This Time with Alan Partridge, episode 2, review: Exquisitely crafted comedy

This is television comedy for the connoisseur

The opening moments of This Time with Alan Partridge (BBC1) are a little strange. Watching as if we were up in the director’s gallery, with all the different camera angles, just before broadcast we find Alan (Steve Coogan) pacing around on the studio floor. He is saying over and over what sounds like “y’know” in varying intonations. We’re on air. The usual jolly little title sequence is dropped, and Alan starts to deliver a sombre eulogy to former presenter John Baskell (1953 – 2019). But then, in what we now realise is in fact a meticulously practised move, Alan “spontaneously” chucks away his notes about “a colleague and tireless man” because “y’know…we’re…guys – do you mind if I speak from the heart?” He then bounds around the (too large) This Time studio space, tells us everything about some bizarre youthful incident involving his Hornby train set and an abandoned sparrow chick, and nothing whatsoever about his late colleague. Classic Partridge.

Then there is an additional filmed tribute to Baskell in which Alan declares that “John didn’t live his life so much like a candle in the wind as like an oil rig flare stack in a North Sea gale. Like an oil rig, he drew on huge reserves of energy, was physically quite squat, and, thanks to his prodigious whisky intake, helped prop up the economy of Scotland.”

But soon after, off air, Alan reveals the true grisly insincerity of the whole exercise to his (frumpy) lioness of an assistant Lynn (Felicity Montagu): “Such a load of toss. I mean just a bore who ate too much sirloin until his colon threw in the towel.” It is such a superbly drawn vignette of telecynicism, they should frame it and put on a loop in reception at New Broadcasting House.

By the way, there is so much exquisitely crafted detail packed into this closely observed satire that you need watch it again, with the pause button ready, to get the best out of, say, the archive Radio Times listings about terrible past John Baskell shows (“Scotland’s Strongest Man/Britain’s Holiest Hymn/Fly tip Squad/Britain by Balloon”) that you just otherwise just miss. This is television comedy for the connoisseur.

John/Alan’s This Time co-presenter, Jennie Gresham (Susannah Fielding) does a better job of concealing any contempt or misgivings she might have about the late John. This is as you’d expect from someone who resembles the result of a genetic experiment mixing the DNA of Kate Middleton, Susanna Reid and Martine McCutcheon. Where Jennie is less careful – well, she really doesn’t care – is pretending that she’d actually want Alan beside her on the sofa under any circumstances. When Sam Chatwin (Simon Farnaby), presenter of War Machines, and previous occasional presenter of This Time, comes on for the usual lightweight discussion of his new show she greets him like a long lost lover. We soon clock that he is a product of privilege – inviting her “down to the farm”, dropping in a casual reference to boarding school – as does Alan, who asks him in mock wonder about his manifold broadcasting successes (“How do you do it”). Chatwin knocks out some cobblers about passion, but Alan, with commendable persistence, continually points out the “little known fact” that daddy was the Head of Factual Programmes at the BBC, and a family friend of old Baskell, to whom he was “very close”.

Chatwin's successful attempts to upstage Alan, a little class war right there on the sofa, are excruciating to watch. Alan is so tantalisingly close to his dreams, only to be deprived of his manifest destiny now that current affairs programming has dumbed down to his level – but now to be usurped by a typical pair of smug, nepotistic, self-entitled media types who are even more ghastly, more knowingly awful, more self-centred than even he is.

Yet, dramatically, a couple of late Tweets about Baskell turn their much claimed “closeness” to John against them – and to Alan’s advantage. He reads the truth about Baskell out, in full: “He gave me a pottery lesson and sat behind me wearing Speedos and saying ‘I’m like Patrick Swayze in Ghost’. It started off as a vase but by the time he’d finished fondling me it was just a very wide ashtray.”

And – another beautifully composed #MeToo style assassination: “I once took a cup of tea to him in his dressing room and he flopped his gown open, gyrated his hips and twirled his penis around saying ‘I’m a catherine wheel’ (my name is Catherine)”.

Alan then upsums, as they say in telly: “John Baskell was on telly, did charity work, good to friends, three marriages, now question marks over conduct”.

A shuttlecock, randomly spied by Alan earlier in the show, drops onto the coffee table, as if symbolically, from the rigging in the studio ceiling. As Lynn had advised him, a Lady Macbeth in a perm, “fortune favours the bold. The time is upon us.” And Alan is upon This Time.

Goodnight.