After stadium tour success, the delusional broadcaster is back where he belongs: self-funding a series about the nation’s mental health. As comedy goes, it couldn’t be more pleasurable

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ike anyone who has grown up in the shadow of Alan Partridge’s three-decade dominion over British comedy, I want only the very best for Norwich’s most relentless broadcaster. By which I mean the absolute worst. For me, Partridge is at his finest when he’s scrabbling around the media’s outer fringes, rebranding past humiliations as glories and furiously name-dropping 1980s television personalities to the nonplussed acquaintances he genuinely believes to be his closest friends.

Sadly, Alan has been riding (relatively) high in recent years. In 2022, Steve Coogan’s creation – now co-written by Rob and Neil Gibbons – embarked on a UK arena tour as a motivational speaker, imparting dubious advice to tens of thousands of adoring fans. Before that, he landed the job of a lifetime: a presenting gig on the BBC’s daily tea-time magazine show This Time. Obviously, he was disastrous – but was still invited to return for a second series.

So it brings me great pleasure to report that Alan is finally back where he belongs: at rock bottom. In How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge) – a self-produced, self-directed and largely self-funded series about the nation’s mental health – we are reunited with the presenter four years after the on-air meltdown that ended his BBC career. Since then, he’s pivoted (involuntarily) to the corporate sphere. He spent time in Saudi Arabia, shilling camel milk products with the requisite servility, and still presents Gulf Digital’s breakfast show from “downtown Jeddah” (AKA a Norwich business park) on an ad hoc basis. He hosts events for a pig feed manufacturer. He leads focus groups. He commentates on school sports days (“all-these-boys-racing-with-each-other-but-they’ve-already-won-the-race-of-life-by-going-to-a-fee-paying-school”). He lends his dulcet tones to everything from supermarket vans to the lift at Norwich library.