Big Beacon, page 18
Instead, I needed fresh thought and new ideas. Dustin had made clear that the presenters’ input was crucial and I’d be given licence to generate my own content – as a show that went out five nights a week, the process was described as ‘fucking chaos – we don’t have time to micromanage every piece of script or VT’. And that filled me with enormous confidence.
Buoyed by this, I spoke directly to the show’s producer, Howard. My only demand? A revamp of the way we handled audience correspondence. As a regional DJ, I received letters and emails all the time, but it had been a while since I myself had read them out. Since 2010, I had farmed that job out to a radio sidekick by the name of Simon Denton, and I no longer felt it was something a senior presenter should have to do.
I also felt the audience would benefit from seeing these missives live on screen using state-of-the-art digital technology. The idea had come to me while driving past a branch of the egregious letting agency Foxtons. Most branches of the reviled realtor contained a fifty-inch touchscreen customer interface on which the agents could show property prospecti in a needlessly expensive format.
Obviously, there was no customer benefit to this – the Digiwall was merely a way of burnishing what was a meat-and-potatoes estate-agency job so that the parents of these braying employees could convince themselves the private-school fees they’d shelled out had resulted in a more impressive occupation. And I liked that.
Luckily, the BBC liked it too and agreed to give it a try. The person to take on this new role? They suggested Countryfile’s Sean Fletcher or Scotswoman Storm Huntley who could transfer from a similar role on Jeremy Vine’s Channel 5 abomination. But I had an idea that was better and fresher – or certainly better, anyway. Simon Denton himself.
Barring a brief period as a stand-in when I’d been exiled from North Norfolk Digital, Simon has always been a junior broadcaster, able only to operate as a foil to another, better, safer pair of hands. But I’d seen something in the stammering sidekick that made me think he had the chops required for a beefier role.
Simon is fire warden at North Norfolk Digital – a voluntary role that gives him a salary uplift of £30 per month, which might sound like chicken shit/feed, but was the only thing separating Simon from living at his mum’s. In that role (fire warden, not mummy’s boy!) Simon is required to shepherd dawdling staff members towards the exits and perform a head count outside. But once a year, he also had to give a talk explaining where the fire exits are. I once witnessed such a talk and what he gave was quite simply a masterclass. Simon’s always been very, very funny – anyone who’s heard him on Mid Morning Matters knows he’s a serious talent – but that day I saw a different side of him. An easy way of communicating complicated information, casually referencing the whiteboard behind him while the audience was in no doubt that they had his full attention. He shared life-saving know-how, he used markers on the whiteboard, invited questions and dolloped on more than a touch of his trademark humour. So he had the presenting chops. He also once showed me how to turn motion-smoothing off on my HDTV to create a better cinematic experience, so I knew the tech wouldn’t faze him either. He’d be the perfect fit.
I have to say, the BBC had misgivings, not least because he was yet another white man. But I assured them: no one who sees the pity-inducing expression he wears on his face would say this was a man burdened by privilege. Further, you’d just assume he ticked one of the diversity boxes. He just had to with a face like that. I also remembered what Dustin had said about the pressure the production team was under, and I gambled that they’d relent to my demand if only to get me off the phone. I’m delighted to say I was right. And Simon and I spent the bulk of Sunday practising and refining our segment together. By the time Songs of Praise came on, our repartee was dazzling.
* * *
83 An uncomplicated but robust and reliable semi-automatic rifle which has stood the test of time. Notwithstanding its role in countless thousands of deaths, it remains an engineering marvel.
KWAAAAK
December 2022
Alone in a half-finished lighthouse, I stew in my own grump. Although I’ve hosted breakfast, early- breakfast and mid-morning radio shows, all of which traditionally call for a tone of almost lobotomised glee,84 I’m not always of a sunny disposition. Then again, who is? Even the sun isn’t always sunny – from time to time, it can give off angry solar flares, intense eruptions of electromagnetic radiation that knock out radio waves across entire continents. I don’t see anyone having a pop at the sun for being crabby.
