Alan Par­tridge: Alpha Papa

The open­ing cred­it sequence of Alan Par­tridge: Alpha Papa finds our hero (Steve Coogan) in all his out­mod­ed provin­cial glo­ry. String-backed dri­ving-gloves grip the wal­nut-effect steer­ing wheel of his spon­sored mid-range saloon car (‘Alan Par­tridge Dri­ves This Kia’). Slick, over­pro­duced dri­ve-time clas­sic ​‘Cud­dly Toy’ by Roach­ford blasts from the sub-woofers and Alan pro­ceeds to mime, drum-fill and bass-slap his way around the roads of his beloved Nor­folk. His hard-rock­ing ecsta­sy is inter­rupt­ed only long enough to berate a fel­low dri­ver for hav­ing their fog-lights on unnec­es­sar­i­ly, before anoth­er rap­tur­ous cho­rus hooks him back into the groove.

It’s an ini­tial­ly hilar­i­ous sequence that is not only res­olute­ly in-keep­ing with Alan’s own core Par­trid­gian val­ues but also gives casu­al view­ers all the char­ac­ter infor­ma­tion they need. Yet as the scene stretch­es on and on, it can’t help become a lit­tle tedious. Filmed entire­ly on a locked-off, dash­board-mount­ed cam­era, it also soon seems a tri­fle thin, blind­ly trust­ing that our love for the char­ac­ter will dis­tract us from the pauci­ty of direc­to­r­i­al inven­tion or com­ic inge­nu­ity on gen­er­al show. It pains to say it, but the rest of the film con­forms to this basic pat­tern: sub­lime moments of char­ac­ter com­e­dy that sub­se­quent­ly have the spark steadi­ly pum­melled out of them.

That isn’t to say that Alpha Papa is any­thing but an extreme­ly fun­ny 90 min­utes. The Par­tidgisms come thick and fast, and are every bit as quotable as any­thing from Alan’s long and esteemed radio and TV career, but despite AP being firm­ly built around Coogan, Alan can tend to get a lit­tle lost in his own movie.

To clar­i­fy: North Nor­folk Dig­i­tal Radio, home of for­mer TV super­star Alan Par­tridge is in the midst of a takeover by the cor­po­rate thugs of Goredale Media. When fel­low DJ Pat Far­rell (Colm Meaney) is sac­ri­ficed to the gods of pro­gram­ming, he goes more than a lit­tle off the rails, comes all the way back armed with a shoot­er and takes the radio sta­tion staff hostage. It is time for a Par­tridge to rise…

And rise he does, but he nev­er quite escapes the stodge of the siege plot that takes up the main body of the film. Rea­son­ing, per­haps, that the mean­ing­less pedantry and self-defeat­ing one-upman­ship that swirl with­in Alan’s heart are not enough to build a movie around (note: they are), the film­mak­ers have instead reached for an off-the-peg, bud­get-friend­ly tem­plate with which to frame the humour. It’s an uncom­fort­able fit.

The siege genre is hard­ly a one that allows for the kind of mean­der­ing, dis­cur­sive, every­day hap­pen­stance — every­day for AP that is — that might, for instance, see a morn­ing meet­ing with some Irish TV execs morph into an after­noon spent run­ning across fields pur­sued by a half-naked, wor­ry­ing­ly tat­tooed super­fan. The nar­ra­tive rigid­i­ty (oh, how Alan would sure­ly love that term) sim­ply won’t bend that far. Instead Coogan and com­pa­ny have to scale back the whim­sy in order to allow room for the creaky dynam­ics of the plot to work them­selves out

The sec­tions that book­end the siege are far more free-flow­ing and there­fore more suc­cess­ful, espe­cial­ly the ear­ly scenes which doc­u­ment Alan’s celebrity/​financial spi­ral via some deli­cious details. Gone, seem­ing­ly, is Alan’s self-designed fol­ly Clas­sic House, trad­ed in for a mod­est detached estate-house com­plete with Busi­ness Cen­tre (read: a con­vert­ed shed) done out as thrust­ing mod­ern office (read: dec­o­rat­ed with oil paint­ings of Spit­fires). That Alan has been reduced to voic­ing radio ads for a local dis­count butch­er — ​“Yesterday’s meat at tomorrow’s prices!” — is equal­ly telling.

Fans of Alan’s pre­vi­ous out­put will also be pleased to see such famil­iar faces as Lynn, Michael and Side­kick Simon. Even Alan’s on-air neme­sis, phys­i­cal­ly fail­ing alco­holic shock-jock Dave Clifton, gets a look in, but none of them are giv­en any­thing espe­cial­ly fun­ny or mean­ing­ful to do. Instead they play mut­ed sec­ond fid­dles to Alan, who him­self takes a back seat to the restric­tive demands of the rather worka­day plot to which — some­what iron­i­cal­ly — his film has been held hostage.