​This Time with Alan Partridge, episode 1, review: A consistently strong creative achievement

Fears for the future of Alan Gordon Partridge, may, once again, be allayed

In a word? Partridge parfait.

For those of us who have grown up with Alan Partridge (not literally, that would be obscene), there is always the fear, the dramatic tension, the dreaded possibility that Alan’s latest foray into broadcasting might – just might – be his last. He bounces back, sure, in the sense that Theresa May does after a meeting with Jean-Claude Juncker – but for how long?

No need to be concerned, Partridgeans. This Time with Alan Partridge (BBC1) is such a consistently strong creative achievement that fears for the future of Alan Gordon Partridge, may, once again, be allayed. Or Alayned, perhaps.

So congratulations to all concerned, and, in particular to writers/directors Neil Gibbons and Rob Gibbons (related), who seem to have formed some sort of mystical communion with Alan Partridge, who enjoys what you might call a personality “soft border” with Steve Coogan. They all thoroughly deserve their Lexi (Lexuses), Kia Optimas, Range Rovers, or whatever they’re driving these days.

Together, they have produced an early evening magazine programme so grotesquely lightweight that it should be tethered to the ground to prevent it from floating away. It could easily pass for The One Show; and it is, thus, worthy of a broadcaster such as Partridge. If I were Matt Baker or Phillip Schofield I’d be very, very worried.

Alan is stepping in because the usual avuncular male co-host is poorly (“our thoughts are with…”), and no one else is available at short notice. So Alan finds himself, a little uneasily, sharing the sofa with the young, pretty and deceptively charming Jennie Gresham (Susannah Fielding), complete with perma-grin and platitudinous conversation: a fine emblem of this particular broadcasting genre.

Jennie subtly undermines Alan. All too often she leaves Alan to run away with factoids about Second World War U-boats, or jarring reminiscences about his long lost grandad Graham. As we watch the show in “gallery eye” mode, in other words much as the studio directors, camera operators and programme assistants do, we can see how, for example, Alan’s off-air quips are “adopted” by Jennie. Thus when she rehearses a line about “the plight of pint-sized seal pups”, and Alan, out of vision, chips in that “that’s more P’s than a pensioner’s pamper”, as soon as she’s back on camera she uses it, leaving Alan visibly disquieted, and quite literally lost for words.

Fortunately, Alan’s newly assertive assistant (no longer mere PA) Lynn Benfield (Felicity Montagu) is around to spy on the gallery, and reassure Alan that his performance is “solid” but “she’s pinched your jokes”, like Delilah, the “slag from the bible”, sapping Partridge’s strength. I get the impression Lynn doesn’t laugh at weather any more.

There are nerves, and misjudgements. Lots of them. Of course there are. Exclusively Alan’s. He introduces a naturalist named Alice Fluck (Cariad Lloyd) as Alice Clunt, and gets away with it until he bids her farewell as Alice F***. He forgets he is on TV rather than local radio, and yells at a tweet, expecting a response, as if it was a phone-in caller. He never knows quite how to sit comfortably.

In a first for British television, Alan also overcompensates with an extraordinary mimed rendition of how, hygienically, to use a loo on the train – because “it is possible to complete an ablution from entry to exit without using your hands”. He does so with a fluent dexterity that would have done credit to the late Marcel Marceau. A toilet tour de force, as Alan should have said.

The most difficult, not to say embarrassingly amusing, sequences, sorry to say, concern Simon Denton (Tim Key). Simon, Alan contends, is “man Friday to my Robinson Clouseau”, who “dissects, satirises and lampoons the news in a manner every bit as funny as a Radio 4 panellist”. Simon can’t operate the “huge interactive digi wall” and has forgotten to upload the tweets. Exquisitely painful.

Alan still says some strange things, a sort of idiot savant poet of the news magazine format. A reference to agriculture causes him verbally to sketch “a tumbledown farmhouse nestled in the cleavage of bosomy downs”; a walk round Soho prompts something about “pole dancers from Lapland, and lap dancers from Poland”. The final sequence is an interview with a “hacktivist” wearing a giraffe mask, who reveals that Alan is paid £2,000 less than Wally Banter at North Norfolk Digital. Alan ends up interviewing him in a BBC lift, simultaneously flirting, pathetically, with Emily Maitlis.

We haven’t seen Partridge on prime time national TV since he (accidentally) shot dead food critic Forbes McAllister in 1994, an event that would shake anyone’s confidence (and inflate their employer’s workplace insurance premiums). This time – This Time – Alan Partridge really is bouncing back. Coogan is now closer to the age Alan is supposed to be, and plays him with a slightly more world-weary, if not knackered, edge, which is hardly surprising, all things considered. Anyhow, he is a brilliant actor, and he has only added to the Partridge persona he has done so much to perfect.

And no one even thought of saying “Ah ha!”