This Time with Alan Partridge, episode 5, review: The team make television history (again) by bringing back absent jokes

Here the viewer finds his/her self in a dilemma – to laugh or be appalled, to laugh with or at Alan, or both

After last week’s cardiopulmonary resuscitation of a silicone sex doll, it is difficult to imagine Steve Coogan and the rest of the team behind This Time with Alan Partridge surpassing that moment of magic.

Well, they haven’t. But they do make television history (again) by bringing back the mother-in-law joke after an absence of quite some decades. Obviously this is done so intricately and ironically that you never quite know what is going on, especially as the one-liners are inserted incongruously into a quite lengthy This Time segment devoted to feminism and the #MeToo movement. This is something which Alan does his absolute best to get on board with, because he has tried to move with the times, and because he also knows he has to retain his precarious hold on his new presenting gig back on prime-time BBC1.

And so, leaving co-host Jennie Gresham (Susannah Fielding) behind on the sofa (just as well), he takes the slightly over-long walk across the studio to the “Digi Wall” area occupied by sidekick Simon Denton (Tim Key). Here they share the viewers’ thoughts on sexism, and they are immediately presented with a predicament about how to treat a series of old lines about mothers-in-law sent in by John, from Essex. In the event, Alan compromises by reading each one out (rather than ignoring them), but, to compensate, does so in the tired, cynical sort of tone one (or Alan) might expect from the woke male of 2019.

Except of course the jokes (three of them, plus a wife gag thrown in for good measure) “still work” as Alan and Simon ruefully agree. They do, too, because – I think – they are just so ridiculous and so obviously not hateful, in the way that other sexist humour and racist “jokes” from the past invariably are. Here the viewer finds his/her self in the same sort of dilemma – to laugh or be appalled; to laugh with or at Alan, or both. (I assume that was what Coogan and writers Neil Gibbons and Rob Gibbons are up to).

For example: “I could tell it was my mother-in-law coming up the path because the mice were throwing themselves on the traps.”

I can recall the late great Les Dawson delivering that on Sez Les in about 1976, I confess, and Partridge’s delivery was only marginally drier, and no less funny. However Alan then goes on to “explain” to Simon in exaggerated terms the supposed horror of this “contemptible stuff” – “suggesting that a mouse would rather take its own life than meet the mother-in-law”.

Much the same goes for this one (also from John, Essex): “I saw my mother-in-law getting beaten up by six men. My wife said ‘aren’t you going to help?’ I said no, six should be enough.”

Thus has Team Partridge, I fear, partly rehabilitated a type of humour that the nouvelle vague “alternative comedy” (the likes of Ben Elton) was supposed to have extirpated in the 1980s. An ambiguous achievement.

Less riskily, Alan also revives some even more antique terms of vulgarity such as “rantallion”, which fell out of use in the later 19th century: “One whose scrotum is so relaxed as to be longer than his penis." This leaves Alan, like the rest of us, wondering “if that’s due to a truncated member or a distended testis”. (Could be both). It’s old and, I guess, sexist in its way, but also amusing.

Talking of swellings, Alan’s lips become comically distended to sausage proportions when he accidentally samples an oyster dish prepared by one of the show’s guests. Even so, ever the super trouper, Alan refuses to allow his allergic disfigurement to prevent him from singing us out, with his mixed vocal harmony group The Quavers. Given Partridge’s status as a practical example of that lethal male combination of arrogance incompetence, their chosen number, "Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves" felt entirely justified.