This Time with Alan Partridge, episode 3, review: Mature and nuanced satire has no peers on British television

It is a fine exemplar, were any needed, of the extraordinary talents of Steve Coogan, custodian of the Partridge persona

This Time with Alan Partridge is the purest expression of Partridgeism. As a mature and nuanced satire on the state of British television, it has no peers. It is a fine exemplar, were any needed, of the extraordinary talents of Steve Coogan, custodian of the Partridge persona, his current writers Neil Gibbons and Rob Gibbons, and indeed everyone involved in this gem of a production. It is funny and worth watching.

Partridge is Partridge, as Theresa May (herself a little awkwardly Partridgean) might say, but the Jennie Gresham character, as played by Susannah Fielding, adds another dimension to the Partridge universe. Fielding, helped by her stereotypical presenter-prettiness, is the perfect embodiment of the modern vacuous, patronising, gushy, daytime telly personality-free personality. Her principal advantage is that her audience doesn’t notice the insincerity oozing all over the sofa and the studio floor.

The chemistry between Jennie and Alan, and the contrast between their on- and off-screen relationship is intriguing. There are moments of intimacy, as when she hovers close to him to explain how to pronounce “intimacy”, to make his Ts less sibilant, but also passages of uneasiness, mutual incomprehension and mistrust.

The relationship between Alan and his semi-detached third presenter, the accident-prone Simon Denton (Tim Key), is much simpler, that of a failed experiment. The personal capital Alan has invested in his former North Norfolk Digital “sidekick” is eroded every time the dread words “no files found” appear on the video screen, as they do invariably. He makes Alan look slick. It is, then, all classical Partridge.

Yet some people have a problem: Piers Morgan, for example. He presents Good Morning Britain, a news magazine show that bears some similarities to This Time, and he’s commented: “Very sad news that the new Alan Partridge show, called This Time obviously mocks me and Susanna… Coogan has disappeared up his derriere.”

Susannah (Fielding) might be caricaturing Susanna (Reid), but the show does not “mock” Morgan, because the latter enjoys – genuinely – huge international fame and success on a scale Partridge can only imagine. Where Alan is insecure, obscure and a hopeless broadcaster, Morgan, love him or not, is the opposite. Partridge is sui generis; he pre-dates (not predates) Morgan.

A few fans implore Coogan to “stop getting Alan wrong”, echoing an episode of I’m Alan Partridge where Alan’s attempt at a James Bond film-watching marathon (”the Bondathon”) is spoiled by others’ ignorance and he explodes at them – “stop getting Bond wrong”.

So let us put this to the test, on Episode Three. First, The Partridge Family. We already know that our hero has been estranged from his children, Denise and Fernando Partridge. Decades ago Alan declared, to some builders as it happens, that “I’ve got access to the kids, but they don’t wanna see me.

Now, a This Time experiment with vegetarianism yields Alan a bonus of a half-hour a day less time spent in the loo, which he uses to organise a – partial – reconciliation with Denise (a meet and “noggin” at Starbucks). Similarly, Alan’s strained relationship with former wife Carol is updated, and we now learn that she beat the children, and was “a functioning alcoholic”, disturbing details he mutters live on air.

Another example: Alan’s long-term thing about teachers. Or, rather, teachers under whom he has suffered injustice. Alan is able to apply his own experience to the This Time segment on corporal punishment in schools, including a quite creepy “reconstruction” sequence of him as a computer-generated schoolboy, complete with trickle of blood from the side of his mouth, like in a 1960s Hollywood action movie, when his teacher slaps him (unfairly, for drawing a caricature with a penis for a nose).

There then follows a sharply sarcastic instructional film in which Alan demonstrates how the sort of techniques usually confined to the squash court or golf course – swing, balance, accuracy – can be deployed in applying a slipper efficiently to an adolescent boy’s buttocks.

Again, this is entirely consonant with what we know of past Partridge. In I’m Alan Partridge (2002), he nurses a grudge against “sweaty” or “cacky” Raphael, who punished him for having a chalk cock-and-balls drawn on the back of his blazer (an anatomically impossible act, as Alan insists). In Scissored Isle (2016) we see Alan remonstrating with an aged ex-chemistry teacher, Mr Cragg, who earned the nickname of “Craggatoa” for his uncontrolled violent temper. Now he’s in a mobility scooter.

So, Coogan’s latest Partridge is 110 per cent Partridge. He is still obsessed with Noel Edmonds; yet he evolves. He tries harder to restrain his excesses (for example “homoscepticism”, as he once called it); he is now behind the wheel of a Vauxhall Insignia, moving on from his previous Kia Optima, Lexus IS and Rovers (25 and 800); he now suffers recurring dreams involving a prostitute called Bianca. All authentic.

I know that Morgan and Coogan have got “previous”, but Morgan does seem to have overreacted to a perceived slight. He predicts: “There might be a third episode, there won’t be a fourth”. Well, I can attest there are six in all, I’ve seen them, and the best, potentially award-winning stuff, is yet to come.

Good morning.