Alan Partridge: Nomad

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And I’m fine with that, not least because these photographs, taken at the start of each financial year, are purely for my own records. Unfortunately, Alan gets far too distracted with the various celebrities that he meets along the way. When Partridge first appeared in On The Hour in 1991, he was a sort of generic parody of sports presenters, mashed increasingly with a nightmarish caricature of Richard Madeley.

For the skies are yours now and you are free, free to soar and swoop, to glide and gambol across the very face of heaven, until you touch down, weary yet elegant in a land far, far away’. The great thing is you can just visualise Alan as he walks in the footsteps of his father to Dungeness Nuclear Power Station.Alan finds evidence that his father had an interview at the nuclear power station but never made it to the interview. And then, almost instinctively, I find myself standing bolt upright, saluting the winged beast above me and yelling up to it at the top of my voice, ‘Good luck, large friend.

For instance, if you live in the South East of England the chances are you’ve ridden Gatwick’s “state-of-the-art” monorail system and you’ll know that it’s anything but. Passenger km’s are calculated by multiplying passenger numbers by the distance between the two airports in question, and for reasons which will become obvious if you give the problem some thought, they are a far more important metric in the aviation industry than pure passenger numbers). Now this is an uncomfortable thing to discuss, but I run towards discomfort like a man who has strapped truth explosives to his body and made his peace with god". Also, now that the Elizabeth Line is fully operational, Heathrow has further extended its natural lead over Gatwick in the game of public transportation links.Similarly, not being able to spell Stansted, or Stanstead, or Standstead or Standsted is a recurring problem in my life, and a failing that I wasn’t aware other people also suffered from.

Anyway, my point is simply that Heathrow is just a much more exciting piece of kit than Gatwick and Alan needs to get this simple fact through his head and stop spreading his malign anti-Heathrow propaganda. There are still some funny bits, and it wasn't awful, but maybe it is getting near time for both Alan, and the character of Alan, to enjoy a well-deserved retirement.The running joke of Alan running into celebrities was a bit irritating too, is it really likely to happen randomly so often, and what was the purpose of making minor celebrities most of us have forgotten into such grotesques?

Diarising his ramble in the form of a 'journey journal', Alan details the people and places he encounters, ruminates on matters large and small and, on a final leg fraught with danger, becomes - not a man (because he was one to start off with) - but a better, more inspiring example of a man. The satire is scrappy too, half the time Alan's views are being mocked, while the other times Alan seems to be being used as a mouthpiece for the authors' more right-on metropolitan views. Early on in the book Partridge admits to padding the word count with meaningless filler, and it's depressing to realise that it's not merely a gag but the literal truth.Also, he seems to have a ridiculous amount of money to spend for a local radio DJ whose real career ended about 20 years ago. Moreover, the character's behaviour is now so erratic that it seems unlikely he wouldn't have been sectioned. We’re in Gravesend so it’s likely to be more Morrisons than Waitrose, but (and this is lovely writing) beggars literally can’t be choosers.