Poorly conceived, badly-written narrative vehicle for Steve Coogan’s once-great creation.
1.
I’m Alan Partridge looked like it had been pre-recorded and played to an audience on monitors. In fact, most of the action was performed live in front of a studio audience, but the set was so large and extensive that most of it was either invisible to the audience or played in via a feed from another studio. This meant that the actors had difficulty hearing the audience’s response, and laughter-surfing was not an option. Steve Coogan, who stayed in character throughout (as he did during the Knowing Me Knowing You recordings) occasionally conversed with the audience - during the recording for ‘Watership Alan’ (17/11/97), he asked a shy Chris Morris if he had anything to say to them; Morris replied ‘Not really, no’ and sloped off.
> Lies, All lies…
2.
The scene in ‘Basic Alan’ (24/11/97) with Alan and Lynn (Felicity Montagu) in a parked car was originally a long, improvised sequence totalling about thirty minutes of material. This couldn’t be accommodated structurally, and the whole scene was cut to about one minute and simply involved a scripted joke about Lynn injuring Alan with a hand-held fan. Watching the rushes one night, Peter Baynham and other members of the crew were convinced that the scene was broadcastable as a show in its own right. The material has, however, never surfaced, and it was notable by its absence on the ‘Add-On Alan 1 & 2’ out-take selections on the 1998 BBC videos.
3.
An early rehearsal script of the final episode (‘Towering Alan’, 8/12/97) contains many passages of cut dialogue. Although the script was re-written extensively since, most of the cut sections were recorded, and the edits are very noticeable. The last few pages are missing, with a note promising ‘more to come’.
The cut scenes were as follows:
(a) Alan and the receptionist Sophy (Sally Phillips) in the hotel room, following the line about Lynn ‘swearing like a docker’:
SOPHY What are those?
ALAN They’re my year-planners. I’ve kept all of the them right back to the year 1986.
SOPHY What, for sentimental reasons?
ALAN Yes, basically. You can ask me any date from 1986, and I can tell you what I was doing.
SOPHY Oh. (Starts to leave)
ALAN Go on, ask me a date.
SOPHY OK. What were you doing on 18th March 1990?
ALAN I was doing nothing that night. See.
SOPHY What’s those three weeks with ‘Bill Oddie’ written over them?
ALAN They were three of the most wasted weeks of my life. I got nothing out of it.
(b) Alan returning from the country show and conversing with Susan (Barbara Durkin):
SUSAN
How was the country show?
ALAN
It went terribly badly. That man from The Archers had a great time judging the tractor competition. He left by helicopter. How people haven’t twigged by now, I don’t know. I had to judge vegetables. I wish I was judging you.
SUSAN
I’m not a vegetable, Alan.
ALAN
Oh no. Or, if you were, you’d be a lovely swede. I’d chop you up and put you in a casserole. A succulent Susan swede casserole marinated in your own bathwater. Aaaagh.
SUSAN
I have a shower, Alan.
ALAN
Oh. (Does Psycho thing) No, I would never chop you up...awful thought. I mean, I’d have to be very angry before I did that. I’d have to get a Daily Express sent to my room instead of a Daily Mail three days on the trot to make me that angry. It has happened to me twice in a row, so you’re on your final warning, and if it happens again I’m off down to Do It All for a chainsaw. (Does chainsaw noise)
SUSAN
Alan, your PA’s here.
ALAN
Sorry about that. But I do want a Daily Mail. That was the point I was trying to make.
[NOTE: This clip was included in ‘Add-On Alan 2’, but cut off after ‘marinated in your own bathwater’ and omitted the section about the man from The Archers. Said character is referred to later in Chris Feather’s office, with Alan claiming he accused him of being a drug dealer; this section was also cut.]
(c) A dialogue at the funeral between Alan and Chris Feather (Constantine Gregory):
CHRIS
I mean, I wish it didn’t have to happen this way, it’s so...
ALAN
Oh, come on.
CHRIS No, it’s a tragedy - the man was only...
ALAN
When you found out that Hayers was dead you must have been laughing like a big nutter.
CHRIS
Not at all, it was tragic.
ALAN
Come on...
