Big Beacon, page 22
I look round and notice my assistant has opened the door. ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were y—’
Too late. In, like the angel of death, swoops my trusty gull friend Likeworm. ‘Uh-oh,’ I say with colossal understatement, because Likeworm is about to make things very, very bad indeed.
The first few seconds are fine, as the bird enjoys a few laps of the circumference. But I can sense he is becoming distressed at being confined.
Kwaaaaak! Kwaaaaak!
He begins to zig-zag, his feathered, fingerless arms slapping down on the air like a single mum disciplining her kid’s bottom. Swooping low, he nearly takes my head off. But as I bend the top half of my body back on itself to avoid a coroner’s report that reads ‘death by gull’, I hear a tell-tale smash. The panic-stricken sky beast has flown into one of the windows.
I begin to lurch for the door, the residual fitness from several years of BodyPump with Dale and step aerobics with Debbie allowing me to hurdle a chair and run the remaining steps. In the blink of an eye – and I’m thinking Diane Abbott here, because hers stay closed for ages – I am at the door, and push it wide open, showing Likeworm a clear escape route. But no. In a scene eerily reminiscent of when I was in a car with my assistant and she got stuck on a box junction when the lights turned red, the gull is going absolutely berserk, or ‘birdserk’ – IHGTTSU!108
He begins to defecate. Big, white sludgy dollops across the tablecloth and floor. My assistant screams and tries to cower behind a curtain, pulling it off the rail.
‘No, please,’ I wail. ‘Please don’t do this! Please!’
But Likeworm has not finished emptying himself, not by a long shit. He is in the midst of a carpet-bombing so intense that within seconds nearly every surface has been hit. What I am witnessing is nothing short of a faecal Dresden. Soon I have springed/sprung into action as fast as I had sprinted/sprunt to the door, flailing my fists in a desperate attempt to, and let’s call a spade a spade, twat the bird out of the sky.
‘Eat crap, bird brain!’ But as the gull waste rains down, little do I realise how ironic those words will be. Because at the very moment they come out of my mouth, into my mouth drops some – no, a lot – of birdshit,
As it slips down my throat like a giant oyster, one thought enters my head: This is poison. Then another thought: I am going to die.
* * *
107 Fingers.
108 I have got to try stand-up!
JENNIE GRESHAM
Jennie Fiona Margaret Gresham-Hartley, thirty-nine, is Britain’s best-loved mid-ranking TV presenter. And with good reason! Armed with a winsome smile she practises in the mirror, Jen’s a broadcaster I genuinely admire. If it’s not verboten to say this in the current climate, she’s the thinking man’s thinking woman, and provides not just eye-candy, but ear-candy and even brain-candy too at times. She’s that good.
From day one, it was clear Jennie and I enjoyed a chemistry that sizzled like liver in a hot pan and crackled like a genuine house fire.
Yes, I liked Jennie very much. And, when asked, she reciprocated warmly. ‘I like you too!’ she trilled, patting my upper arm and walking away. I shouted after her: ‘Jennie? Jennie? Jennie. Jennie!’ She turned. I said: ‘In the words of Grease, Jennie, we go together like rama lama lama ka dinga da dinga dong!’ And we both laughed. Me first, followed by her. And while I had to find the clip on YouTube to assure a Malaysian researcher I wasn’t mimicking her language, the good humour that would characterize my and Jennie’s on-air relationship has been firmly established.
It would be the start of a long and pleasant working relationship.
Privately educated and childless, Jennie enjoys being on both TV and Instagram. She always had a gift for presenting. Starting out fronting in-house videos for Lockheed Martin and Pfizer, she was soon snaffled by Bloomberg TV and later the BBC News channel, where she broke stories such as the Greek bailout, Prince William’s second child and a capsized ferry. But there’s much more to this news hound than that!
A keen tennis player and childless, she likes nothing more than catching up on the soaps, reading the Guardian newspaper or shopping for the latest iPads in her white Tesla. She’s modern, sassy and wants it all!
