Alan Partridge has a problem. But he’s being very brave. Alan is opening up about his mental health. To many viewers, it won’t come as a surprise – Alan’s mental health has seemed sketchy ever since that punishing late-Nineties spell in the Linton Travel Tavern. But Alan’s realisation came later, after an amusingly minor breakdown while advertising high-volume pig-feed pellets as part of his portfolio of Norfolk-based corporate work.
His symptoms were mild – he fainted in someone’s lap, basically. But even so, Alan found a new, potentially monetisable calling. The result is How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge), a series he describes as “Britain’s first ever documentary about mental health”. One of Alan’s most enduring qualities is his dogged belief – usually in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary – in his own originality and genius. Whatever the opposite of imposter syndrome is, Alan Partridge has a terminal case. Does this qualify as a mental health problem? When it leads him to believe he can attempt a stand-up comedy set – as, excruciatingly, it does in this series – the answer is probably yes.
Because Alan Partridge is such a brilliant, comical character creation, it’s easy to forget that he’s a magnificently sustained satirical vehicle, too. In On the Hour and The Day Today, Partridge launched Steve Coogan’s career (and vice versa) with a note-perfect spoof on every overearnest, underinformed sports jockey you’d ever seen. Knowing Me, Knowing You skewered one of the TV staples of its day – the gimmicky, flashy, flimsy chat show. He’s gone on, via everything from state-of-the-nation polemics to attenuated podcast series, to sceptically poke the tenderest spots in the contemporary mediascape.
And he’s still doing it. While it feels mean to single out one individual, the title of this series seems like a very deliberate nod to Holly Willoughby’s melodramatic, much-mocked “Are you OK?” address on This Morning in the wake of the Phillip Schofield revelations. Willoughby seems to be a minor easter egg throughout; at one point, a random mock-up of a Mumsnet page on the screen boasts a thread titled “Holly Willoughby blanked me – not nice??”
It’s great that mental health has been demystified as a topic of discussion. But has it become a lazy televisual signifier of weight and depth rather than a sincere opening-out of discourse? More broadly, has the overuse of “therapy-speak” (terms like “triggers”, “interventions”, “boundaries”) become a new form of obfuscation and evasion?
How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge) is the best Partridge-related project in years. That’s because, as a character, Alan is such a perfect case study for the subject matter. He is the embodiment of all the reasons people struggle with mental health at the moment. Financial worries. Status anxiety. Relationship stress. Directionless political paranoia. Media overload. Technological alienation. If only he knew it, Alan has a full house.
The delightful irony underpinning this series, then, is that Alan is sad – just not in ways that he is genuinely willing to confront. There’s a glorious sequence in episode two where Alan attempts to recreate after-school hijinks with two similarly middle-aged childhood friends. They ride around on their bikes and muck about down the park. Alan reads a heartfelt, deeply sentimental poem he’s written to another old schoolmate before decrying it as “s***” and throwing it on the floor. Poor Alan. If he weren’t so consistently appalling, you could cry for him. It’s very funny, but quite touching, too, in its depiction of midlife ennui and regret.
Alan, though, is doomed to miss what’s right in front of him. He falls out with a man, even as he’s saving his life. He spends a night in a country pub and ends up sleeping “with an open penknife in my hand” after a contretemps with a member of staff. He’s only in the country pub at all because his semi-detached partner Katrina (Katherine Kelly) “told me to go away for the weekend and climb a big mountain by myself”. Soon, we will learn her motivation for doing this. Spoiler: it isn’t out of concern for Alan’s mental health.
The success of Alan’s journey is mixed, then. It’s been dotted with episodes of score-settling: with Tim Key’s Sidekick Simon; with the BBC commissioning editor who sacked him after his This Time on-air meltdown; even with his poor, blameless PA Lynn. No lessons are learnt. Fortunately, Alan is also the embodiment of another notable modern pathology: shamelessness. As his memoir attests, Alan has been “bouncing back” for years. He is the satirical epitome of redemption culture: a space within the world of celebrity and politics in which second and third chances aren’t so much earned as simply waited for. Literally any disaster can be parlayed into “content”.
And this is why How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge) works so well, as both a circular psychic travelogue and a satire. As the final episode declares, somewhat optimistically, Alan’s mental health journey has “come together to create a series that is both informative and accessible, that would work for either terrestrial channels or streamers”. He has poked around “inside the black box of my mind” and found nothing – except a new series.
How are you, Alan? Whether he’s ranking the teddy bears in a shop window or engaging in off-colour banter about diversity training with a robot called Zuzan, he’s still strange, and he’s still Alan. And that’s more than enough.
