I, Partridge (27 page)

Other people were there for me too. My assistant would pop round to the house every day to drop off food, do the dishes, flush the loo (I tended to forget). At my lowest point, she also offered to help me shower. But even with my swimming trunks on I think that would have been a bit weird.

Although technically my employee, I knew that she was doing all this as a friend, and that meant a lot. She came round so often, I’m surprised she had time to get any actual work done, and I think it was that as much as anything else that forced me to drop her down to a part-time wage for a while.

I did a lot of crying as well. I’m not ashamed to say that now, but at the time I found ways to hide it. Mainly by doing the bulk of it in the shower. That way people can’t say what’s tears and what’s just hot water. Same applies in the bath. Just hold your breath, stick your head under and let the grief flood out. You’d be surprised how much better you feel.

To this day I still use Short-Burst Underwater Crying for all sorts of problems. I wouldn’t cry at, say, an unexpectedly large MOT bill. But if I’d received an unexpectedly large MOT bill, combined with the death of a good friend, plus I hadn’t eaten that day, then I might well weep.

I developed a complementary technique called Controlled Anger-Release Splashing, though it should only be used as a measure of last resort, and you will need to mop up afterwards.

Against the express wishes of Bill Oddie, I also tried therapy. It wasn’t for me though. I didn’t want someone to pick and prod at my troubled mind like a shopper fingering a piece of fruit in the supermarket. I wanted something that would allow my soul to heal in its own sweet time. And that’s why I took up pony-trekking.
²⁰⁰

It all stemmed from someone telling me I’d feel better if I exercised. They’d suggested jogging, but what appealed about pony-trekking was that you were basically in charge of a vehicle/being. Also, horses don’t complain. They don’t criticise you about viewing figures, play hard-ball over budgets or fail to re-commission your show. Plus they’re grateful for a sugar cube.

I’d had a little experience of horses previously, not least on
Knowing Me Knowing You
. Show-jumper Sue Lewis had been a guest and had come on the show with her horse (see picture section). And I must say it made for pretty pleasing television until she shat on the floor (the horse).

But yes, clambering aboard my horse, Treacle, really was just what the Doc ordered. Mottled grey and measuring a good 15 hands, you could tell that she just ‘got’ me. I truly found peace in the gentle side-to-side bob of her trot, the quiet swoosh of her tail and the tender plippety-plop-plop of her shit hitting the dirt.

It wasn’t all plain-sailing, though. Probably my lowest ever equine moment was when we were out one day and I fell badly off the pace. Soon I was totally lost. I began to panic. In an effort to relocate the rest of the riders I’d taken a short-cut across a dual carriageway. But it was then, as we tried to hurdle the central reservation, that something terrible happened. Treacle stood on a nail. On another day, she might have got away with it, but with the quite extraordinary weight of me on her back the rusty nail just slid through the hoof like a knife through hoof.

Over the roar of the onrushing traffic, I heard her whinny. But because I hadn’t seen the incident, and because I knew almost nothing about horses, I assumed she was just laughing. The poor girl. By the time we got back to the stable her hoof looked like a split sausage.

She was fine in the end. Even more incredibly, she didn’t seem to blame me in any way. She bore no grudge.
²⁰¹
The dignity of these beasts. Mind-blowing.

After the rides I liked to stick around. I’d lean on the gate, unwrap a Twix and watch as the ponies got groomed. I’d marvel at the skill of the stable lads as they went to work with their hoof picks, shedding blades and dandy brushes. I really loved the fact that it was like a car-wash for horses. I really loved that fact.

Once one of the lads offered to let me have a go, but I got all shy and said ‘no’, even though I would have enjoyed it. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about that moment. What an error.

Over time, though, I did pluck up the confidence to join in the chit-chat.

‘Lovely grooming, John!’ I might shout.

‘Thanks, Mr Partridge,’ he might reply.

‘Except for the fact that there’s still shit on Prancer’s undercarriage!’ I might add. I had a smile on my face but we both knew it needed dealing with.