Yes, Jennie enjoys tennis tremendously, and while I’ve never seen her play, it’s not hard to imagine her as a rather handy female player, one who perhaps struggles to serve overarm but is a willing runner, scampering around the court like a young gazelle, a pleated white skirt bouncing and wafting in time with her legs.
From the start I took on a kind of mentor role, bringing my experience and know-how to bear on how together we could shape her career. It was just her bloody luck – oh, Jennie! – that she was caught in the no woman’s land between two different eras of telly presenter. On the one hand, she was marginally too young to be grouped among the hairspray-and-teeth voice-of-the-Establishment ladies – Fiona Bruce, Katie Derham, Natasha Kaplinsky. But, heartbreakingly, she was a full age-group above the new wave – Stacey Dooley, Lauren Layfield, Storm Huntley – and no amount of being on Snapchat was going to change that. It’s for that reason that we needed to manage her choices veeeeeery, very carefully.
From day one, I wanted to cultivate a friendship with her – partly because being a friend is something I happen to be good at (can provide testimonials if needed) and partly because I felt it would bring a tangible authenticity to our on-screen interactions. Get it right and viewers start to fixate on what they see blossoming before their eyes. A little glance here, a touch on the arm there, a wry smile at a private joke, a casually introduced pet name, even – could be as simple as Jen or as intriguing as Punky or Buggalugs. I suggested we could even move on to a will-they-won’t-they dynamic after a few months, but Jennie didn’t think that would fly. And I agreed with her.
One of the best ways to befriend a woman is to hang around her when she’s upset. As luck would have it, the early weeks of our relationship were characterised by Jennie grieving the death of erstwhile colleague John. Ever the good guy, I stepped into the role of protector-in-chief, buzzing about and saying things like ‘don’t crowd Jennie’, ‘don’t look at Jennie’ or ‘get Jennie a tissue’.
And I know that meant the world to her. Well, it would.
But doing the off-camera legwork needed to become friends proved difficult. We were just too bloody busy. I liked to unwind of an evening or attend a pub quiz. Jennie enjoyed dining at a private members club or hosting corporate awards for money. And on the occasions when she had agreed to come round for a spag bol followed by giggles in front of the telly, something would always come up and the Italian delicacy would end up slopped into the bin. Muggins here would be in front of Love Island eating garlic bread and ketchup for one!
Without these out-of-work get-togethers, our relationship’s upward trajectory was built on shaky foundations. Ours was a precarious kinship; without a shared history or a shared Bolognese to look back on, we could easily be blown off course by professional niggles.
And so it proved. What was the turning point? Hard to say. I do remember we had sharp words over Jennie’s poppy schedule that autumn. She started to wear one at the end of September, a full six weeks before Remembering Sunday, which I considered to be almost sarcastically early. I told her this was cynical and instructed her to take it off. She looked at me quizzically and laughed.
I said to her, ‘There’s a well-accepted timetable to the sporting of poppies: it goes, second Saturday in October for a cheap paper one; a week before Halloween, you can upgrade to a bigger, more flamboyant (no sequins, please) one; a larger plastic poppy can be fixed to the grill of your car from 6 November, and you can project silhouettes of the fallen onto the external walls of your home no earlier than the 10th.’
She said, ‘You’re only annoyed because I got in there first,’ and yes, there was an element of that – her honouring the war dead night after night while I sit next to her, unable to follow suit for fear of appearing a copycat, and looking instead like a left-wing environmental agitator (Chris Packham).
But hand on heart, that wasn’t what caused our relationship to fray. That came later, shortly before Christmas. It’s a moment I have agonised long and hard about including in this book. In the end, I have decided, for personal reasons, that I will include it.
I’d been sent some homemade aftershave by a viewer – it was a Christmas fragrance called Cracker that supposedly had notes of frankincense, brandy, citrus, mulberry and Quality Street. Alone in a corridor after a show, I invited Jennie to smell it, and she stepped towards me so she could sniff my neck. And then …?
Then … there was a moment. Yes, a very definite moment. Our faces were close, in that position where the side of my nose is adjacent to the side of hers. There was something electric between us. And I’m almost certain she leant in for something more.
‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘No, Jennie. No.’
