I, Partridge (6 page)

‘Tea and coffee are okay,’ I said, casually. ‘But they’re not the be-all and end-all. Surely there’s room in life for a third caffeinated beverage option?’

Suddenly I came out of auto-pilot. What the hell was I doing?! In the ten years since I’d come up with that view, how many people had ever agreed with me? I’ll tell you how many – zilch. At best it provoked an indifferent grunt, at worst it had cost me friendships. It was chat suicide.

Or so I thought.

‘I know,’ she said, her brown hair even glossier in close-up. ‘I’ve been saying the same thing for years.’

Cha-ching! Instantly my confidence returned to its normal level. Then just carried on soaring; soaring like an eagle that didn’t care if it went so high that it blacked out. Within seconds I found myself sharing another of my ace theories – that it was time to go beyond salt and pepper and begin the search for a third primary condiment.

This time she disagreed (she actually got quite angry), but it didn’t matter. By now a bond had been formed, a bond that nothing – save for 16 years of attritional bickering and one pretty choice piece of philandering (hers, see Chapter 15, the bitch) – would ever be able to undo.

Those first couple of years flew by like a car doing 50 in a 30 zone. Maybe even 60 in a 30 zone. Depends who you ask. We were the principals in our very own Norwich-based Hollywood romcom. She was a thinking man’s Meg Ryan, I was a non-Jewish Billy Crystal.

We soon moved in together, and it was when we did that I took another giant leap into the warm waters of adulthood. A gentleman doesn’t dwell on such things, but let’s just say that when two healthy and hygienic adults enjoy two bottles of wine on an empty stomach, strip naked, lie on the kitchen floor and place their genitals within spitting distance of one another, there are going to be fireworks.

I’ll admit that there was a certain awkwardness to those early romps. Whereas I was flying my first sorties into sexual territory, Carol had been hymen-free for the best part of six years. My caution didn’t last long, though, and within about three months I was able to perform my duties quietly, competently and with a minimum of fuss.

With things continuing to go well, it seemed only logical (I sound like Spock!) to proceed to the next step – marriage. So, in early 1977 I cycled the 26 miles to Carol’s parents’ house to meet with her father and request his daughter’s hand in marriage. But when I got there I was on the receiving end of an almighty curveball.

‘Hello, Alan,’ said Carol’s dad, Keith.

‘Hello, Alan,’ said Carol’s mum, Stella, not bothering to think of a greeting of her own.

Within seconds, I had nodded back at them. I would have spoken, but I’d just cycled the equivalent of a full marathon.

‘What brings you out this way?’

I put my hand up as if to say, ‘Give me a minute, will you, Keith? I’ve just cycled the equivalent of a full marathon.’

Yet no sooner had I got my breath back than I spotted something truly incredible. Sat on the lawn, as bold as brass, was a brand new FlyMo. Now not only did I not know Keith was getting a FlyMo, I didn’t even know he was
considering
it.

I was completely floored. This machine was science fiction brought to life. It was based, of course, on the original design for Sir Christopher Cockerell’s hovercraft. And you really did get a sense of that – apparently it simply glided across the turf, as light as a feather, as nimble as a ballerina. I’d even heard rumours that owners didn’t mind the back-breaking job of collecting up the cuttings afterwards. And that speaks volumes. Clearly, it was an honour to mow with.

Of course I was so distracted by this turn of events that I never did get his permission. I did make another attempt the following month, though. I faxed through a request to his office. But I’d got the extension number wrong and it went to a different man.

The most profound moment of my life was still to come, though.
³⁹
And I’ll never forget the moment I heard the news.

I was banging about in the cellar, trying to find a pewter tankard that a friend of mine, Pete Gabitas, had suggested could be worth a fair bit of money. Sweaty, angry and pretty pissed off, I was not in the best of moods. Carol approached with a glass of lemonade, but it was homemade and I preferred the bottled fizzy kind so I took it without saying anything. Straight away, she looked hurt and I could tell she was troubled by something.

‘Out with it, Carol,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to find a ruddy tankard here.’

