I, Partridge (16 page)

That pretty much covers it.

Carol left me 14 months after the last of my TV chat shows. I wasn’t in a good place (the back garden usually) and she’d found it difficult to offer the right
¹²²
support.

But I can’t speak for Carol. Nor would I want to. Only she knows why she wanted our marriage to end, so she’s very kindly outlined – in her own words – what went wrong. Over to you, Car.

‘I loved Alan and probably didn’t fully appreciate what I had. He was working hard to provide for me and the kids and I probably took that for granted.

‘He was away from home more than I’d have liked but I acknowledge that Peartree Productions needed him and he had a career on the telly. You can’t do that if you’re swanning around at home, for crying out loud.

‘He’d be working long hours trying to resuscitate his production company, his mind forever racing with new ideas and formats. Every now and then, in front of guests, I’d laugh at the sheer inventiveness of them.

‘But yes, Alan’s career hiccup hit me hard. I’d invested a great deal of hope in Alan being a fixture on mainstream TV for years and years to come. God knows, he deserved it and was (is!) a damn sight more of a talent than the likes of Tony Robinson or Andy Marr.

‘When his show hit a few snags and he was hung out to dry by the BBC, I began to realise that my dreams of being on the arm of a BBC mainstay were fading. I mean, he’d come back stronger – that was never in any real doubt – but I was impatient and wanted all the rewards that he’d promised me.

‘Hurt, upset and I guess a bit
too
moody about the whole thing, I took to visiting the gym. I’d suggested that Alan come too, but after every unreturned phone call to the BBC he’d dig an angry hole in the garden and so any spare energy went on that. Besides, he was already in pretty good shape.

‘At the gym, I met a personal trainer. He was young, physically in peak condition – no arguments about that, fair do’s, some people have a lot of time on their hands – and didn’t stretch me intellectually, which did my confidence the world of good.

‘In a clear contravention of my marital vows, I began sleeping with the guy. God knows how Alan feels about that. I never stopped to ask his permission or run the idea by him. This carried on for an indeterminate amount of time.

‘I then split with Alan, who hadn’t been having an affair. Not because he couldn’t. He could. He was a well-regarded TV personality. You think he was short of offers? Dream on. But he exercised self-restraint. What can I say – that’s Al.

‘Alan wasn’t perfect. There were a couple of minor niggles which I won’t bore you with now. It wasn’t anything significant, and it was certainly not in the bedroom department, a room where to be honest he played a blinder.

‘So, that’s my story. It’s the tale of stubbornness, broken promises, broken dreams and – I have to admit – my own shortcomings as a spouse. I’ll now hand you back to Alan.’
¹²³

Thanks, Carol. Appreciate that.

Carol scotched ideas of a reconciliation and said we were splitting up for good in 1996, and I – of course – demanded sole custody of the children. Fernando wasn’t keen as he was living in Cambridge midway through the final year of a politics degree, while Denise was living in Ipswich with an art collective. I consulted a lawyer nonetheless and he advised me not to pursue it. The law
always
takes the side of the woman.

116
Press play on Track 24.

117
He says ‘banging’ actually but I mean, honestly.

118
Some people wrongly refer to birdwatchers as ‘twitchers’, a phrase emphatically rejected by the birding community – presumably because they think it paints birdwatchers as hunched weirdos beset by debilitating tics, which isn’t always the case. I’m assured that only a small minority of them suffer from these kind of spasms.

119
i.e., ‘French kissing’ – a technique in which two mouths dock at the lip, creating a closed arena for intermittent insertions and exploratory recces of the tongue interspersed with quicker prods, darts, scoops and jabs.

120
Known in the international diving community as the OK sign – the left hand bit, I mean. For god’s sake, don’t do the sex mime to indicate you’re able to breathe.

121
Must get up to speed on this royalty thing.

122
Any.

123
These are Carol’s actual words in the sense that I ghost-jotted them and faxed them to her I don’t know how many times for her to sign off. She had ample opportunity to make amendments but declined to do so – ergo, she’s happy with it.

Chapter 16
Yule Be Sorry!

THE DAY AFTER I
confronted her, Carol had said to me she wanted to clear her head so moved out just before Christmas. I sat on the edge of the bath, sobbing and eating a pork pie until the pie was gone – at which point I felt a heck of a lot better.
¹²⁴

Don’t get me wrong, the prospect of spending Christmas in unbroken solitude didn’t fill me with cheer, but it actually turned out to be alright. Brilliant even. I’ve subsequently done the same (out of choice) on four other occasions.

The benefits once you think about them are obvious. You’re free to break the rules. That year I had a glass of beer at 10am. Imagine that! A glass of beer and a piece of toast on Christmas morn. I didn’t finish it – it was horrible – but I chortled as I thought of what the ‘ball and chain’ would have said. Stupid cow.

Then there’s the almost overwhelming sense of liberation that comes with wearing a dressing gown (nude beneath) without having to anxiously reknot the string every few minutes. The gown flops open and reveals your goolies? Big deal! No one’s there! It just feels good. After a few more glasses of beer, I put on a CD of Christmas songs and marched up and down my landing to ‘Stop the Cavalry’ by Jona Lewie.
¹²⁵
After a few minutes of brisk promenading, my gown spread apart, like the curtain of an old proscenium arch theatre to reveal a one-man show by John Thomas. I let it.

There were other reasons why Christmas alone was enjoyable too but I can’t remember them at the moment.

Besides, bugger all that, I had a TV show to make!

I had been given a chance of redemption – a Christmas special of
KMKY
which had been agreed as part of the initial series commission. And with the internal inquiry into the regrettable death of Forbes McAllister still ongoing, I had yet to be deemed culpable of anything.

