Big beacon, p.1
Big Beacon, page 1
Contents
TITLE PAGE
A LETTER FROM THE AUTHOR
PRODOGUE
SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE
THE KRAKEN AWAKES
SEEING THE LIGHT
NEW WAYS OF THINKING
I SHALL
STASIS
MY TRANSITION BEGINS (NOT GENDER)
GOING PLACES (OF MY LIFE)
FISHERMAN’S FRIENDS
SILAS, WHOM I DISLIKED IMMENSELY
FRIENDS OF ABBOT’S CLIFF
MARVIN
NEITHER CHUMS NOR EGGS
CHAV
SPITTING FEATHERS
GOOD FELLAS
BULLHORN BOSS
ME TOO, PLEASE!
OH, RED
RESURRECTING
KWAAAAK
THIS TIME
CIDER WITH ALAN
BACK IN THE BIG TIME
GUANO
JENNIE GRESHAM
THE POISON INSIDE (OF) ME
SELDOM
UNDER PRESSURE
HOPPING MAD
THE FRIENDS OF ALAN PARTRIDGE
EPIDOGUE
PLATE SECTION
COPYRIGHT
* * *
FROM
‘THE RIME OF THE
ANCIENT MARINER’
The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the lighthouse top.
The light came on Oh! How it shone
As the keeper flicked the switch
It casts its spell, the rocks were quelled
The sea was now his bitch
by
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (first verse)
and Alan Partridge (second verse)
* * *
A LETTER FROM THE AUTHOR
he1 book you are about to read isn’t like other books. It employs a daring structure known as a dual narrative.
What’s a dual narrative? Well, it comes from the words ‘dual’, meaning two, as in dual carriageway or dual nationality. And ‘narrative’, meaning story or narrative.
It’s a device you’ll be familiar with from the world of film. In a popular movie, we might follow a character in childhood and then see that same character played as an adult by Keira Knightley. Now, when people pay to watch Keira Knightley, they ain’t gonna sit there for an hour while a child actor has a go at the role. A paying punter and fan of Knightley will spend that hour thinking, quite rightly, and excuse my language so early in the book, What the fuck is this?
People simply don’t sit in a movie they’re not enjoying, not in a cineplex that has air hockey on site or a ten-pin bowling alley next door. You have to grab them by the short and curlies (pubes) and enthral them from the get-go. If not, they’ll vote with their feet and skidaddle, maybe grab a Frankie & Benny’s and try to win a big teddy from a basketball game with an undersized hoop. No disrespect to the child actor – I’m sure they’re very good and they’ve been in Holby or the stage version of Matilda – but we’re here to see Knightley. We want Knightley. Where’s Knightley?
How does a filmmaker square that circle? How can he (or increasingly she! ) incorporate the childhood section of the story without angering their Keira-hungry audience? They do it by using a dual narrative, with the storylines running, if you like, ‘side by side’ – a phrase a lot of you will be familiar with. With the stories placed in parallel, the filmmaker can flit between the two at will. Bit of the child actor, bit of Knightley, bit of the child actor, bit of Knightley. Oftentimes, love that word, they’ll pop the date on screen to indicate to the audience that we’ve swapped from one period of time to another. It’s something we’ve all seen, and if you’re thinking, Hmm, doesn’t ring a bell, trust me, you will have seen it, you just can’t remember right now.2
So, we know it works in films, but incredibly it’s never been tried in a book before – until now. In Big Beacon, each strand of the dual narrative will tell a different story of resurrection. One follows the pursuit of a simple dream, the struggle to resuscitate a career as a TV personality. Will I succeed?3 The second follows a very different quest – one in which I spurn the world of broadcasting for a more humble life spent restoring a dilapidated lighthouse, and in doing so, in scenes that are often quite moving, tenderly breathing new life into both the abandoned seaside building and, in a funny kind of way, my own soul.
