This Time with Alan Partridge concluded its acclaimed first series on BBC1 last night – but will it return for a second?
The comedy show, co-written by brothers Neil and Rob Gibbons, is regarded to be up there with the best of Steve Coogan’s Partridge, including 1990s series Knowing Me, Knowing You, with many commending the supporting role from Susannah Fielding as Partridge’s co-host Jennie Gresham.
Episode six (read our review here) ended with uncertainty thrown upon Partridge’s position on fictional series This Time following a bust up with Jennie that saw her walk off set moments before the broadcast began.
Hope for a second series was fuelled by BBC comedy boss Shane Allen at the launch of the show in February as well as the Gibbons brothers who confirmed they’d be up for writing more episodes.
However, don’t go expecting a new series anytime soon. Neil told Radio Times.com: “When you do Partridge, it’s quite an intense working process. The writing process never ends really because we write in the writing stage, in the shooting stage and in the editing stage, so you tend not to strategise that many steps ahead. It’s such an immersive experience that when you come out of it you just want to think about other things, so we don’t really have a life plan for Alan all mapped out, we just wait until the juices start flowing again and then see where we think Alan would go and what he’d be doing and wait for the ideas to bubble up organically.”
One person who would love to return is Fielding, who said: “I think we’d all like to [do more], and obviously it’s been successful, and I think the BBC really like it, so fingers crossed for another series.
Before this Time, though, it seems the Gibbons brothers are working on another Partridge project altogether, which will see the character “try his hand at something else”.
They told the Empire film podcast: “There are other formats on our list, one of which we’re – I don’t know if we can talk about it – but we’re about to shoot another Partridge series.”
Whether they’ll write more This Time after remains to be seen, but it certainly seems promising.