‘Alan,’ she said. ‘I’ve fallen –’

Freezeframe!

Let me tell you something about Carol. Over the years I spent with her, I learnt that ‘I’ve fallen’ was an opening gambit that could go one of two ways. One was very good, the other very bad. There was no middle ground. On the bad side, the sentence could end, ‘… off some step-ladders’ or ‘… out of love with you’. On the good? ‘… for one of your practical jokes’ or …

Unfreeze!

‘… pregnant.’

She was with child, and I was to be a dad. I’m told that some men have written entire books about the experience of becoming a father. And while that’s clearly too much, there’s certainly plenty to be said on the subject.

This child, my first, was Fernando. He was conceived in January 1980, the same month that President Carter announced a grain embargo against the USSR. Carol and I had been hiking and stopped for a toilet break behind a large boulder on Helvellyn. One thing led to another and soon we’d taken off our Gore-Tex trousers
⁴⁰
and were having, for want of a better phrase, full sexual intercourse. (I should add that before getting ‘hot and heavy’ we’d moved a good metre due east of the piddle zone.)

As to how it happened? Well, Carol hadn’t been on the pill, so I can only hazard a guess that the prophylactic had got punctured in the cut and thrust of what was some fairly robust lovemaking. Not that we cared. We were to be parents! In just under nine months I would be welcoming a child into the world in much the same way as I would one day welcome the guests on to my primetime BBC chat show. Namely, very warmly indeed. (And ideally with the musical backing of a 22-piece house band.)

The early stages of the pregnancy were equally tough for both of us. For the first ten weeks Carol suffered from almost incessant nausea, not to mention frequent bouts of oral vomiting. While, for my part, I was having hell’s own job getting a reasonable quote for a new fan belt.

Eventually, though, things settled down (I ended up going with NDB Autos on King Street) and we could begin to enjoy learning about the different stages of the foetus’s growth. One week it was the size of a pea, another a walnut, then a plum, an apple, a beef tomato, by which time the novelty of being able to equate my child’s size to the mass of a common fruit or vegetable had really started to razz me off.

When the birth came, though, I have to confess that I didn’t find it especially traumatic. After all, I’d been through it myself some 25 years earlier, and that experience (see page 3)
seemed
to stand me in good stead. Carol, on the other hand, wasn’t quite so keen. It took her two days and two nights to deposit our first-born from her loins. But finally, almost as if he knew there were only minutes left on my car-park ticket, Fernando Partridge was born, weighing in at 9lbs 4oz (roughly the size of nine one-pound bags of sugar).

There he was, his skin covered in a thick film of my wife’s innards. Tears streamed down my face. I was so happy I wanted to shout it from the rooftop. But at the same time I knew that that afternoon’s downpour would have made the slate tiles so slippery that achieving any kind of purchase would have been impossible. Equally, I was acutely aware of the car-parking situation mentioned above.

After a while (a bit too long actually) I was awarded my child and I cradled him against the crook of my elbow. He was well swaddled so I didn’t have to worry about getting any of Carol’s guts on my shirt. We stood at the window, me and my son, my son and I. The night sky was straining to get into the room but couldn’t because of the glass. I could at least protect him from that.

I looked up at the starry night and knew what I must do. I closed my eyes and began to sing very, very quietly, for the first time, to my infant son.

‘There was something in the air that night, the stars were bright, Fernando. They were shining there for you and me …’

And at that point, I broke down. To this day, my inability to sing the full chorus irks me because I’d just realised that I could change the next bit, ‘for liberty’, to ‘for Carol P’, which I thought would be quite nice. But I’d turned to look at Carol and she looked so happy and proud, it made my throat constrict and fill up with tears. I handed the child back to a nurse and ran off to the toilets so I wouldn’t be seen, throwing my head back on the way to shout, ‘I’m a
father
, you
mothers
!’