A simple rule of thumb is that the chapters alternate between the narratives. So it goes TV career, lighthouse. TV career, lighthouse. TV career, lighthouse, TV career, lighthouse. You get the idea. If you read the book, it’s really quite easy to follow. You come to realise that if you’re reading about my TV career, the next chapter is gonna be about the lighthouse. And when that’s over, you’ll be back on the TV career. Then it’s lighthouse again. I’m making it sound like you need a pen and paper. It’s really not that hard. My assistant’s read it and she doesn’t even have an O Level.
Please enjoy this book. Pop a bookmark in this page if you’d like to return to it as a ready-reference tool. Any bookmark will do, but I’d ask you not to fold back the corner of the page, as it creates dog ears.
Thank you.
* * *
1 I’ve always wanted to start a book with a big monk’s letter and make it quite saucy. I was advised I can’t do that in the current climate but my assistant suggested if I include a muscly man it would keep the moaning minnies at bay. If I can keep it up, I hope to start every chapter with one of these.
2 Jumanji.
3 [SPOILER] Yes.
PRODOGUE
wo candy flosses, please!’
I sniff deeply and let the sticky air waft up from the drum and fill my nostrils. I’ve always enjoyed the taste of these sugary pink puffs and buy them whenever I see a stall. Tucking into this wispy, coloured nest might feel like you’re eating an old woman’s hair on a stick, but my God, she is one delicious lady.
It’s 11 June 2021. The funfair’s come to Chapelfield Gardens in Norwich and we are going to rock. I’ve enjoyed the evening so far, nodding at people who recognise me from my BBC One show This Time and just forgiving those who don’t.4
I’ve come with my dog, Seldom, to stretch (a) his legs, and (b) the patience of everyone else at the funfair. Seldom’s a rambunctious presence, preferring to walk through people rather than round them and snarling if he feels disrespected – even when restrained by a lead lashed to my arm, supported by a two-shouldered, concealed harness fitted with an emergency ripcord.5
But the fact is, he becomes more cross if left alone in the house. Of course, I prefer to come to the fair without him, but when I got home the other year he smelt fried onions on my clothes and went berserk. So this year I’ve taken no chances. He’s had his eggs, he has his ear defenders on, and, as long as they don’t play banjo rock – e.g. Mumford & Sons – I like to think everything will be fine.
The vendor hands me my flosses and I hold my card against the contactless console to pay – it feels odd using a modern payment system to buy a snack that should have been banned in about 1970, but no one else raises an eyebrow so I just chuckle and stroll.
I look round for Seldom but there’s no sign. He’s probably gone to get a burger. He learnt last year that if he kicks open the cool box behind the burger van, he can get at the discs of frozen mince and feast.
I wait for a minute for him to return, allowing myself a brief daydream in which he meets a female dog who just gets him and is able to bring out his softer side, the two of them eventually living at the oasthouse with me – so wrapped up in each other that I can have visitors again. Another minute passes. I’ve finished my floss and his is beginning to droop. This isn’t like him.
A single white balloon floats upwards. I watch its silent rise. Then back to the action.
I start to walk around, calling Seldom’s name, gently at first but then more urgently: ‘Seldom? Seldom!’
Another minute passes. I’m frantic now. Where is he? I’m stopping people. ‘Have you seen my dog? He’s big and brown. I don’t know – he’s just a big, brown dog.’ But no one’s seen him.
Now I’m running, pushing past duck-hookers, coconut hurlers. ‘Seldom! Seldie!’ I pray he’s not got on a dodgem. Like the nearby town of Sheringham, he welcomes careful drivers only. Seldom, where are you?
I hand his candy floss to a young boy whose mother tuts – Oh, fuck off, I think – and hurtle through the throng of giggling families. I’m spinning round, the funfair now a blur of neon and tat. And then … I see him, lying peacefully a few yards away.
Relief gushes through me and I put my hands on my knees, partly to steady myself and partly to wipe on to my trousers any trace of candy floss. I smile and walk towards him. He’s having a nap in between the helter-skelter and the waltzers.
‘Where the hell did you go, you daft bugger?’ I say, although I skip ‘the hell’ and ‘you daft bugger’ bits.
