Alan Partridge review: Series has been consistently brilliant, witty and inventive

'This Time' combines all the best elements of the Partridge heritage, from 'The Day Today' to 'Knowing Me, Knowing You'

It gives you a bit of a jolt. Usually we find Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan) and Jennie Gresham (Susannah Fielding) in the This Time studio together in a mood that varies between mild flirtation and uneasy cohabitation, like two scorpions in a jar not sure whether to mate, predate or both, a state of permanent tension.

Now Alan lets off (not like that) in a display of spoilt childishness that might shame a spoilt child. The immediate cause is that Jennie, or “Jennifer” as Alan calls her, has discovered what Alan has been saying to the rest of the team behind her back. Jennie decides to confront Alan with a recording of his impromptu remarks: “Seen it all before mate, all tits and teeth. She’d smother her own grandmother with a pillow if she thought it would get her on the front cover of the Radio Times.”

This is a captivating moment. Alan’s aside is callous, yes – but is he right? Jennie is upset, yes: “I’m a nice person and I loved my grandmother.” Yet there’s a hint of dissembling there – she doesn’t categorically deny Alan’s charge as simply being a lie.

Further, from what glimpses we have seen of her manipulative, vacuous personality so far we can quite easily believe Alan is right and that she trades on her looks and is ruthlessly ambitious, if not to the literal point of asphyxiating a living antecedent. He might even be justified in comparing her stompy walk unfavourably to Carol Thatcher (who, by the way, has gone a bit quiet lately, hasn’t she?).

From this, things escalate into mutual recrimination with Jennie threatening to flush Alan's emergency supply of Viagra down the toilet – which she has, sneekily, discovered in his gym bag: “It's all because I don't fancy you, isn’t it?” She adds that his “type” of woman is a lonely bottle-blond divorcee in her fifties. Alan, to his credit, acknowledges the truth of this, because “they’re the only ones who can handle me.”

Calculating she has now captured the high ground, his driven-but-competent co-host walks off the set just as the opening titles roll. Alan realises he is on his own. He has no option. He calls in sidekick Simon Denton (Tim Key) from his usual role in messing things up over by the Digi Wall to messing up the rest of the whole show.

And so they go into some bizarre set pieces. The pair gamely try to host a fashion item about different skirts, and they just about make it. There’s an interview with a Nigerian con man, in which Alan somehow comes off worst, a woman stuck on a ledge in the Peak District on the end of a phone in, during which Alan gives her the technically unwise advice to eat some moss; and we see Alan going through night terrors. There is also one highly disturbing sequence featuring Alan and a muscular, taller, better looking version of Alan, which climaxes in the showers (no, not like that).

By the end of the show we hear that Alan has been summoned to see the executive producer and the Director General because of his bust-up with Jennie. Like the lady on the phone in stuck on a ledge, we are on a cliffhanger. We cannot know if Alan and Jennie, and Simon, will return.

I hope they do. This first series of This Time has been brilliant, at times sublime, and always witty and inventive – a tribute to the players, including newcomer Lolly Adefope (Ruth Duggan) and longer-established Felicity Montagu (Lynn Benfield), and most of all to writers Neil Gibbons and Rob Gibbons. It also combines all the best elements of the Partridge heritage: the spoof interviews from Knowing Me, Knowing You; the mock documentary films inspired by Alan Partridge’s Scissored Isle; and the claustrophobic banal “banter” from Mid Morning Matters. The satirical take is as sharp as on The Day Today, Alan’s original TV base. The only thing that was missing was some referencing of Brexit, though that is probably beyond parody anyway.

All I can do is to echo the line from a much earlier Partridge vehicle, I’m Alan Partridge, in which a BBC exec jokingly tells the corporation’s commissioning editor: “Give him another series, you swine!”. I just hope this time, so to speak, Alan remembers not to add “yeah, give me another series you s***”.