I, Partridge (19 page)

Or even worse than burglars, what if you’ve got foxes that keep coming into your garden? It wouldn’t be so bad if they stayed on the lawn, but last night, and forgive the language here, they were fucking all over the herb garden. It’s got to stop.

They’re actually very randy animals, and that’s okay, we’ve all got needs. But for Christ’s sake keep off the flowerbeds. Never before had I been so irked by vulpine intimacy. I was so mad last night that I was considering fighting fire with fire. If I’d had a consenting adult with me (female) I’d have gone to their den and had sex in it. And that’s despite the very real danger of coming away with a dirty back.
¹⁵⁰

Of course, that was all just in the heat of the moment. I soon calmed down and realised that a more measured approach was just to stay calm (after all, these were just wild animals following their instincts) and put poison down.

A lot of people criticised Michael for his love of guns. But at least he loved something. And I think we could all learn from that. After all, surely it’s better to love something than nothing, even if it means a few intruders get paralysed from the waist down, or the neck down if it’s dark and you can’t see where you’re shooting?

By the way I don’t know why I’ve been referring to Michael in the past tense. He’s not dead. I don’t think he is anyway – he just texted me.

It’s a strange truism that people tend to feel sorry for a man whose house is a Travel Tavern. But for AGP (Alan Gordon Partridge) things were pretty ruddy swell. This was one of the most creatively fecund periods of my entire life. I was absolutely fizzing. I was like an Alka-Seltzer. Or a Berocca. Or to be honest just a bog-standard soluble aspirin – they’ve all got baking soda in. I remember once bringing this metaphor to life in a meeting with a senior executive from Fenway Plastics. I was on a short-list of two to front a corporate video. Seeing that he was wavering, I went for broke. I went right up to him, bared my gums and made a very loud fizzing noise in his face. It backfired. Not least because my mouth was still littered with bits of recently consumed banana.

It wasn’t just corporate stuff keeping me choc-a-block busy. I also had projects on the boil with 24 broadcasters around the world. How many of the UK’s other blue riband presenters could say that? And although the exact level of commitment from these channels was hard to gauge, they had at least taken my calls.

I was also injecting seed capital into a number of exciting business ventures. In the days before
Dragons’ Den
, this was Partridge’s Nest. Local entrepreneurs would come and meet me in my room. I’d lie on my bed eating grapes like an emperor and quietly listen to their pitches. I could tell they were nervous – after all, get through this and they were staring down the barrel of an investment in the high three figures – but I remained stony-faced. Again, like an emperor.

When they were done I’d put down my transparent bag of fruit and begin my questioning. Within minutes I would almost always have found their flaw. And I’d tell them too. ‘Your business isn’t scalable.’ ‘Your sales projections are gubbins.’ ‘I don’t like your face.’ Occasionally, though, very occasionally, someone would leave the Partridge’s Nest having struck gold (up to a ceiling of £999).

In late 1997 I was ball-deep in a project that looked set to revolutionise the business travel market. A local man (don’t recall his name, think it was either Jim or Tom, so I’ll call him Jom) had come to me with the idea of ripping out the back seats of tens of thousands of company cars. If this had just been mindless vandalism against cars I would have laid him out there and then. Seriously, I’d have knocked his teeth out. But it wasn’t, it was much more than that. It was an ingenious way to save businesses millions of pounds (or billions of pence) a year.

Why spend all that dosh paying for travelling employees to stay in expensive motorway hotels when you could just replace their back seats with beds?
¹⁵¹

But it got better. The discarded back seats could be re-purposed as cut-price sofas for low-income families. You were helping the poor
and
creating a secondary revenue stream (revenue river more like!). I was so blown away by Jom’s pitch I don’t think I ate a single grape.

Right there and then I wrote him a cheque for £300. I would have gone higher, much higher. I would have pumped that man so full of seed capital it would have been coming out of his bum (up to a ceiling of £999), but I couldn’t because it was the end of the month and I still had a few standing orders to come out.