She frowned and walked away. I leaned back against the wall, blowing my cheeks out so that they resembled two big balloons. Sometimes you have to be professional and do the right thing. She’s a mixed-up kid, I thought. I’ve all the time in the world for Jen, but I also happen to believe some things matter more. I knew then and there something had fractured. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to scoop her up, pop her in a cab and take her to a nearby hotel to make sweet love at her. But I couldn’t betray the professional code I have lived my entire life by.
As I say, I’m almost completely certain that she leant in for a kiss. And while you can never be sure about these things, I’m 99.9999 per cent confident it happened and have retained the 0.0001 per cent possibility I’m wrong not to give me wiggle room in the event of a legal challenge, but purely because, as I say, one can never be 100 per cent sure about these things.
Me, I didn’t think much more of it. It had only been a fleeting moment, I reasoned, and my aroma had been very powerful. But looking back, I do think you can trace the beginning of the end to that day in the corridor.
People say, ‘Did you find Jennie attractive?’ It always makes me smile. I simply don’t look at co-workers in that way – and that’s to say nothing of the twenty-year109 age difference between us! The thought of sullying a professional relationship in pursuit of base gratification, like a dog or fitness instructor, actually makes me laugh out loud. So, in answer to the question, no, of course I’m not in love with her nor have I ever been.
But things began to unravel after that day. We were never again the Alan ’n’ Jen that the viewers had taken to their hearts. Might be that she was hurting. Might be that she was hurting real bad. Or, as I say, the whole kiss thing might just have been my imagination entirely. But she hardened.
Suddenly, she took less of an interest in the content of the show. I’d come to her dressing room with notes on the script before it was fed into the autocue – ‘I think you should say “still to come” instead of “coming up”’ or ‘Can we say “Hello!” in unison and then giggle?’ – and instead of engaging with the suggestion, she’d say ‘yeah, fine’ without even looking up from her phone. And that was hurtful. I told Howard on her but he advised me not to tell tales – I wonder if he’d have said the same to Harvey Weinstein’s victims, or to the people of Ukraine when Russian troops were massing at the border. Just a thought!
In time, I’d come to realise the reason for her distractedness. Jennie was developing ‘outside interests’, a common failing among younger presenters. She was working on a range of business interests, most notably a line of frocks for the fashion catalogue Very, plus a cosmetic range aimed at the school-gates market, mums who haven’t quite given up and would like to reduce visible eye bags if at all possible.
Alongside this, she had embarked on an unwise dalliance with then-married TV presenter Sam Chatwin, who had attended a much more prestigious private school than she had and was able therefore to tap into the inferiority complex she had carried with her since being a day boarder in an otherwise full-boarding school. I have nothing against Sam. He’s not perfect – like many posh men, his immense privilege means he sees nothing wrong with continually playing with his nose, and he clearly regards marital vows as beneath him – but their relationship was ill-advised, ending shortly after it began but still managing to upset the full trifecta of: 1) their friendship, 2) his marriage and 3) any relationship he might have had with his kids. Way to go, guys.
Somehow, she still managed to find the time to create and present her own podcast Listen Love with Jennie Gresham, in which she has a chinwag and a cuppa (this is from the press release!) with free-thinkers and wisdom-dispensers from Malala to Jake Humphrey.
Kindly, I took an interest and even agreed to be a guest myself some week – such that one afternoon I sat with her in her This Time dressing room, shooting the shit and detailing my outlook on life, expounding on the blueprint I’d followed in order to meet my objectives (get back on TV), the importance of lists, as well as sharing some of my most intimate hopes and fears. After an hour and a half of chat (us), laughter (me) and tears (me), I sat back and asked when it was likely to air.
‘When is what likely to air?’
‘The podcast,’ I said.
Her brow crinkled in amusement. ‘Sorry, did you think we were recording a podcast?’
My mouth guppied open and closed. Eventually, the word ‘yes’ dolloped out of it. Well, the thrice-engaged starlet roared with laughter.
Turned out the microphone I thought I’d been speaking into was just a make-up sponge, and she seemed to find that soooooo amusing. ‘That’s hilarious. God, I have to tell Holly [Willoughby] that,’ she cackled.