CHRIS
No, Alan - we had our differences, but ultimately he was a loyal, hardworking colleague.
ALAN
Bugger off! (Alan very briefly worried that’s he’s said the wrong thing)
CHRIS
(Pause) Yeah, he was a bit of a wanker.
(d) A scene in the lobby between Alan and Michael (Simon Greenall), following the purchase of the Bang and Olufson stereo:
MICHAEL
There you go, Mr Partridge. Here’s the rest of your hi-fi.
ALAN
Thanks, Michael. I was just talking to Susan about time travel.
MICHAEL
Oh yes?
ALAN
You know, wouldn’t it be incredible to go back to Camelot and show King Arthur a Psion Organiser. It’d blow his mind.
MICHAEL
Or imagine, just before the Battle Of Hastings, going up to King Alfred and handing him the keys to a Range Rover. The arrows would just bounce right off a laminated windscreen.
ALAN
Yes, and it would completely alter the Bayou Tapestry because there’d be an embroidered Range Rover. And no one would now how it got there.
MICHAEL
Except us.
ALAN
I’m going to miss these chats.
(e) A brief exchange, following Alan’s chat with Ben (Simon Pegg) about Kurt Cobain:
BEN
(Sings) ‘Here we are now, entertain us...here we are now, entertain us...’
ALAN
(Sings) ‘The boys to entertain you...’ Did Kurt Cobain write songs for Don Estelle? I suppose the thing about pop music is you have to get the guitars right. After that, all the other instruments take care of themselves.
[NOTE: The above exchange did not make it to the recording - the earlier Cobain dialogue is cut short by the arrival of Mike Sampson (Kevin Eldon) and this is shot as one take.]
(f) The beginning of the scene in Chris Feather’s office:
ALAN
Sack half of this lot for a start.
CHRIS
Take your pick.
ALAN
Really? Right. Well, you can begin by striking out anyone from Oxbridge. No, there’d be a bloodbath. You’d just be left with the man on the door.
CHRIS
No, he went to Oxford.
ALAN
Is that a joke?
CHRIS
Yes.
[NOTE: The meeting continued with Alan announcing ‘Hands off cocks - on with socks!’ much to Chris’ bemusement (‘It’s an old army expression - I was trying to be bawdy...’). When Chris dies, there are revelations that Chris and Lynn once had an affair. ‘He gave me an Easter egg and inside was a cheque for £200 and a note saying ‘I love you’, confesses Lynn. ‘He was weird,’ replies Alan, peering at the corpse.]
(g) Other brief cuts included Alan and Lynn debating over how many leaves the houseplant in their office has (‘It’s 35 - one fell off yesterday...’), Alan leaving a message on Tony Hayer’s pager (‘Re Hayers death, open brackets, tragic, close brackets, deep symp and cond. On this v. sad day, RIP, AP...’), and a dream sequence noted simply as ‘Alan and coffin’ (included in ‘Add-On Alan 2’). Certain lines (e.g., Susan’s ‘If you’ll excuse me, Alan - I have to leave the desk unattended’) were left blank to be filled in later - perhaps by the actors themselves - and are noted in the script simply by a long line of question marks.
3.
The Wings track ‘Jet’ (played when Partridge jumps around his bedroom at the close of the first episode) was cut from the CD/cassette release but retained for the video. This suggests it was cut for incomprehensibility rather than PRS reasons. Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ was definitely a legal problem, however, and was cut from both the audio and video incarnations.
[Note: TalkBack are no fools, and presumably knew they would encounter difficulty with copyrighted music. Thus, Partridge always faded the music completely before speaking. They would also have known there’d be no problem with Wings’ ‘Jet’ as they’d managed to get it cleared once before for the second video of The Day Today.]
4.
There is an ugly edit just before Partridge tells Dave Clifton (Phil Cornwell) to ‘fuck off’ in the fourth episode, suggesting that further profanities were removed. Clifton’s ‘I’m shocked, Alan’ response also seems to come in too early; although since the dialogue in the series is quite badly paced anyway, this was probably part of the script itself.
[NOTE: ‘Fuck off’ was broadcast, unbleeped, on the BBC1 repeat.]