But yes, there are times – and this will shock the many hundreds of you who follow my brand closely – where I can slip into moroseness. My children used to refer to this side of me as Mopey Chops or Sad Dad. Nine times out of ten, I’d snap out of it and laugh it off. But the odd time, I’d kick a beachball at them or tell them to shut it.
As a result, I’ve learned handy techniques over the years that help to combat bad moods and steer me back towards cheerfulness. That might be as simple as destroying boxes of cereal with saws or hammers, or it could be leaving a negative review on TripAdvisor. Sometimes I might sit on my friend’s Peloton eating toast and watching one of the instructors hosting a class. Or I might book a yurt and go and stay in a yurt. If not a yurt, an executive room in a Marriott. There are loads of things you can do.
But this rut is a deep one – and what is worse is the knowledge that everyone in the town knows I’ve had to halt work. The Friends of Abbot’s Cliff, the man in the shop who won’t change a fiver, the sea shanters. When I ran out of shaving foam, I couldn’t face popping to the shop – oh, they would have loved that – so I’ve simply stopped shaving, allowing the follicles beneath the skin to issue their thick rods of hair further out of my face. I begin to drink rum. And not just after 6 p.m., sometimes as early at 5.30 or 5. My Rab Microlight Alpine down jacket snagged on a nail that the builders hadn’t hammered all the way in – who goes on strike mid-nail? – and I burst into tears as tufts of foam bled from the hole, like a cloud was leaking out of it. I binned the jacket entirely and am now forced to wear an old oilskin coat I found on a hired canal barge in Wales.
I am a ball of baleful frustration. I don’t even care that it’s raining. I open the window as wide as it’ll go and lean out so that I can shout up at God himself. ‘Happy now? I’m really trying, I’ve been working my fingers to the bone to make this place a bit nicer, you should be doing this, you lazy sod.’ And then a low blow. ‘And why don’t you shave! You look like someone at a real ale festival.’ And on that I slam the window shut.
I struggle to fill my days. One day I find myself texting a friend who ran speed-awareness courses for the DVLA. Philip and I had met back in the year 2000, when I’d been forced to attend one of his courses. At the start of the session we’d been at loggerheads. I tried telling him I was an innocent man, that I shouldn’t have even be there, that I’d only been speeding because I’d got it into my head that an angry driver was trying to chase me and I was flooring it so I could seek refuge in Keele Services before she could hurt me. He gestured to the rest of the group: ‘Join the club. Everyone here’s got a reason for speeding. You need to look inside you, find the version of you that broke the law and kill him.’ By the end I had totally bought into his teachings, killed Alan the Dangerous Driver, and made a new friend.
Now, desperate for human contact and to kill a bit of time, I plead with him over text to allow me to join one of his sessions. He isn’t having it at first, says it’s more than his job is worth. But eventually he agrees to let me join as long as I gave him five stars on the feedback form afterwards. Deal.
I sit there, in the lighthouse, on a Zoom call with Philip and six idiotic road users. Philip is doing the segment on braking distances, sending shockwaves through the group by showing that a car takes slightly longer to stop that you think it would. Then, Kwaaaak! A noise from outside.
Kwaaaak! There it is again. I look outside. On the rocks at the foot of the lighthouse, a sea gull. It looks directly at me – kwaaaak!
I do my best to ignore it. I just want to enjoy the course without interruption, especially as he’s about to move onto tyre maintenance and the importance of tread.
Kwaaaak! The gull again. If I had a gun, I’d maybe not shoot it but certainly swing the butt of it at the bird, croquet style. Kwaaaak! I swear to God it’s looking at me. What could it want?
The weather is rubbish today. Rain and wind and wave combining in a triple threat of inclemency. It’s then that I notice a wooden forklift pallet has been hurled onto the rocks by a wave. The gull seems to have a leg trapped underneath it.