I don’t ride any more, haven’t done for a while. I stopped when
Brokeback Mountain
came out. I just didn’t feel comfortable. I do occasionally go on the stables’ website though. I like to see if they’ve uploaded any new pictures of Treacle. I also ‘friended’ her on Facebook. I know it’s not actually her that replies but it’s still nice.

Just as important as my mental health was my physical shape. Over the previous few years my body had become flooded with blubber. It was now home to over five stones of excess weight. There was no getting away from it, I was clinically chubbed-up. And it needed to change. I set about one of the most merciless exercise regimes in the history of Norwich.

In the last few years I estimated that I had spent somewhere in the region of £54,000 on Toblerone. That’s more than most unhappily married men spend on prostitutes in their whole lives. My assistant said that wasting so much money on treat-food was immoral, especially with so much starvation in places like Africa and parts of Norfolk. She said the devil had got inside me, which sounded serious at first, but she says that about most people, especially John Craven.

But first things first – I had to round up all the remaining Toblerones in my house and get rid of them. Going through my cupboards was easy. The problem came when I needed to find the secret stash. I knew that in the fug of a previous Swiss choc high I had hidden a bar somewhere in the house. But where?

Never before had I been so badly in need of a metal detector adapted to detect Toblerone. Instead I had to search myself, through the medium of my assistant. I (i.e. she) began by checking the cisterns of all three toilets. Then I (she) checked the underside of all tables and chairs. And then I (she) checked in the loft, during which I (she) fell from the stepladder and cracked my (her) head on the wall. But I found nothing.

It wasn’t until hours later that I (i.e. me – she’d taken the bus to casualty) found it, hidden in an air vent behind a wardrobe. It was just sat there looking at me, like some sort of confectionery Anne Frank. (God I hate the Nazis!)

I gathered what remained of my Toblerone supply into just six bin bags. I knew that the most cathartic thing to do would be to just give it all away. So that very afternoon I parked up at the local primary school, wound down my window, and handed bars out to the kids as they walked home. It was just a nice thing to do and the fact that the police were called says more about genuine paedophiles than it does about me.
²⁰²

Finally it was time to commence the total annihilation of all the un-needed flab within the body of Alan Gordon Partridge. In terms of weight I effectively had a large midget wrapped around my internal organs. And I wanted him gone. I looked into liposuction but it was too expensive. Besides, while I knew it could do a good job on tummies and thighs, I wasn’t 100% convinced of its ability to cure a fat back. I would have thought about the stomach stapling technique used to such great effect by Fearne Cotton, but it was yet to be introduced at that stage. Probably still being tested on rats.

My only option was to hit the exercise, hard. I started with a regime I found in my assistant’s copy of
Bella
magazine. She very kindly offered to do it with me, but when I thought about her in a leotard it made me feel all cold inside. I went for a drive to clear my head but at one point I nearly had to pull over because I was shaking. In the end we compromised. I would do the exercises and rather than be joined by her I would just watch
Oz Aerobics
on Sky Sports One. How that programme has not won awards I will never know.

The other big problem was the squat thrusts I was supposed to do. It was a simple question of physics. With the best will in the world, the only way my knees would have been able to cope with the sheer poundage was with the aid of a Silverline SE9 hydraulic jack.

I turned my attention to swimming, and it was fun for a while. We figured out that I displaced the same amount of water as half a Ford Fiesta! Not bad for a little lad from Norwich. Not bad at all. But soon enough the local kids started calling me Moby Alan. I gave the swimming up. It was the straw that broke the whale’s back.

The thing is, I knew one of their mums and I’d seen her leaving a local hotel the other week with a man who wasn’t her husband. Now I could have mentioned that to her catcalling child, but I didn’t. Well I did, but it gave me no great pleasure.

