time to let the darker material settle, so the programme reaches for a laugh at moments when silence would have been braver. And Alan’s cruelty to the people he meets, which was always the character’s engine, is turned down a notch here; those who liked him nastier will feel the loss.
Against the character’s own standards it sits near the top, and the reviews so far agree with us; we have not read a lukewarm one. The programme takes him out into the county he claims to understand and finds he is just as lost in the open air as he ever was indoors.
Watch it in one sitting, which at this length is no hardship, and preferably with someone who already knows who he is. Newcomers will laugh, but the sadder scenes land because of long acquaintance with this man and his habit of avoiding the mirror, and nothing you catch up on tonight will supply that. Norfolk, for what it is worth, comes out of it rather well.
Glanfield’s verdict is strongly positive, describing the programme as the best Alan Partridge of the 21st century. He praises its careful construction and well-observed humour.
Read the full review →Crace finds the special fresh, hilarious, and unexpectedly dark, with Partridge becoming more complex and sympathetic. He particularly praises the city-hall sequence that turns a documentary-style tour into a Hitler fantasy.
Read the full review →The critic calls the special one of Steve Coogan’s funniest works and praises its humor and emotional depth. They single out the added pathos that makes Alan feel more than a caricature.
Read the full review →
I'm Alan PartridgeThe travel tavern years; the character at his nastiest and the writing at its tightest.
The Trip · not reviewed yetCoogan playing a version of himself across the north, with the same quiet dread underneath.
This Is Spinal TapThe mock documentary that taught everyone how to hold on a face too long.
Marion and Geoff · not reviewed yetTen-minute monologues from a cab; a man explaining his life while it collapses.
Toast of London · not on Fi1m yetAnother vain British broadcaster with no self-knowledge, played louder and stranger.