Not my problem, I think, and return to the course, putting my hand up and answering a question quickly and well. Something about checking your mirrors for motorbikes.
Kwaaaak! This bird will not shut up! Eventually, reluctantly, I excuse myself for a moment and don my coat. Then I open the door and step out into the driving rain. ‘Aah,’ I say quietly, as I always do when I step out into rain.
Turning my head against the wind, I make my way across the crag to where the bird is pinned. Gulls really are awful animals. Big things. Mean faces. I approach it gingerly, knowing that given half a chance it would peck out my eyes, although I might still be thinking of the Hitchcock film.
‘Easy girl,’ I say.
Kwaaaak!
‘Alright, easy boy, then. I dunno,’ I tut.
Slowly, oh so slowly I lift the pallet, which is really heavy and hurts my fingers until the bird is freed.
By now, my hair is pasted to the side of my head, sodden. My eyes are wild, both glinting and squinting. And then, the weirdest thing. Instead of scuttling back inside, I stand tall and … laugh. I laugh at the sea. I laugh and laugh and laugh.
Then, with the wind lashing at me like a tawse, I face out to the ocean, daring another wave to try its luck. ‘Where are you?’ I shout, goading the waters. ‘Where are you? Let’s be having you!’ It sounds pleasingly salty, although I later remember that this is what Delia Smith says at football matches when she’s had a few.
I look back at the lighthouse and see myself reflected in the window. My hair is long and lank. My face grizzled and bestubbled. A grin is smeared across my face, and in oilskin coat and sou’wester hat, I look strangely at home. There’s a timeless quality to me; I could have been one of Shackleton’s men, one of the senior ones, certainly. Maybe this is me. The chap I’ve always meant to be. Alan Partridge, man of the sea.
Now comfortable in these conditions, I amble back to the door, taking my sweet time. Kwaaaak! The gull is still there. It is free, but instead of flying away, it merely cocks its head sexily and looks at me. I smile, dart inside and return with food. I know they like chips because once in Llandudno, a gang of them stole my chips. I don’t have chips so I furnish the hungry gull with the next best thing: barbecue-flavour Pringles, which I arrange into a small pile by the door, like the mounds of rocks you sometimes see up Helvellyn. The bird nods – ‘Thanks, Alan!’ – and begins to eat.
I return to my chair and hear Philip’s voice on the Zoom call: ‘Alan? Just checking you heard that last point?’
‘Yeah, don’t drive fast, bye,’ and I hang up. It’s the first day of the new me.
* * *
84 See Toby Anstis.
THIS TIME
25 February 2019
7 a.m.
‘[Lyrics removed on advice of publisher]85,’ I sang powerfully in my kitchen, ‘[Lyrics removed on advice of publisher]!’
The track? Gary Barlow’s Take That classic ‘Greatest Day’ [which I’m strongly advised not to quote directly but in which the generously hipped wealth enthusiast posits that this day, the one we’re now in, could in fact be the best, or greatest, one of those to have occurred so far]. I’ll leave it for others to decide whether Gary should have gone for a lower key; it might be that he wanted to sound like that.
‘[Lyrics removed on advice of publisher]86!’ I continued.
I was in the kitchen, brewing up a mug, my loyal assistant eating her abundantly margarined scone at the breakfast bar. And yes, today could be the greatest day of our/my life. I’d bought my assistant a new headscarf to celebrate, and even though we were indoors she was wearing it proudly. Me? I was just singing.
‘Stay close to me! Stay close to me!87’ Taking this as a cue, my assistant snuggled against me playfully.
‘Not you!’ I laughed and bumped her off with a quick shoulder barge, then sipped of my drink, letting the song peter out.
‘Mmmmm. This coffee tastes gooooood,’ I purred in the non-specific American accent I often use when feeling fine of a morning. And of this morning I most certainly did feel fine. Because today was B-Day (the ‘B’ being an abbreviation of ‘BBC’), a clever play on the codename given to the Normandy landings, with the only slight downside that it sounded like I was referring to the bathroom device used to sploosh out one’s backside.
