The movie Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa is absolutely hilarious. I've rewatched it several times, and I originally went into it never having heard of Alan Partridge and only barely of Steve Coogan. The trailers don't capture it all. "Trust me, Susan." is probably the greatest line ever in the midst of a shootout.
I was properly introduced to Steve Coogan and also Rob Bryden through their movie The Trip.
it's a crying shame that for a large part of a recent generation, Ali G in da House is their only real awareness of Ali G. it's like knowing Ali G solely through the intros and interludes from Da Ali G Show
Oh, I had no idea it was a TV series! Just thought it was the movies, and I didn't recognize those impressions from The Trip movie but recognized that table.
On the subject of Alan Partridge, I highly recommend the two books, "I, Partridge" and "Nomad".
This is my Goodreads-review of Nomad:
This is one of the funniest books I have read. I just love the Alan Partridge character, with all his insecurities and petty attempts to show off. I read the first book, I Partridge, and this is even better. In Nomad, Alan tells the story of his walk to honour his father – he will walk from Norwich to the Dungeness Nuclear Power Station.
Not only is the book packed with hilarious episodes, the writing is also fabulously bad – full of examples like “the wind whistling through my hair like a wind whistle”.
Highly recommended.
I, Partridge had some outstanding footnotes, and from memory it also had a playlist at the back with notes to play specific tracks at particular chapters/moments.
Alan Partridge is very underrated, and I'm surprised that so many here have heard of him - although hacker news has a large UK presence his shows are not those that have been exported widely to the best of my knowledge.
There's just something so British about that kind of character, where you're half laughing with him (1) and half laughing at how blissfully unaware and cringey he is. (Much like David Brent in the UK/original "The Office", although there's a long history of that style of character)
I actually paid for a Partridge-tribute to sing a happy-birthday song for my (Finnish) wife, on Cameo. We were both very impressed at how well his message was 100% in-character for the real AP.
I genuinely feel that these two books, and the audiobooks even more so, are full blown genius.
The character has been steeping in his own mythology and metatext for decades, and these books use that to such a wonderful effect. I think they hold up as amazing comedy in their own right, but having the character describe events we’ve seen in previous formats but through a warped narrative is a wonderful and uncommon device, and the intentional bad writing is so joyous.
"Oh btw, there are some strobe effects in this, so please, any epileptics get out now. Statistically one of you is, and two of you are gay. Btw guys, if you are gay, please remember, rubber up."
The best thing about the Dirty Feed blog is that it shows just how fragile history is.
We're talking about stuff that happened in the last few decades - and yet people's recollections are faulty, the documentation is inconsistent, and the contemporary commentary is already wrong.
Now extrapolate that back a hundred years. What conventionally accepted history is wrong? What cause and effects have been mixed up?
Popular culture isn't always well researched - and John shows just how difficult it is.
Slightly offtopic but anyone with a dark sense of humour would do well to check out Chris Morris's stuff - I get a feeling most younger Brits haven't heard of it. Day Today and Brass Eye, both still funny, are wonderful time capsules satirising Britain as it was thirty years ago.
But IMO his finest work was Blue Jam - the radio comedy not the TV incarnation, hour-long episodes of low-key music and surreal sketches. Absolutely brilliant even today. Archive.org has a copy at https://archive.org/details/chrismorris_bluejam. Best enjoyed late at night.
Trigger warning: basically everything. The BBC would never get away with broadcasting it now.
Blue Jam is amazing, but it was the TV version of it: Jam, that really blew me away. Dark as anything, surreal, challenging, spectacular use of language, amazing use of music, and video editing techniques … incredible.
I remember when it was originally aired, it would be on around 10pm. Then repeated around 4am, but with the visuals just bouncing around inside a small square (like a ‘Pong’ ball). Each episode they would mess with the visuals in a different way. Definitely will never see anything like that on Tv again.
Probably my favourite sketch (which is also on Blue Jam) [1], but there are so many [2][3][4][5]. Even the intros [6] were disturbing, and set you up for what was coming in the next 30 minutes.
Wow some seriously strange/funny/interesting stuff... Laughed my ass off at "Thick People as a Service"
American here. Reminds me heavily of Monty Python. I didn't realize there were other shows in such a similar vein. Will def checkout Jam / Blue Jam. Can you recommend any other shows I might not be aware of?
Look Around You [0] is little known even in the UK, but I think a lot of HN readers might love it. It's a surreal but perfectly observed parody of the 80s/90s educational videos we used to watch in school science classes.
One that I absolutely loved, but which rarely comes up, is Mr Don & Mr George by two Scottish comedians Moray Hunter and Jack Docherty. I think there was only one series, but it has a beautifully gentle, slightly surreal, slightly slapstick humour.
Edit: And for a much more brutal sense of humour, I don't think any political comedy has bettered The Thick Of It.