‘Why?’ I said.
‘Why is it hilarious?’ she asked.
‘No, why have you got to tell Holly [Willoughby]?’
She shrugged and went on to assure me that she wouldn’t tell Holly Willoughby, an assurance that wasn’t worth shit because I later learned she did tell Holly Willoughby.
Still, as the saying goes, from poor behaviour great results can spring. Because it inspired me to try my own hand at podcasting.
‘Aaaaaaalan Paaaaartridge, from the oasthouse! Aaaaaaalan Paaaaartridge, from the oasthouse! From the oasthouse! With Alan Partridge! From the oasthouse. With Alan Partridge.’
It’s a theme tune that will be familiar to more than four thousand podcast enthusiasts across the English-understanding world. In fact, after Going for Gold and Brush Strokes, ‘Alan Partridge: From the Oasthouse (We’re Having a Barndance) (Mumford mix)’ is one of Britain best-loved theme songs.
It’s 2020, and I, Alan Partridge, have created my own podcast.
The idea had come to me while sitting in the cubicle of a unisex toilet. A woman washing her hands by the basins was talking on the phone, seemingly unaware that anyone else was in the bathroom. As a result, I was treated to an incredibly intimate, unfiltered confessional in which she divulged all manner of upsetting, highly personal matters. The woman – Debbie something – needn’t fear: I shan’t be spilling any secrets here, although her fiancé Stuart or Stewart might want to put his back into it when he’s trying to satisfy her.
That, I thought. That is what my podcast should be like.
I had toyed with the idea of podcasting for some time but didn’t want to incur production costs until I was sure it could be monetised. But what if I could dispense with the hiring of a studio and frame the format as an intimate, behind-the-scenes piece of content which I could knock together in my own house?
That day, From the Oasthouse: The Alan Partridge Podcast was born. In it, I would invite listeners into my home (not literally) to share in the most intimate moments of my superb life. People were shocked, of course they were. I’d always been a famously private man, yet here I was welcoming listeners into my home and audibly de-shrouding myself before them; letting the dressing gown of my life fall to the floor and saying simply, ‘This is all of me.’
Week after week after week, in each generously durated episode, I would siphon off some of my choicest thoughts, from wit to wisdom, from musings to moanings, and everything in between.
Listeners got to hear about my home life, my work life, my love life and the pond life who criticise me online.
To this day, people say, what’s From the Oasthouse like? Who are you inspired by? Well, I’m inspired not so much by other podcasts, as I tend not to listen to those, but by the excellence we see all around us: a dog leaping to catching a stick, a ballerina doing brilliant ballet, a forklift truck driver steering one-handed while smoking. And I think that comes over.
Has it been a success? Yes, it has been a very good success.
By 2021, Jennie and I were two of the most successful podcasters in the UK – her by metrics such as numbers, me by metrics such as ‘is it any good?’.
But there was tension on the set of This Time. Jennie had begun to grow distant. Whether that was because her business interests were struggling – one Amazon reviewer of her make-up range said the mascara felt like it was made of chip fat and Crayola – or some other reason, I don’t know.
But I was keen to build bridges. I suggested we pool our talents. ‘Why don’t we do a joint podcast?’ I said.
‘Oh, I don’t think I’d have time,’ she chirped. ‘I already have one to be getting on with.’
‘So do I!’ I laughed. ‘I mean instead of those. We wind our own ones down and do something together. Alan and Jennie’s Pizza Party, or Alan and Jennie’s Coffee Morning …’
‘Ha, no, no …’ she giggled.
‘Or Great Tram Journeys with Alan and Jennie? Or Sex Talk with Alan and Jennie?’
‘No, Alan.’
‘Jennie and Alan, then. Any of those but “with Jennie and Alan”.’
Once again, she mysteriously put the phone to her ear as if someone had called. ‘Jennie Gresham.’ And off she strolled.
And that was that. As she walked away, I knew she’d gone. I’d bloody lost her. Any idea that we were teammates or partners or allies or buddies or chums or homies was well and truly gone.