My emphasis changed again, this time to running. I was a bit nervous as I hadn’t been jogging for years and wasn’t sure I’d be able to remember what to do. But as long as you keep telling yourself to move your right arm in time with your left leg (and vice versa) and to push off with sufficient propulsion to travel part of each stride airborne, you literally won’t put a foot wrong.
²⁰³

I used to run along the country lanes with my assistant driving behind like a Baptist kerb crawler. The idea was that if I went below a certain speed she would just blast the horn. The shock of it would lead to a sudden burst of acceleration. We called it the ‘toot and shoot’ technique. Yet such was the agony of running that I soon learnt to ignore the horn. (I only wish the same could have been said for the many, many horses that we spooked.)

No, we needed something more drastic, otherwise I would never lose the weight. With a heavy heart I decided on a new plan. If I consistently dropped below my target speed my assistant was to pull forward and slightly run me over. Well it worked famously. Believe me, when you’ve nearly been trapped under the front left wheel of a car driven by an unbalanced Cliff Richard fan, you soon speed up.

Once I got to grips with exercising, though, my excess baggage just melted just away. I was like a snowman in the sun. (One day I lost five pounds, although that was partly because I’d eaten some bad ham.) And within three months I was more or less back to my pre-Toblerone weight. It had been a slim-down as dramatic as it had been medically inadvisable. But I had succeeded.

How I longed to go back to the swimming baths and show those young boys my body. I used to lie in bed imagining them staring at me, my skin glistening under the changing room lights, my body covered in a veil of twinkling, chlorinated droplets. And it felt good, it felt right.

I would have done too, were it not for one thing – the sudden weight loss had left me with masses of excess skin. When I was clothed it wasn’t a problem – I’d just tuck it into my jeans. But when I was naked, you couldn’t miss it. I was half tempted to get on a plane to Papua New Guinea. Knowing that lot, they’d have cut it off and made crackling. Cannibals, eh? What are they like?!

Of course, in the years to come I’ll probably be able to donate my skin to medical science. And the thought that one day a flap of my tummy might be grafted on to the face of a badly burned woman is a source of enormous comfort to me. Not just her face either. I’ve got enough skin to cover large parts of her body. She really can afford to be as clumsy with that chip pan as she likes.

To summarise then: my drink and drugs heck had taken me to places I never wanted to go. Mainly Dundee. I’d like to say that I came out of the whole ordeal older and wiser. But I’m not sure I did (though I concede that the age one is is hard to dispute). Yet it didn’t matter because, by the spring of 2001, thanks to a hardcore diet and the love of a good horse (cheers, Treacle!) I was back. I had bounced back.

200
Press play on Track 35.

201
That was actually one of the titles I was thinking about for this book – ‘She Bore No Grudge’ – until I realised it made little or no sense.

202
The constables and I laughed about the confusion, though there’s no denying that I looked like a paedophile, many of whom – like myself at the time – are paunchy. It’s said they consume food as avariciously as they do explicit images of children.

203
There’s no need to tell yourself this out loud, although as a habitual sports broadcaster, I found myself automatically providing a third-person commentary of my runs which buggered up my breathing patterns and gave me a painful stitch in my abdomen.

Chapter 28
Bouncing Back
204

I’M NOT SURE I’D
ever felt so proud. As I walked into the shop, I could feel my chest puffing out like a toad’s throat. In front of me were rows and rows of books. And on the front cover? Yours truly. I reached out and tenderly fingered my glossy, smiling face. That might sound a bit weird, but it wasn’t.

I span flamboyantly on my heels so I could look out of the window of the big-name high-street bookstore in which I stood. As humans of both sexes hurried and scurried about, I nodded in quiet satisfaction. Today Norwich Waterstone’s, tomorrow the Booker Prize for Books!

Allow me to explain. To begin, you must join me as I return to the year 2PD (post-Dundee). Alan Partridge is in a tizz. He just can’t figure out what to do with his experiences. He has been through a major male mind meltdown, surely there’s some good that could come of this? Then one day in the bath tub – Ulrika! – it hit me. I’d translate them into a publishing deal.