I recommended Still Game to an American colleague and he found it hilarious even though I thought it would be a bit crude at times for an older gentleman. I guess the fact they're pensioners themselves softens the humour a bit.
They were Edinburgh's answer to Glasgow's Naked Video (Gregor Fisher, Elaine C. Smith, Andy Gray, Helen Lederer, etc.) although the welsh John Sparkes was in both, and had is own spin-off series, Barry Welsh is Coming
Love Big Train, some seriously good sketches. Here's some more of my favourites (outside of the ones you've already mentioned).
Unfortunately my favourite sketch, 'Cake Factory', isn't on Youtube any more. That was where I first realised how brilliant Simon Pegg was as a comedy actor.
I’d recommend anything by Julia Davis, who was in the ‘thick people’ sketch. Her comedies are pitch black and very good, including Nighty Night and Hunderby.
For a sketch show I’d recommend Big Train - it went slightly under the radar, but has an absolutely incredible lineup of talent.
Slightly different, but Charlie Brooker (of Black Mirror fame) had a series called Screenwipe, which lampooned the tropes of television in the mid 2000s. It was pretty funny, and quite dark in places.
Here's a great parody of Jam by Adam and Joe. I enjoyed Jam but when it misfired this was exactly how ridiculous it came across - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0t0Ocau-CUg
My housemates and I used to do Jam nights where we’d binge the whole series in one sitting, usually the Jaaaam version that was even more woozy and disorienting.
Ended up in some very strange headspaces at about 2am.
We should also remember On The Hour, the original radio precursor to The Day Today, though I think the TV series is more important.
My own favourite Chris Morris production is probably his Radio 1 series with the painfully embarrassing improvised tasks he'd set his hapless roving man on the scene.
I think that was also the one that got him temporarily banned from the Beeb for implying - but not outright stating - that Michael Heseltine (very senior British politician at the time) had died from a heart attack.
Edit: Ah, here. Typically facetious interview with "close personal friend, colleague and bass player of the Jam, Bruce Foxton"
> "The Ukraine declared its own independent laws of physics. Under the new legislation only natural-born Ukrainians were granted the right to have density, speed was calculated to equal boiling-point over height and friction was abolished, which caused increased mortality around hills, but meant that Ukrainians could glide over hundreds of miles with just one push. Meanwhile in Kiev over three hundred protesters were injured in gravity riots."
BBC probably wouldn't broadcast Blue Jam today, but only because it would get such limited audience. It's niche and of its time.
Similar shows today would include the Skewer, and to be honest I would rank that as more legally dangerous to run, it skirts libel laws much more closely.
And especially the relevant interviews: the movies are the artistic depictions, but the real world facts that made it important to produce them - the rationale and the exposition of salient research material that became the movie - are explained by Chris Morris in talks.
I never knew what to think of Four Lions. It's a hugely politically charged topic (suicide bombers, islamist terrorism, particularly perpetrated by UK residents/nationals). I watched it 10 years ago so perhaps I misremember it, but it didn't feel to me that the movie had any particular political agenda, it was just making fun of a band of clumsy terrorists.
It picks up a political agenda near the end when it shows the authorities to be clueless, and suspecting entirely the wrong people, but more generally the film has political origins.
When 7/7 happened, we saw the CCTV footage; Yorkshiremen getting on a train at Luton. Three of the four bombers were from Leeds, they were born in the UK, what on earth possessed them to go to London and try blowing it up? Fanciful notions of being a mujahideen? Some disconnect of belonging to the UK when they were clearly brought up fully within it?
I'm pretty sure Morris said he made the film to answer that question.
Monkey Dust series 2 (broadcast 2003, two years prior to the attack) had a similar examination with its Abdul and Shafiq sketches. Their friend Omar preaching to them about jihad but their lives mainly revolving around what's on telly and their mum feeding them turkey twizzlers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhxQT1d1AvE
The key point that Four Lions makes is that the terrorists are not the highly devoted, strict followers of Islam that they claim to be. They are bored, directionless clowns and the devout want nothing to do with them. This is highlighted in the ringleader Omar's relationship with his brother - Omar and his wife tease and mock his brother for his strict adherence to Islamic customs. The devout brother tries to persuade Omar to abandon his terrorist plans, but is later targeted by the security services because they too assume that it's the strict, devout muslims that are behind it all.
Not the key point, I would say, but an important point.
It returns to OP's missing that the movie may have «any particular political agenda»:
there is a political point, which is "outcasts in search of an identity conflictually with their environment may have a political agenda, which causes a political problem". Disregarding such problem implies potential tragedy.
Edit (wrote in a rush): hence, that if there is a risk, quite worth of assessment, you'd better see things flatly, for what they are.
