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CHRISTMAS SPECIALS
Knowing Me, Knowing Yule ... with Alan Partridge
Friday 29/12/95, BBC2
by Graham Kibble-White
December 2000
 

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"What is Christmas? It's a little robin red-breast, petrified by the wind. It's an orphan in a blanket being helped into a shed. It's a snowman whose nose-carrot has been stolen and subsequently eaten by a gypsy thief."

Coming "live" from a studio mock-up of Alan Partridge's home in Norwich Knowing Me, Knowing Yule ... with Alan Partridge saw out the first incarnation of Steve Coogan's grim Titchmarsh/Bough/Wogan/Bates/Coleman/Dineage concoction. Aside from providing us with some top-drawer humour, the business of this Christmas Special was to pack-up that version of Partridge as a mainstream chat show host; a success in his own (limited) terms. By the end of the programme, Alan Patridge's world would be irrevocably changed, and the character would be posited rather differently upon his eventual return.

This programme, then, saw out Partridge as demonic, powerful host. The head of a three-car family (one a runaround for his daughter Denise), the owner of a house stuffed to the brim with World of Leather furnishings and the director of his own functioning production company (Pear Tree Productions) this was the essentially unchanged Alan Partridge we'd followed since On the Hour on Radio 4. Yet, the conclusion of this Christmas Special saw him kicked out of mainstream telly, deserted by his wife and heading fast towards some sort of mental breakdown ... with his hand rammed up the jacksy of a dead fowl, to boot.

Patently KMKYWAP (to use the accepted abbreviation) is in part about the theatre of cruelty. And the other side of that coin is, of course, the theatre of embarrassment. The character of Alan Partridge turns tricks in both here, with Coogan allowing his creation to be both bully and victim. Thus, after punching a paraplegic ex-golfer in the face, Partridge is quickly cowered to begging "please don't take my chat away from me!" when he realises his hopes for a second series of his chat show are in serious jeopardy. Bully yes, but victim only to his own stupidity and cruelty.

Christmas Specials, as we've come to learn, rarely represent the best of the programme and indeed there are sections of Yule that feel a little like the soulnessness of a greatest hits package. Another way is found to shoe-horn in the "not literally, that would be hideous" gag, yet there's a enough new material here to make the programme really special in its own right. Alan's amble around Norwich is hilarious, and his inability to handle the concept that the aforementioned paraplegic has a sex-life hints at a discomfiture with disability akin to The League of Gentlemen's Mr Foot character. Of course, the other Partridgeon foibles are here too; a morbid obsession with violence (Partridge's questions dwelling lovingly on the electrocution of one of his guests), hints of racism ("What is it you call them?" asks Alan's driver referring to an Asian street party, "Ramadan-a-dingdongs?") and a vague homoerotic curiosity (referring to a cross-dressing chef pointedly as a "TV chef" and later insisting "I am not aroused!" when s/he makes a light double entendre to the contrary) are gently sketched in. There's enough here to prove that Alan Partridge is probably the most detailed, multi-faceted comedy character on TV.

Curiously within Yule there is some attention played to issues of continuity, and thus members of Alan's family are name-dropped; consistent with previous references to them. Similarly various new aspects of Alan's world are introduced here which would either be referenced, or developed further when he returned to our screens in the succeeding I'm Alan Partridge two years later. Most notable, is the introduction of Tony Hayers, Chief Commissioning Editor at the BBC and a figure who would be demonised throughout that succeeding series. His presence here, though, simply ensures that Alan gets himself sufficiently agitated to hoist himself by his own petard. It's interesting that normally an attention to continuity is the antithesis of comedy, normally it's a dry business, but here it just adds more depth to our understanding of Alan's life and our appreciation of the humour. It's quite a unique facet of the comedy though, with only The League of Gentlemen (them again) taking steps to remain as consistent to their own fiction as Coogan (and one of them's a Doctor Who fan anyway, which explains a lot).

"The show is a success, I believe that" says Alan, and he's pretty much right. Perhaps the only real drawback in the programme is that "TV Chef" Fanny Thomas is played just a little too much this side of caricature by Kevin Eldon. There's really only room for the one grotesque on this show and Eldon's contributions throw things a little off balance. Despite that, however, Knowing Me, Knowing Yule ... with Alan Partridge is a rare jewel of a comedy with an unseasonable bite. Coogan's next project would shy clear of Alan Partridge, but The Tony Ferrino Phenomenon would prove to be a comparative disappointment (although still fairly enjoyable). Upon finally returning to the character, Coogan would go on to surpass the excellent work documented here, formatting Alan Partridge now as a sitcom character who had become quite wretched, powerless and most tragically of all, self-aware enough to realise it.

And on that bombshell ...