I also have a daughter, whose birth invoked similar feelings.
⁴¹

37
With the exception of a Hoseasons holiday to Bournemouth in 1979. Consistently excellent intercourse.

38
Press play on Track 7.

39
Press play on Track 8.

40
But not our boots – there was a fair bit of shingle underfoot.

41
Denise.

Chapter 5
Hospital Radio

IN 1967 I MISDIAGNOSED
myself with cancer of the ball bag. In every other respect I was a perfectly normal youth – I was active, I had a good diet, I was pubing well – but one day I found a lump.

For three long days, I felt the cold hand of death on my shoulder. Lost in the depths of despair I tried to figure out what I had done to deserve this. I wasn’t an evil person. The worst thing I’d ever done was kick a pig.
⁴²
It’s not even as if I wanted to live a particularly long life. As a child I would have been satisfied to reach my mid 30s. To be honest, I just wanted to best Christ.

Yet it seemed I wouldn’t get the chance. As I sat in the doctor’s waiting room, I pulled out a notepad and began to draw up my final will and testament. It was almost as if, even at the age of 12, I was somehow aware of the tax implications of dying intestate.

But before the pencil lead had dried on the paper, I was spared. A quick medical fondle by Dr Armitage had identified that the suspected tumour was nothing more sinister than an infected paper cut – a result, I later realised, of a clandestine word-search puzzle done under my duvet after lights off. The heat from my head-mounted caver’s torch had made it impractical to continue without removing my jim-jams. And it was then that I must have nicked my scrotum.

I may have cheated death on that bitter February morn, but I had learnt a valuable lesson. I had learnt what it felt like to stare death in the face (and also what it felt like to have its cold hand on your shoulder). And I believe it was this knowledge that helped me make such an unmitigated success of my first job in broadcasting (read on).
⁴³

Snowflakes fell from the sky like tiny pieces of a snowman who had stood on a landmine.
⁴⁴
My wipers scurried across my windscreen, back and forth, back and forth, back and – my god, was that the time? I had just five minutes to get to work. And so help me god, nothing (other than perhaps the weather, the roadworks at the top of Chalk Hill Road, and the distance I still had to travel) was going to stop me.

For the last three years I had been a hospital radio DJ at St Luke’s in Norwich. It was a smashing little hospital and many of the people who went in there didn’t end up dead. I loved my job, though. And despite being unpaid, I’d been quick to negotiate free parking and the right to jump the queue in the canteen – this never went down well, but the patients were often too weak to oppose me.

But I hated being late, because the inmates needed me. And while no one would be silly enough to claim that my trademark mix of great chat, decent pop and amusing home-made jingles could take
all
their pain away, it did take the edge off and was definitely more helpful than homeopathy.

Six minutes later I pressed the red button and spoke into the mic(rophone).

‘Whoa! Yeah! Call off the search party. I’m
here
. It’s one minute past eight and this is Alan Partridge! Or should I say the
late
Alan Partridge! Perhaps not, because that would suggest I was dead. And I am not! But here’s a list of people who are …’

You’ll notice from this that I had a much brasher broadcasting style in my early days, my speech peppered with laughs and shouts and whoops. Soon after
Good Morning Vietnam
came out, I’d even begin shows with the holler: ‘Gooood morning St Luuuuuke’s!!!!!!’ However, I was upbraided for this and told it called to mind a war zone littered with the injured and diseased – which was precisely why I’d thought it was so appropriate.

As DJing gigs go, it was far harder than people realise. Yes, you have a captive audience, but you also have a listenership that is almost exclusively poorly. And that makes song selection a delicate business. One wrong step and you could instantly offend a fairly meaty percentage of patients. Just take the number one singles from my first year in the job, 1975. Almost all of them were capable of upsetting someone. Art Garfunkel’s ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ (the recently blinded); David Essex’s ‘Hold Me Close’ (burns victims); The Stylistics’ ‘Can’t Give You Anything’ (the terminally ill); Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand By Your Man’ (paralysed women, paralysed homosexual men).

In my time at the hospital, I was broadcasting live during the deaths of some 800 patients. It’s a record that stands to this day. Industry awards and repeated praise from
TV Quick
magazine are all very well, but it gives me immense pride to think that the final voice those 800+ people heard may have been mine, as I read the traffic and travel or introduced a clip from my favourite
Goon Show
LP.