A sort of "favorite" of mine is this speech by an anthropologist about muslim extremists.. indeed you can apply it to white supremacist terrorists too, they join up to the cause for a feeling of belonging and purpose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlbirlSA-dc
I thought of it as satirising the picture painted by the security services of terrorist groups as Mission Impossible-type bad guys who were amazingly organised and professional, so they needed loads of money for counter terrorism. Don't get me wrong, I do value (some of) the work of the security services, but I think this kind of portrayal too easily allows people to ignore the fact that "terrorists" are often just directionless people drawn into that kind of world almost by accident. The Day Shall Come, released nine years later, expands on that idea.
I am not sure you can get that message from the movie. In the end it does show them as dangerous, murdurous criminals. It doesn't take a PhD or lots of means to kill a large number of people. Which is also the difficult challenge posed to those security services.
I didn't (intentionally) say they didn't end up as dangerous, murderous criminals. I said that they were directionless people - they weren't criminal masterminds in a glamorous world of high-tech equiment and fast cars, they were tragic characters who got sucked into a farcial which saw someone blow themselves up in a shopping precinct while dressed as a chicken. It's a fundamentally humanising film which hints at the reasons people join those kinds of organisations, which are much less high-tech and organised than the security services (intentionally or otherwise) paint them as.
Nobody is talking about a «political agenda» - art as a lucid portrait exposing salient traits is not involved in that -, and it was not simply «making fun».
The very fact that you write «a band of» suggests you are not seeing the universality of the depicted. It is not like the long dream in Mulholland Drive, that changes and deforms a reality: it is meant to be a description through a satirical lens. And it's not "wacky break": it's "Wackyland".
The right-winged that converts himself after studying the texts of the opponents with the original intent of deprecating them; the special radicalism of the converted "local"; the actual nature of the largely misunderstood special culture hosted in the alien lands; the tone based on constant references to actual events (those who hid weapons in a park and found them stolen; those who hid them in a playground and found the children playing with them; those who filled a boat with them and it sank...); the social and internal states, flow and dynamics of the involved... The causal relation leading to the "necessary conclusions". All of this is a portrait - an analysis.
And statements such as "I have hit them, so they must be the bad ones" are fed to the police - not the protagonists. «Clumsy» who? And the interrogator in the "extra-territorial" container, that seems to be imported directly from Joel and Ethan Cohen - «clumsy» who? No, not just "the protagonists".
Maybe, as suggested, you could check a few of the interviews that Chris Morris gave.
It was also written about complex cultural issues in ethnic minorities by people who weren't from those minorities. I am a big fan of Morris, but there is something inauthentic (edit: I originally wrote "slightly patronising" but I think the film was made in very good faith) about that. Also there are no shortage of voices from those communities represented, so why should it be left to a bunch of people removed from them to tell their story?
If you like Chris Morris, then you might also like Victor Lewis Smith who had a similar sense of humour. (I'm not going to get into an argument about whether one influenced the other. There was apparently a bit of bad blood.) He (VLS) died recently and the BBC did a retrospective: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001kgd2
I remember staying up late as a kid, so I could listen to Blue Jam! Such amazing sounds! I seem to recall it was annoyingly late tho, like 2am or such.
> The cabin crew suggested we all go out and club it. I had no option. It was that or one of their B&Bs. I figured it'd be safer on the streets. For the first time ever I saw the Scotch in their natural habitat, and it weren't pretty. I'd seen them huddling in stations before, being loud but… this time I was surrounded. Everywhere I went it felt like they were watching me; fish-white flesh puckered by the Highland breeze; tight eyes peering out for fresh meat; screechy, booze-soaked voices hollering out for a taxi to take 'em halfway up the road to the next all-night watering hole. A shatter of glass; a round of applause; a sixteen-year-old mother of three vomiting in an open sewer, bairns looking on, chewing on potato cakes. I ain’t never going back… not never.
I'm a big fan of Monkey Dust, but due to legal complications with the music copyrights, they were only able to release the first season on DVD. Pirating is the only way too watch seasons 2 and 3.
The kind of thing they ‘got away with’ was cutting in shots of black and brown people doing their cultural dances with shots unrelated Brits with a laugh track backing.
> In his book Disgusting Bliss: The Brass Eye of Chris Morris, Lucian Randall says that the pilot of The Day Today was “completed in January 1993”. I can independently verify this; the VT clock for that pilot is dated 29th January 1993. So the pilot for The Day Today was shot in either December 1992 or January 1993. Which gives us a rough date for this particular limbo incarnation of Partridge.
Where does "December 1992" come from in this sentence? Is there a specific reason why it couldn't be October or November 1992?
(I mean, maybe it's just common sense that a programme wouldn't take that long to shoot, but I feel like the author is more confident than that given the rigorousness displayed throughout the rest of the article.)
My guess would be the common sense angle, within the context that when someone commissions you to make a pilot, you get it done, because in part, you're trying to demonstrate that you're ready to do the thing for real.
