Alan Partridge is returning to TV screens next month with new chat show

The six-part series will feature an episode about #MeToo

Steve Coogan has revealed when Alan Partridge will return to television screens.

The character will act as the temporary co-host of This Time, a fictional evening weekday magazine show that sounds remarkably like The One Show, marking Partridge’s “first return to live television since his 90s chat show Knowing Me, Knowing You was cancelled after a guest was fatally shot on air.”

Speaking to Marc Maron ion his WTF podcast, Coogan confirmed that the show will debut on the BBC in February.

Speaking about what series will focus on, the actor said: “What we do is we have him trying to jump on the bandwagon and say, you know, he says ‘Hey! I’ve made mistakes, I’ve stood on the side of the sidewalk and slow hand-clapped while I watch a woman try to parallel park, you know, and I feel bad about that. And now if I saw a woman doing it now, I would shout instructions’.

“He’s sometimes ignorant and prejudiced but he tries to do the right thing. Early on we made him too predictably conservative a bit like shooting fish in a barrel – a caricature. Whereas now we do him as someone who realises that he’s got to get on message. He’s struggling to do the thing he’s supposed to.”

One of the topics Partridge will tackle is the #MeToo movement, ”There’s a whole episode about that,” Coogan said. ”That’s such a difficult topic for anyone to talk about for anyone to say anything about, but if you’re doing a character it weirdly gives you this licence to. You can get things wrong in a big way and it’s fine because it’s him doing it.

“You’re not sanctioning or agreeing with what he’s saying, you’re saying ‘this guy gets things wrong’ so you have licence to do it. And this is the crucial thing, because you’ve got a comic character he can say stuff that you go, ‘that is so off message,’ but sometimes he can say stuff that’s true that I can’t say. So the fool can point something out that everyone secretly knows to be true.’

“You’re not saying that he’s right and you’re not saying that he’s wrong. It allows you to sprinkle a little humanity on arguments that are atrocious.”

This Time With Alan Partridge marks the character’s first major appearance on the BBC since the sitcom I’m Alan Partridge, which ended in 2002. Since then, Coogan has played the controversial broadcaster on various occasions, the most notable being the film Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa.

Susannah Fielding, best known for appearing in The Great Outdoors and Black Mirror, will play Partridge’s co-presenter Jennie Gresham in the six-part series, while Tim Key returns as Sidekick Simon.