He’s not moving. I approach him, making a clicking noise with my tongue like a Geiger counter so as not to suddenly surprise him with one loud noise when I’m beside him. ‘Seldie?’
He’s very still. I stare at him. He’s not breathing. Something’s wrong. I push him hard – the acid test. Either he retaliates with extreme prejudice or he’s dead.
Oh my God, I think he’s dead. I know in that moment the image of this hulking dark form next to the lighthouse-shaped slide would be seared onto my brain for ever.
‘Seldom! Seldom, no. Please, Seldom. No, Seldom, Please, Se
Two fairground workers look over, resembling a pair of thick-set Morrisseys. ‘We can shift him, no problem,’ says one. ‘We’ve shifted bigger weights than that before now.’
I don’t ask. Seldom would have liked them.
I watch as they roll him into the jaws of a digger, and it suddenly hits me: he’s gone. I howl at the heavens. ‘Nooooo!’ I see the balloon rising ever higher – as if his very soul is taking flight.
‘Seldom!
‘Seldom!
‘Seldom!
‘Seldom!
‘Seldom!
Seld—’
I realise a woman is standing next to me, handing me back the candy floss I’d gifted to her son. I take it, wait for her to leave, then, before the tears begin, I plunge my face into it – and eat.
* * *
4 For those who are interested and do want to approach me:
‘Hey Alan, where’s Jennie?’ = BAD
‘Hey Alan, my uncle isn’t very well, can you record a birthday message for him on my phone?’ = BAD
‘Mr Partridge, sorry to bother you, I don’t want a selfie, I just want to say nothing more than I admire and respect what you do.’ = GOOD
5 After some trials in a field using a quad bike as a dog substitute, this emerged as the best solution.
Something in the Middle
21st June, 2021
6 man strides down a corridor in BBC Broadcasting House with an almost rhinocerine confidence. It’s ten days PS7 and he’s a presenter at the top of his game – with no idea he’s about to lose even more than he’s already lost.
‘I’m gonna need breath mints, a big banana and some coffee.’
The man is I, Partridge.
‘Caf or decaf?’ My assistant holds up two flasks as she jogs to keep up – her replacement hip, a Chinese one crudely shaped out of PVC composite by twelve-year-olds, earning its money with every step.
‘Caf. No, decaf. No, caf. Extra caf. Maximum caf. I want the amount of caffeine Jason Statham would order.’
‘So a very strong black coffee?’
‘Precisely. A very strong black coffee with milk.’
It’s an hour after we’ve aired the latest episode of This Time and I am motoring, having been summoned to a meeting with the show’s producer, the head of content for BBC One and representatives from the corporate communications department and HR. I am not surprised. Moments earlier, I had created a nationwide campaign, exactly the kind of ‘big tent’ idea the badly listing show badly needed. All of a sudden, da big dogs got shit to talk about.
Faster I stride. Faster and faster. To my left, a wall adorned with empty BBC slogans; constant, constant pictures of Pudsey Bear (well done, you raise money for needy kids, we get it); and maps of fire exits and muster stations.
I begin to perspire. My assistant, whose nostrils are attuned to detect any fluctuation in my odour, looks up at me. ‘Roll on?’
‘Roll on.’
She hands me the Mitchum antiperspirant and I reach under my untucked shirt to slather it beneath my left arm. I hand the tube back to her and raise my right arm for her to do that side, as I’ve not been able to reach there since hurting the rotator cuff in my left shoulder at the weekend. My own fault! I’d attempted to dislodge a wasps’ nest from the side of my house using an old swing-ball I’d found in the shed. Wielding the pole like a medieval mace had been incredibly satisfying – the tennis-ball end acted as a miniature wrecking ball and pissed the wasps right off – but it had played merry hell with my shoulder.
My assistant does as instructed, removes any stray hairs from the applicator ball and replaces the lid. Moments later, she hands me the coffee. She’s recently got into coffee bags, as she finds the Nespresso intimidating and this way she can employ a system she already understands from the world of tea bags. On this occasion she’s squeezed the coffee bag a bit too hard and it’s ruptured, leaving a layer of sedimentary silt at the bottom of the flask. Still, she’s a good worker and was only trying to extract maximum flavour from the bag, albeit cackhandedly.