‘Mmmmm.’ Another big sip. That really was excellent Kenco. I’d tried to maintain the US accent for the ‘mmmmm’, but it’s quite hard to do an accent for a noise. And while that would have really bothered me on any other day, today I didn’t care. Today I had bigger fish to fry. ‘And ahm gohn fry dem fishies up real good,’ I said, accidentally slipping into the kind of Deep South accent I probably wouldn’t attempt outside the house.
On the kitchen table was laid out a veritable feast. As this was a special day I’d asked my assistant if I could have a special breakfast, and she’d said I could, even though, as my employee, it wasn’t really down to her. I tucked in greedily, my glad mouth making light work of the finest pastries money could buy from Sainsbury’s. Next it was eggs, scrambled, and I like mine slack as hell.
With no need to chew, the warm yellow paste had slipped down an absolute treat. It was almost horribly satisfying. And I deserved every wobbly gobful.
You see, in less than twelve hours, I, Partridge – or me, Alan – would be back on the BBC.
7-10 a.m.
The drive from Norwich to London was uneventful, so I won’t insult you by describing it.88
10.10 a.m.
I reached BBC TV Centre, pulled up to the sentry gate, and waited to be waved through. It had been so long since I’d last been here that it seemed only right for me to look up at the much-loved building and shake my head wistfully for about ten to fifteen seconds. With that done, Kenneth, the friendly sentry guard who really did have an excellent grasp of English, explained to me that the BBC hadn’t been based here for six years and that it was now a luxury apartment block with a high-end gym and a private bar. I thanked Kenneth, expressed my deep desire to one day visit his homeland,89 and got on my way.
11 a.m.
An hour later, I was in reception at Broadcasting House being asked to take a seat and wait for a production runner to come and collect me. You see, no word more accurately describes the process of getting into the BBC than ‘rigmarole’. ‘Faff’ isn’t far off and ‘palaver’ isn’t bad, but ‘rigmarole’ has it just right. Sign in. Show your ID. Have your bag scanned. It’s as if they fear being the subject of a terrorist bomb plot. And indeed they do. Or at least that is the public line. I was later to discover – via an unguarded moment with the head of BBC One as he and I weed side by side at the urinals – that the real reason for such intense security arrangements is to ward off the very real danger of – say it quietly – an ITV spy. Since the death of Cilla Black, the ITV network has fallen into creative stasis, unable to generate any good ideas whatsoever, and it’s an open secret that it has had to resort to espionage to generate new content, passing off agents as ordinary visitors and potentially embedding a mole deep within the organisation – e.g. Tim Davie – with a microfilm camera hidden in a lanyard.
As I took a seat on the reception area’s cheap Chinese chairs, my assistant toddled off to do the BBC tour. Having seen the newsroom, visited the BBC Radio Theatre and posed for photos with a giant Dalek, the highlight for many was the chance to stand in front of the green screen by reception and ‘have a go’ at being a news or weather presenter. Yet what seemed like harmless fun to them was actually deeply insulting to the hard-working professionals who did these jobs.
The insinuation that being a newsreader or weatherperson was simply a matter of turning up and reading from an autocue was profoundly offensive. And though it was also true, I for one stood in solidarity with my brothers and sisters in the newsroom. (Less so with the weather lot, but that was because of what I can only describe as an ongoing Schafernaker Twitter spat.)
‘Hello, you must be Alan.’
It was production runner, Paula. ‘I’m the production runner, Paula.’
‘That’s a nice name.’ This was my go-to compliment when meeting people for the first time.
‘Oh, really? Do you think so?’
Problem was, it worked less well with what one might call the shitter names, such as Paula, when it could sound dangerously sarcastic.
‘Absolutely, my mum was called Paula.’
