Tuesday 20 August 2013

In a pear-tree ? : A review of Alan Partridge : Alpha Papa (2013)

This is a review of Alan Partridge : Alpha Papa (2013)

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20 August

This is a review of Alan Partridge : Alpha Papa (2013)

Alan Partridge : Alpha Papa (2013) is a tremendously enjoyable film. If one knew the subject-matter or some of the scenes, one might not be able to imagine that laughs would come (and so consistently), but it comfortably runs to 90 mins without outliving its welcome. (I doubt - never having subjected myself to it - that one could say the same for Steve Coogan in The Parole Officer (2001)...)

That is not meant to knock long-standing Partridge collaborators Armando Iannucci and Coogan down, but rather to say that they (and the others who co-wrote) know what they are doing with the character, and how far to bend him - in the other film, Coogan is credited as authoring it just with Henry Normal (a producer on Alpha Papa), and it must have been a shock that enough people did not seem to trouble themselves to see it (even though, on a low budget, it grossed respectably enough.)

If one looks at the Wikipedia® page for Partridge, it is written in a curious amalgam of fact and pseudo-biography, almost as it was not known where to place this would-be child of Norfolk (though Coogan neither attempts to sound as though he is one, nor does much other than mask his Mancunian heritage), and it reveals that we have had more than twenty years of Partridgeisms on radio, and not far short since he first appeared on t.v. Again, in the nicest way, it had seemed like longer, and I had hoped against hope that Partridge had not been made into a feature for the sake of doing it.

Those whose judgements I trusted assured me that it would be a safe ride, and now I see that Coogan had had a half-feature-length t.v. outing with Alan Partridge: Welcome to the Places of My Life (2012). Alpha Papa loses nothing from seeing the trailer (a feat of avoidance that is almost impossible to achieve), keeps the gags, by and large, safe with Coogan, and he delightfully (in character) loses his dignity (in various different ways) whilst trying to play each situation for his advantage.

I am not sure that one likes Partridge any more than one ever does, because he is always on the make, but he does get our resect - momentarily - in some of the scenes that he has to face. However, he really does not irritate in this nicely structured scenario.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

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