Besides, I am in a very good place, for in the last few minutes of the show, something special had happened. An unscripted moment of daring improvisation that had spawned a movement, one that was already making waves and/or inroads across the nation.
‘I am hopping mad and I want something in the middle.’
Eleven words. Forty-two letters. One hell of a rally cry. Uttered by me, live on BBC One, at 9.26 p.m. on 21 June 2021, this primal scream landed in an echoey TV studio like liver on a butcher’s slab. A cold, fat plop. But my God, it fizzed down cables into the nation’s living rooms where it prompted a very different reaction. And suddenly – boom! – everything changed.
Odd to think I’d said these words just a week earlier after a hairdresser had left a big gap in my fringe. Then, no one had batted an eyelid, yet these very same words delivered down the lens of a camera, encapsulating the frustration of the viewing public, had tonight gone off like a nuclear bomb and catapulted me to the vanguard of a nationwide movement.
It was a simple call for reasonableness – pithy, clear and almost musical in its rhythms. There was a poetry to these words that made them resonate and linger. Ross Kemp said later he was pretty sure they were a haiku but he wasn’t certain. And the sentiment itself – a rejection of extremism, plus a request to have more programmes on TV like Goodnight Sweetheart and Antiques Roadshow – was surely irrefutable. Little wonder it had created a groundswell of public feeling.
The public was the ground; I was the swell.
Revisionists will try to understate how seismic this was – and that’s cool, that’s cool, that’s cool – but the facts are these: in the days that followed, ‘I am hopping mad and I want something in the middle’ became every bit as ubiquitous as ‘Hands, Face, Space’ or (my personal favourite) ‘See It, Say It, Sorted’. It captured the public imagination, certainly in towns with a high C2/D social demographic (skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers). Trust me, that heady summer those words were everywhere. You couldn’t move without seeing them retweeted by a single dad who likes the England flag, or chanted by a gaggle of aggressive mums outside a Portsmouth school. For three weeks they were daubed on a motorway bridge on the M6 as you approached Preston.
It gave the people hope, something to believe in, an issue over which they could come together. Families that had been fractured by one brother sexting another brother’s fiancée, a gran saying something overtly racist to a grandson’s mixed-race girlfriend, or an uncle grabbing a nephew by the collar because he sneered at Brexit, could finally sit down for a roast dinner and say, ‘Hey, what about that something in the middle campaign?’.
For the first time, I was the face of something. The leader of a people. An iconic figure with an army of acolytes in lockstep behind me. I was like Christ donkeying through the streets of Galilee. I had heft.
We arrive at the meeting room. I enter.
I don’t know it yet, but I’m walking into an ambush, an HR mugging in which I’ll be told I’ve already completed my final television appearance. My last ever episode of award-winning8 BBC magazine show This Time. I am effectively going to be crucified like (yes, him again) Lord Jesus Christ.
‘Do you mind if I don’t high five you, Alan?’ Howard Newman, the show’s producer, is avoiding my eye, not to mention my hand, which now hangs in the air, as limp and redundant as the mistletoe in Rod Liddle’s conservatory. I slowly lower it.9 I know this to be a bad sign. No five should ever go unhighed. My rotator cuff twinges in sympathy.
I’m surrounded by fretting BBC staff and a producer (Howard) who looks like a heart attack in a Burton shirt – a coterie of panicky pen-pushers, covering arses and baying for blood.
Howard speaks again: ‘I think we need to look at your role, going forward.’
I nod. A less intelligent mind might have processed this as, They want to look at me roll, going forward, and launched into a judo roll in the middle of the meeting room. But although slightly panicking, I am an altogether sharper intellect and realise what was meant just before initiating a roly-poly.
I feel no rancour towards Howard. It is obvious to me that the role is too big for him and he is struggling. He’d joined the corporation from E4, the channel famous for bringing us Japanese stunt show Banzai. Well done them – but Banzai was twenty-two years ago. What have they done since? Nothing.
