�鶹��

Available for over a year

Good morning. I was overjoyed to see Alan Partridge on �鶹��1 last night, back to doing what he’s famous for: presenting television quite badly. Steve Coogan’s comic character first hosted a TV chat show – Knowing Me Knowing You – in 1994, when I was 12 years old. Alan lost the job after he accidentally shot a man live on air, and then compounded his disgrace by punching the chief commissioning editor with a wheel of cheese. Partridge is a satire of middle-class inadequacy, but for many of us middle-class inadequates, he’s become something of a hero – especially for his one-man campaign against “the pedestrianisation of Norwich City Centre”. That banal yet beautiful turn of phrase goes to the heart of great comic writing: it’s both daft and poetic, and there are people who can recite whole scripts of Alan Partridge as if they’d memorised Shakespeare. I’m one of them. I find myself doing it unconsciously. The phrase “monkey tennis” - which was a TV idea that Alan pitched shortly before the incident with the cheese – has become shorthand in the creative industry for running out of ideas. My newspaper editor will ask: “Tim, have you any thoughts for tomorrow’s feature section?” And I’ll reply: “Monkey tennis?” If the editor laughs, you’ve got a Partridge fan – and this is the social utility of fine writing, the creation of a common language, which is arguably one of the ambitions of art. In the book of Genesis, human beings start out as having a common tongue, but we get too big for our boots and God confuses our language and scatters us across the Earth. But believers would also say that humankind is meant to be redeemed and brought together by language – God is described as “the word” – and, of course, words are the carriers of ideas and the shapers of identity. In daily conversation, language is how we consciously and unconsciously recognise friends and allies. Fans of the same TV shows do it; minorities do it; religious people, like me, do it a lot. Our ears are attuned to a phrase or a word that gives you something to latch on to, something that says “this person is like me. What a relief. We’re going to get on.” This is powerful for those of us who are shy and never quite certain what to say. I guess this awkwardness is one reason why I've always felt as much sympathy as amusement at Mr Partridge. Knowing me Tim Stanley, knowing you Alan Partridge, A-ha.