There was just one hurdle to overcome: the rather delicate subject of (say it quietly) waste disposal. There was no question that travelling employees could park up in a service station and get a genuinely great night’s sleep in the comfort of their own cars, but how to deal with a call of nature in the middle of the night?

Now I knew for a fact that truck drivers just climbed down and did it on the tarmac. In the morning the cleaners would find neat little piles of it next to where the lorries had been. I was once lucky enough to have dinner with the general manager of Newport Pagnell Services (M1). I couldn’t believe how unfazed he was by it. I think his exact words were ‘that’s just the way they are’.

I’m reliably informed that lorry driver clean-up costs are budgeted for by every service station in the UK. Apparently it gets its own line in the business plan. They’d rather it didn’t happen but what can you do? If you try to stamp it out, they just go elsewhere. Don’t believe me? Ask Bob Grainger up at Keele (M6). He learnt the hard way. You avoid them depositing their previous meal on-site but you also miss out on them buying their next. Apply a simple cost-benefit analysis: the margin on a service station breakfast is £5.95; clean-up costs are a pound a dump. If they boycott your services, you’re looking at a total net loss of £4.95. Ergo, let them go.

The problem for Jom and me was that service stations turned a blind eye for people with HGV licences but that’s where they drew the line. At a crisis meeting in early November, we battled to find a solution. The closest we came was the idea of installing caravan portaloos in the boot. We wanted to see if we could hook the flush up with the car’s exhaust so that the human waste took the same exit as the CO2, but deep down I think we both knew it wasn’t going to happen. I demanded my £300 back that very afternoon. When it transpired that he didn’t have the money because he’d spent it on mattresses, I took the mattresses instead, 15 in all. I’ve still got them actually. They’re in a lock-up in Beccles. But you know what? That’s business. If you can’t stand the heat, don’t cook.

146
On a clear day, and provided I’d got rid of any smudges on my binoculars, I could even see the M11.

147
It’s just occurred to me that in the previous chapter, when I said I spent the night with Glen Ponder, I should make clear I meant I went to sleep at his flat. I did not have sexual relations with him. Thought I’d cut in now and mention it while it’s occurred to me. Believe me, there was no physical contact and the light remained as on as my clothes, save for my socks which I always remove to let my toes breathe because I have an intermittent athlete’s foot. So, as I say, no funny business at all. The only time I’ve touched a man as I slept was on an Outward Bound course to Snowdonia when I hugged a man in a sleeping bag, but that was only for warmth. Richard doesn’t have a gay bone in his body and is as manly as they come. He now runs a nightclub in Brighton called Beef.

148
She’d been raised on a diet of powdered egg, so any real egg – even battery – seemed to her an unnecessary eggstravagence (my word).

149
Press play on Track 28.

150
I shared that thought with TV comedian Alan Carr and told him he could have it for free. He laughed. The guy’s a breath of fresh air. Some people unkindly say the deaths of Inman, Harty and Grayson have put talented entertainers like Carr back into some kind of closet. I hope not. I’ve long lobbied the BBC for the reintroduction of a primetime TV homosexual.

And yet some people have accused me of intolerance or homophobia, a word that didn’t exist before 1980 – if you’d have used the term before then, people would have thought you were referring to a science fiction disease. Uh-huh. Not me. Although call me old-fashioned, but in my day public toilets were for pissing and shitting.

It seems that now that it’s not a criminal offence, it’s fine for TV homosexuals to be ‘active’. Is that a good thing? I’ll remain above the fray. That’s for you, the reader, to decide.

Although if pushed, I’d say if the ‘activity’ remains in a private dwelling or hotel, is genuinely consensual and the age disparity is under a decade, let them broadcast.

