Last month when David Mitchell and Robert Webb returned to Channel 4 with a new series, there was a lot of talk about the return of sketch comedy after a long absence. Then a few weeks later Alan Partridge returned to BBC for this new series. i didn’t really notice at the time but How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge) is really a sketch show too. And a brilliant one.
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In this current run Steve Coogan’s Partridge is exploring mental health. Though of course that’s only really a peg on which to hang Partridge and his comic foibles. At first I thought the series was a bit scattershot, but if you look at it as a series of sketches it suddenly all makes sense.
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And like even the best sketch shows it’s been hit and miss. But with a performer as inspired as Coogan the hit rate is high. Partridge fits him like a leather drivning glove. Unforgettable moments so far include Partridge on a jet pack. Or Partridge trying to connect with his childhood in the most literal way, wearing shorts and doing wheelies around a cul-de-sac.
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This week’s episode has some delicious moments too. It is a sign of skilful, incisive writing that Coogan and Rob and Neil Gibbons came up with a sidebar plot about the DJ doing lucrative Saudi Arabian work long before the Riyadh Comedy Festival hit the headlines. This week we see Partridge doing his Jeddah traffic reports from a business park just outside Norwich city centre. (talking of radio DJs, has anyone noticed the similarities between Partridge’s nitpicking pedantry and comedian John Rpbins on his R5/podcast with Elis James? They even both have birds as surnames)
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Elsewhere he goes walkabout and talks about the delights of human company (“I’m happy to hug a tree once a year”) although these scenes – manly conversations in the pub, eating a biscuit while his girlfriend Katrina (Katherine Kelly) gossips with her friends – don’t suggest he is actually enjoying the social whirl that much. Needless to say Katherine is having an affair, while Alan seems to have a more fulfilling relationship with the female AI robot he road tests.Â
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Comic awkwardness is the ever-present theme here. Whether trying to order a coffee using technology, chatting to young people about accommodation issues or conducting an interview with a crane driver via walkie talkie. Or, in another episode highlight, working on a train and quickly becoming a jobsworth. Partridge is the ultimate fish out of water however much he tries to fit in.
How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge), Fridays, BBC One, 9.30pm and on iPlayer.
Picture: BBC/Baby Cow
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