The upshot: the BBC was duty bound to honour my contract and broadcast
Knowing Me Knowing Yule
. Not that this was the only consideration. I’d argued strongly that we must respect the memory of Forbes and plough on. We owed it to him to treat his death with the tact and decorum it deserved. Besides, I’m confident the Beeb would have wanted an hour-long special from me anyway. I’d proved myself over the course of
Knowing Me Knowing You
to be someone who makes television as unmissable as Forbes McAllister’s aorta.

So, for all my domestic problems, I had to push on. Carol had left on Christmas Eve 1995.
Knowing Me Knowing Yule
was to be broadcast five days later. Bring it on, as American peacekeeping soldiers scream when given backchat by unarmed natives.

The knowledge I could switch from the bony chest of my wife to the fleshy welcoming bosom of the British viewing public provided sweet, sweet, sweet succour.

Emotionally, I’d invested a great deal in the success of the show. And
nothing
was going to go wrong.
¹²⁶
I spent Christmas Day alone, practising my musical number again and again and again until I my throat swelled up and I couldn’t fit Christmas pudding down it.

The show was conceived by me as a kind of televised mulled-wine-and-mince-pies party that would take place in an exact studio mock-up of my house.
¹²⁷
There’d be guests milling around, food being cooked, an air of festive cheer and three lovelies dressed as Mother Christmas. (Bit misleading that. They were basically models dressed in Santa outfits, on stand-by to hand out mulled wine and mince pies.
¹²⁸
It’s wrong to call them ‘mothers’. There’s no way any of them had been through pregnancy or suckled young. You could tell that from their bodies.)

And yes, we did have some last-minute gremlins. We had an eleventh-hour panic sourcing wheelchair ramps for [CHECK]-aplegic former golfer Gordon Heron, while star guest Raquel Welch cancelled three hours before we went live. Far from knocking me off course this provided a much-needed emotional outlet, as I was able to spend 30 minutes venting down the phone to her. I spewed all my bile into Raquel’s delicate ear, sometimes confusing her name with that of my ex-wife, sometimes not. Referring to her appearance in
One Million Years BC
, I called her a historically inaccurate sexy bikini sex woman, spitting that dinosaurs had long since been extinct before the arrival of admittedly sexy hunter-gatherer cavemen’s girlfriends that she’d played.

Still! We still had a great show lined up. The now permanent chief commissioning editor for BBC TV Tony Hayers was going to come and chat, we had bell ringers, the world’s biggest Christmas cracker, TV chef Peter Willis,
¹²⁹
a sexy trio of models I called Christmas Crackers and Mick Hucknall had agreed to perform because he was, in his words, ‘trying to bang one of them’.

An appealing line-up certainly. And yes, there were a few glitches, but most of them occurred in the final four minutes of the show, and so I’m still satisfied that we produced a piece of high-quality television.

Admittedly, I left the studio a little shaken and with a hurt hand – but my spirits were up. As I’d walked on set that day I had no inkling whatsoever as to what a seminal moment this was. It would be my last show on BBC television.

I won’t dwell on what happened other than to say our attempt to enter the
Guinness Book of Records
by pulling the world’s biggest ever cracker went wrong due to the unbelievably shoddy workmanship of its makers, White City Pyrotechnics.
¹³⁰

That upset me to a disproportionate degree. One thing led to another and I ended up punching a golfing cripple in the face after he’d made an off-colour joke at my expense, and then responding to Tony Hayers’s have-a-go intervention by belting him a couple of times too. But the rest of the show was nothing like that.

In retrospect, I’d taken my eye off the ball and allowed certain boundaries of acceptable behaviour to become blurred. I know – of course I know – that punching a wheelchair-bound former golfer in the face with a turkey-encased fist was wrong, just as twatting a BBC executive, twice, is inadvisable.
¹³¹
But I was operating on about four hours’ sleep since Christmas Eve and I had set myself and the show unrealistically high standards.

But let’s not get hysterical. Some people assume it’s
always
wrong to smash a cripple in the face. But is it? Let me paint a hypothesis: what if the cripple, like the Jackal from ‘Day of the’ fame, actually had a false leg and was using a hollowed prosthetic limb to hide a specially adapted American bolt action Savage 120 rifle. What then? Is he still off-limits, fist-wise? I’m not saying Gordon Heron was an assassin necessarily. But you can see the point I’m making.

What if Osama bin Laden had been in a wheelchair when crack US forces entered his compound and, with no concern for their safety, bravely shot him in the head and neck? Similarly, a Zimmer frame could easily be four tommy guns in disguise with fake rubber feet on the bottom which the bullet could pass through once the Zimmer was aimed horizontally. What if he had one of them? Yes, there’d be an outcry from disabled pressure groups but would his killing have been
wrong
? It’s not black and white. I’m just saying, sometimes –
sometimes
– not to hit a man in a wheelchair is an abrogation of responsibility as member of the public or the US military.

Besides, the realisation mid-broadcast that certain participants were attempting to sabotage the show had got on my wick so, yes, I responded. I make no apology for that. I was like a wounded animal. If you step up to me, you better brace your ass for a genuine smackdown. They stepped, I smacked. Down.

I couldn’t face going home. So after unwinding with a few halves of bitter, I spent the night with Glen Ponder. The next day I felt much happier.

Some of the next day’s reviews focused far too much on the final few minutes – and those that didn’t each contained the phrase ‘self-serving’ or ‘vanity project’. I found these comments deeply offensive. People
¹³²
had
asked
to know more about my background and to find out who the real Alan was – if there’s something vain or self-serving about spending £29,000
¹³³
creating an exact replica of the inside of my home so that people gain a better understanding of me and my life, then guilty!!