151
I suggested the name ‘Motel’ as it was half motor car, half hotel but Jom wasn’t keen.

Chapter 19
Me
V
Hayers

I’D FELT SO AT
home in BBC TV Centre I resented not being able to come and go as I pleased. Watching the building from a parked car for an hour every Tuesday filled me with a profound sense of sadness and anger, which I could quell only by reminding myself that a second series was still highly likely to be ordered.
¹⁵²

This was just a few short months after the slightly mitigated success of
Knowing Me Knowing Yule
. I was well aware that I’d upset Tony Hayers in a personal capacity by punching him in the face with a raw turkey – not kosher, I suspect – but was confident that he’d be grown-up enough not to let it cloud his professional judgment.

As far as I’m concerned, I’d honoured my side of the bargain. Fact was/is, I’d been contracted to provide 6 x 28-minute shows, plus a 58-minute special – and I had delivered them.

I missed being in and around the Death Star, as Jeremy Clarkson calls BBC TV Centre. But as a friend of
Grandstand
back-up presenter Steve Rider, I could pitch up in reception whenever I liked and he’d come down and sign me in. Having accessed the building, I could stalk the corridors and have a coffee in the BBC café whenever I pleased. I was determined not to be forgotten, and reasoned that one way to stay right in people’s consciousness and appear important was to perform laps of the building’s circular corridors while pretending to be on the phone.

After a while, Steve called.

‘Alan. I suggest you stop hanging around the place because people might find it disconcerting,’ he said.

‘Really?’

‘I’m only thinking of your career. You know what they say – “Never feed a hungry dog”.’

‘No, I think it’s “Dogs aren’t just for Christmas”.’ I thought for a moment. ‘You don’t have dogs do you, Steve?’

Steve may not have been too hot on well-known phrases and sayings, but he was blessed with the kind of genuinely great wisdom you only find in men with side-parted hair. In short, he was right. He was always right. After the break-up of my marriage, similarly, he advised me not to eat my lunchtime sandwiches every day in the car park of Carol’s gym. I knew deep down I shouldn’t be sat there, but sometimes you need to hear it in the silky tone of Steve Rider for the penny to drop.

I thanked him – ‘Thanks, Steve’ – and hung up.
¹⁵³

On his counsel, I kept away from TV Centre and kept a low profile for a couple more months. I had plenty to be getting on with: restructuring Peartree Productions so that the printer was nearer my desk and the researchers sat facing
into
the room; keeping myself in good shape; re-watching every second of
KMKY
to identify areas for improvement (weren’t that many); and finding a new place to eat my lunchtime sandwiches. I was also winning plaudits for my successful return to radio with
Up With the Partridge
on Radio Norwich. But I was of course waiting for the call from Hayers that said: ‘Alan, we’re on.’

I’d recently moved into the Travel Tavern and was enjoying the quite excellent facilities there. Anyone who’s stayed in one of the 22 properties in the Travel Tavern franchise will know that those guys ‘get’ what the weary businessman wants. He wants to recharge his batteries without the namby-pamby fussing of so-called luxury hotels – concierges, extra pillows, free slippers, room service after 10pm. Believe me, my batteries were as charged as a Pentagram Infinity 2600 mAh rechargeable cell battery. Still the best batteries money can buy.

It was quality hospitality from top to bottom, and yes, I liked being there, but as the weeks wore on I became concerned about the radio silence from the BBC. I’d been fobbed off with the excuse that they needed to conclude the inquiry into the death of Forbes McAllister before they could talk about recommissioning me. But even after it was completed – I was effectively absolved, bar the petty conclusion that I was guilty of ‘unlicensed use of a firearm’ – the recommissioning process felt like it lacked momentum. That’s not to say they weren’t keen; I’m sure they can’t all have been
that
thick. But they were dragging their heels in the way that only a groaning bureaucracy populated by Oxbridge graduates can.

Hayers in particular seemed to have forgotten what his job was. I knew what it was: it was to say ‘yes’ to quality TV shows. But he was too busy twiddling his thumbs, or getting someone else to twiddle them for him!

Let me tell you something. For a man who works five days a week in the BBC, Hayers was incredibly hard to get hold of. If he wasn’t at the chiropodist or at his daughter’s graduation, he was on holiday in the Gambia or in a broken lift. I mean, he was never
ever
at his desk.