THE RETURN OF CHARACTER COMEDY

Two much-loved comedy characters made their return last week: please welcome back to the microphone, Messrs Ed Reardon and Alan Partridge! Both thwarted older men with up-and-down careers and an inability to cope with modern life, both petty, ridiculous and fabulously funny when frustrated.

Reardon, played by Christopher Douglas, who also writes the series – his longtime co-writer Andrew Nickolds died in 2022 – has been a stalwart of BBC Radio 4 for decades: the new series of Ed Reardon’s Week is the 16th. If you’ve never heard the show, Reardon is a poshish curmudgeon who makes his living writing books such as More… Death in Paradise Recipes, Mary Portas: Have I Got Shoes for You and Wallander’s Swedish Meatball Solutions (“a Woolworths ‘value  read’, I’ll have you know!”).

Douglas’s writing and performance are lovely, the walk-on characters nicely ridiculous, and I can appreciate that the whole show is a delight, but it doesn’t make me belly laugh (Reardon is too close to the kind of man who drives me nuts in real life). I enjoyed the madder parts, such as the moment where our hero got so annoyed by the number of people in his flat that he escaped to an exclusive retirement village and attempted to convince them to let him stay the night.

Other than that, the humour is all a little home counties for my taste – though that, of course, says more about me than Reardon.

Alan Partridge, on the other hand, makes me howl. Far more ridiculous, pompous and deviant than Reardon, Steve Coogan’s finest creation is back making his podcast From the Oasthouse for Audible. For those who’ve not been keeping up, Partridge tends to record almost everything he’s up to for his pod.

In the first episode of the new series, this means we’re treated to him being stuck in his long-suffering assistant Lynn’s glass front porch. “I feel like an action figure,” he says, mournfully. “Action Man. Alan Man.” The theme song in which Coogan sings “Alan Partridge from the Oasthouse” over and over is a piece of mad genius, as is the second show, an almost Play for Today-esque monologue in which Partridge waits for Lynn to come out of a hospital appointment.

He’s sitting in Lynn’s Daewoo Tacuma (which he isn’t a fan of) in her disabled parking space (which he is). “It does feel like there’s a secret omertà … a veil of silence in which no one is allowed to say how superb disabled parking and toilet facilities are. Well, not me!”

The writing is so great, so precise, and Coogan’s performance is an absolute joy, especially when Partridge gradually loses it as he realises Lynn might actually be seriously ill. Brilliant.

Partridge is mostly seen as a TV character, but he was originally an audio creation, and in the 1990s my friends and I had a tape of his Knowing Me, Knowing You Radio 4 show that we shared. Our favourite episode was the one in which Partridge’s elderly guest, the very rude Lord Morgan of Glossop, died on air. The host was forced to use his own Pringle jumper as an improvised shroud and began a minute’s silence, before respectfully reciting all the various service stations where you might pull over to take part in that silence. It still makes me laugh even now.

Back on Radio 4, the BBC’s chief political correspondent, Henry Zeffman, gave us a smart, densely packed summation of Keir Starmer’s first 12 months as prime minister in Starmer’s Stormy Year. This was an excellent 45 minutes, with revealing interviews from former transport minister Louise Haigh, former head of the civil service Simon Case and the minister for intergovernmental relations, Pat McFadden (a man you’d be loth to cross).

Zeffman was clear about what Starmer and his government have done well, such as his handling of fraught international politics – and what they haven’t. Right from the start, “there wasn’t joined-up strategy”, said Haigh, diplomatically. Hence huge mistakes such as announcing that the winter fuel allowance for pensioners would be cut, and then, subsequently, going back on that policy (listening to this while the cuts to personal independence payments were being debated gave a sense of deja vu).

What Zeffman called Starmer’s political pragmatism – “he’s definitely not an ideologue”, said one interviewee – should mean the prime minister can focus on creating policies that work. But it also means that when they don’t, they are swiftly junked, which makes people cynical. Labour MP Josh Simons articulated how the electorate felt when Labour got in. “People were angry,” he said. “They weren’t excited; they didn’t feel like they were on the cusp of some new horizon.”

There was no optimism to cushion the new government for a few months. Starmer has made mistakes, but he’s also had to slog from the start.

Photograph by Audible 

2025-07-05T04:07:01Z