"I've had a life of plenty/ Does that makes me a C-U-N-T?" So croons Steve Coogan in his new show, playing "himself" for once. It's a hilariously double-edged nugget of smug self-exculpation, and it also foregrounds the challenge Coogan faces with this tour. These are his first live shows for 10 years, since when he has become more famous as tabloid fodder and Tinseltown ego than as the character comic who won the Perrier award back in 1992.
In that show, he launched the Mancunian ne'er-do-well Paul Calf, who returns tonight for a number that sees him romancing a Gypsy temptress. His sister Pauline sings a hymn to the Marriott Hotel and brands her daughter overweight ("She'd had a gastric band fitted. She could have had a brass band fitted"). Both skits prove that Coogan's eye for the bathetic detail of tawdry clone-town Britain still has 20/20 vision.
But the show's predictable highlight is the return of Alan Partridge, reinvented as a motivational speaker. This is well-trodden comic ground, but it provides fertile soil for Partridge's high self-regard, foot-in-mouth crassness and inane DJ-speak. "If people were pies, who would have a positive filling?" he asks. (Trevor Phillips, as it happens.)
Neither this seminar nor Partridge's one-man play about Thomas More, which follows it, are realised in such a way as to be remotely credible. But they are shamelessly funny, and Coogan comes alive as soon as he adopts Partridge's adenoidal whine. The show has its weak spots, but - perhaps because I've been swayed by Partridge's positive-thinking masterclass - its successes linger in the mind.
