HOWZAT

Coogan talks about this as if it were obvious, or as if everybody else did it, too. In fact, with the monstrous lower-middle-class sports reporter and chat-show host Partridge, he invented an entirely new way of making comedy. Partridge was not an impression of anybody, he was — with his ignorance, his ghastly golf-club clothes, his petty arrogance, his desperate lack of cool — an emanation of the zeitgeist, the irredeemably stupid lower-middlebrow philistine who does not know what he does not know.

“It was in 1991. I was working with Armando Iannucci, and we decided to call him Alan Partridge. It sounded a bit familiar. There was a reporter called Frank Partridge, I think, and Alan sounded a bit sporty.” When he first did the character on radio, he went to Lillywhites and bought a pink sweater with a golf logo (“Very expensive!”), slacks, a shirt and loafers. He combed his hair as horribly as he could. It was all to get in character for the studio audience. After the show, Patrick Marber told him Partridge would make him famous, and soon, everybody would be crying “Ah-ha!” and “Knowing me, knowing you” after him in the street. It happened, of course, but now the street encounters just irritate him. He also seems mildly miffed this media-savvy satire for a media-savvy generation failed to change anything at all.

“News reports on television still seem ridiculous to me. What I find bizarre is when a journalist is standing somewhere, on a story he knows next to nothing about, and the anchorman asks him, ‘What can you tell us about what has happened?’ And he’ll say what anybody could say, ‘Well, obviously, people are very unsettled by this, and it’s unclear what’s happening, but we should know soon.’ At one level, it’s funny, but at another, it’s just lazy and debilitating.”

After Partridge and other assorted emanations, there was always going to be a long convalescence for Coogan. Being a great British comedian does not offer great career prospects. A Fish Called Wanda gave Cleese a taste of Hollywood, and Sellers ruled for a while, but Hancock failed to make it in film and, in general, British comedians have had to settle for being British comedians. Undeterred, Coogan has flung himself into movies with alarming abandon. The one big-budget Hollywood number was Around the World in 80 Days, a turkey. He only likes to talk about this now because it gave him the chance to sit in a hot tub with Arnold Schwarzenegger. “‘Where’s my phone? I want to text someone’ — it was a moment like that.”

The full list of his films is already absurdly long, and he has Sofia Coppola’s Marie-Antoinette coming out next year, as well as a small film called The Alibi, and several others he seems unclear about. Yet he insists he has not abandoned his television roots. He has a BBC2 series called Saxondale, which should start in April. It’s about a former roadie who has become a pest-control officer. He’s excited about this because the hero is a sympathetic, witty character, unlike Partridge or that other 1990s monster, David Brent in The Office. Coogan saw only two episodes of the latter, because he was frightened of absorbing and imitating the style.

“I liked it, and it was good, but I really have to avoid that stuff. It starts sinking in by some kind of osmosis.”

He looks well, fit and sharply dressed. He has just turned 40, but he could be 30. Yet he’s right: there is a heaviness about him, a burden of some kind that twists his body as he speaks. There’s a constant background static of ums and ers. Perhaps he really doesn’t know who he is: the old Porsche or the new Ferrari. I certainly don’t. I returned that call on my mobile after we parted: “Yeah, just finished with Alan Partridge. He was great.”

A Cock and Bull Story opens on January 20

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