This is a very Partridge-esque look at its history.
If anyone is a Coogan fan, I highly recommend seeking out The Trip. And not the terrible movie version, but the actual full series. Season 1 is such a brilliant piece of television.
I was in a digital agency during the first dotcom era, and TVGoHome was one of the thing that kept me sane. Such a shame it took so long for the TV version of Nathan Barley to arrive - felt like it missed the moment somehow.
TVGoHome! Great site. Charlie Brooker is another comedy genius. When I ran my TV torrent site we got hold of some pre-release shows of Charlie's from someone at the BBC and the second they were posted he sent me a really lovely email asking if I would take them down until after they were broadcast. Who am I to argue with a God?
The Day Today was such a classic show. It often gets overlooked because of how iconic Brass Eye was but Brass Eye wouldn’t have existed if it wasn’t for Day Today and the former show is every bit as good as its predecessor.
I also quite enjoyed Time Trumpet. It’s a completely different show with different writers and comedians but follows a similar format.
Yeah, he also wrote The Thick of It which is probably the best comedy series I’ve ever seen. Another writer on that was Jesse Armstrong of Succession fame.
Jesse Armstrong also co-wrote Four Lions and Peep Show, amongst others. It's amazing how a very small group of people can have such an influence on a vast amount of cultural output.
It’s also worth adding Charlie Brooker to that list of cultural icons too. Someone who has not only worked with Chris Moris, but also has an exceptional repertoire of his own as well.
he was also an executive consultant on the tv show version of What We Do In The Shadows, which for a few years was the best comedy show on tv imo. The Jesse Armstrong, Armando Ianucci, Chris Morris, Charlie Brooker Channel Four-some has a lot to answer for (although most of Ianucci's work is BBC produced). I think the only other writing comedian of that generation I respect as much is Sacha Baron Cohen, although his work is slightly different
Armando Iannuccis back catalogue is so vast. He's done so so much stuff over the last 30 odd years and so much of it is top tier. Yet few people would recognise the name. He's talented on so many levels. If anyone hasn't I'd highly recommend the 'Armando Iannucci Shows'.
Time Trumpet is enormously underrated. Some of the special effects were done by Ben Wheatley (now a movie director). (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0840965)
Best thing Coogan ever did was a little known animation called "I am not an animal". Many of the jokes are British pop culture references, but it's still sooo funny. And edgy. There's no way in hell it would get past today's sensitivity panel at the BBC. In fact I'm amazed it got on the TV at all.
If you’re British and of a certain age, then Alan Partridge the character encompasses a significant aspect of Britishness, and has a particular cultural resonance as a result.
This DVD extra turned into his hands-down best sketch (and probably the best intro to puzzled Americans) - Peter O'Hanrara-hanraran, live on the scene at 9/11 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SPWgodul_E
British cultural icon as important as other (more internationally famous?) British comedic characters such as Blackadder, Basil Fawlty and David Brent.
I would have assumed it was on a Look East segment in about 1983 about a young boy who had made his own TV studio at home in Norwich.
Actually he was probably one of the presenters on the East Anglia week of Why Don’t You (Just Switch off your TV and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead)
Very much still active. Steve Coogan still does tours as Alan Partridge and there’s a gig from (iirc) this year available on Netflix called Stratagem.
In my opinion the most of the Partridge stuff since I’m Alan Partridge has been pretty poor. The one exception being the movie Alpha Pappa. But hardcore Partridge fans might still enjoy Stratagem.
Agreed, actually I thought the movie was a bit weak too. Feels a bit like he’s playing a dumbed down caricature of the old AP… although the Mid Morning Matters series was pretty funny, maybe more because of the supporting characters
I found it had to get into This Time until I watched Welcome to the Places of my Life which is end-to-end hilarity.
I'm now fairly convinced that This Time is the greatest version of Partridge. It's his equivalent of "Diamond are Forever" (and no, he's not showing off!)
Coogan is best now in roles like "philomena", or "24 hour party people". "The trip" is good but he is (over) playing a version of his public self which gets a bit forced.
A great example why the semantic web is total bullshit and for the loons.
Alan Partridge: First appearance on TV?
The most basic things are impossible.
It's why examples of semantic networks start with birth certificates, the most basic thing society measures that's taken 100's of years to get a system for.
Which of course are no longer considered sources of truth as the West has become even more abstract. And anyone who's lived in developing nations knows accurate DOBs were always for the rich.
I was properly introduced to Steve Coogan and also Rob Bryden through their movie The Trip.
Some B roll impressions from The Trip and maybe the follow-up movie(s): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB3eSud1_Cs
Michael Caine impressions by them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFIQIpC5_wY
Even more impressions from them and probably shows their breadth the best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWJTcblS4KI