Steve Coogan's comic creation of the blathering social outsider Alan Partridge and his humiliating gaffes at Radio Norwich helped put Norfolk on the map. While Coogan plumped to base Partridge in what he calls here the "rump of Britain," it wasn't until he pitched up at Felbrigg Hall to film A Cock And Bull Story that he'd spent much time in the home place of one of his best-loved characters. The film saw Coogan team up again with director Michael Winterbottom, who has described the country pile, near Cromer, as "one of our favourite ever locations." With cast and crew bonding over pints at a local pub during filming in September 2004, they were pleased to be able to keep their vow to watch their movie back at Felbrigg on Tuesday, 4 July, 2006. The National Trust mansion staged the open-air showing in the walled gardens to celebrate the launch of the 26th Cambridge Film Festival. Although the film was released in January, it's a screening which Coogan said he would attend because of his "affection" for the movie. And it seems that spending time in Alan Partridge's home county may have sparked a comeback for the character. He last appeared on our screens in 2002 continually taunted by the fact that a mental breakdown meant he'd driven to Dundee in his bare feet while eating Toblerone. In this two-part interview, Steve Coogan tells Chris Goreham why Alan's sports casual wear and cod-piece could be popped on again for a feature film or TV special; why A Cock And Bull Story is so dear to him and how his latest sitcom Saxondale has been a change of focus. Can you explain the plot of A Cock And Bull Story?Oh, that's a cop out, frankly. The way to describe it is it's a film within a film. It's a film about a group of people trying to make a film about the novel Tristram Shandy. So part of the film is set in the 18th century and part of the film is set in the 21st century. I play the roles of Tristram Shandy, I play Walter Shandy, his father, and I also play Steve Coogan because for part of the film I play myself. So it sounds slightly confusing but the general received wisdom is it makes sense. It does once you've seen it but it's difficult to explain to people who haven't.That's the best I can do. There have been precedents for this, there have been precedents about films, about people trying to make films.  | | See photos from the screening in our gallery |
It's a side-ways look at the whole creative process of trying to make a film and Tristram Shandy, the novel, was known as the unfilmable book and Michael Winterbottom, the director, saw that as a challenge. Instead of just trying to adapt the book he thought it would be more inventive to have a film about a group of people trying to adapt the book onto film, so there are different layers of reality. It's certainly a very inventive film, is that why you were so interested in getting involved with it?I've worked with Michael before on 24 Hour Party People about the Manchester music scene in the '80s - about New Order and the Happy Mondays and he asked me to do this film. I enjoyed working with him so much that it was too good an offer to refuse. When he told me he wanted me to play myself in part of the film and be two other characters then it intrigued me and I raised both eyebrows. You're well-known as a character actor, how did you find it playing yourself?Michael's an author, director and he's about the work - he's very creative and artistic - so really it was about me... In some ways it was quite easy playing myself and in some ways it was quite difficult but you just have to be honest, I suppose, when you play yourself. When you're playing other characters it's easy. Some of it was near-the-knuckle, some of the material, but Michael is someone who I trust so I knew he'd do something that was intelligent. When you're playing yourself, the film deals with your private life and what goes on in your family life when you're trying to make a film. How true to life was that and how happy were you to have that featured in the film?Well, I'm quite happy to basically utilise... I'm creative and I am in the public eye so I don't mind using aspects of my private life if it's creatively justified, it's interesting and it makes the film better then I'm happy to do it. That was quite a simple one really.  | | Coogan - Lord of the manor |
We mix fact and fiction. Although I'm playing myself, in the film my wife is played by Kelly Macdonald. Now anyone who knows Kelly Macdonald knows she's not my wife and I also have a baby son and I don't have a baby son in reality so we juggled fact and fiction. The way I played myself in the film is more sympathetic than I think I am in reality, but then that makes for better comedy. I play myself as slightly, slightly, more pretentious than I am in real life. You're coming to Felbrigg Hall for the open-air screening on 4 July. What was it like filming a lot of the Tristram Shandy scenes there?Although it was originally written in Yorkshire and set in Yorkshire, we used Felbrigg Hall and we used lots of other wonderful houses in Norfolk. I have to say that for me, personally, it was a real revelation spending time in Norfolk. It was a part of the country that I wasn't familiar with despite my Alan Partridge, locating him in Norwich. I actually wasn't familiar with Norfolk at all, being a northerner from Manchester. I found it incredibly charming; it looks like no other county in England and what I was amazed by was the number of fantastic deciduous trees that were all about. I think it was because, apparently in Norfolk there are a lot of private estates - or was - all kind of conjoined. So if you tried to chop down trees in the past it would have been on pain of death. So I thought Norfolk was an amazing county, and the thing I realised about it was people talk about the big sky. Because it's relatively flat, sunrises and sunsets - because you're shooting very early in the morning - were magnificent. So I kind of fell in love with it topographically, shall we say. I guess some people might be surprised to hear you haven't spent that much time in Norfolk given the Alan Partridge thing.It's a common misnomer because when we were writing Partridge the only reason we chose Norfolk... or Norwich rather was... it wasn't about Norwich specifically as a town. First of all, when you write comedy you try not to use the clichés that other people have used, you try to create new clichés.  | | Steve Coogan with our man Wally Webb |
Norwich seemed to me be commutable from London, just about, but also because it's a strange city because it's on hill in the middle of Norfolk. If you look at a map of Britain it's slightly isolated and we thought that suited the character - that his isolation suited being from the city. It's not something that had been featured or talked about in comedy or drama a lot in recent times in television. That's why we chose it. I'd been to Norfolk a couple of times because I'd performed there as a stand-up comedian but I wasn't very familiar with it and some people saw it as me satirising or taking the mick out of Norwich and that really wasn't it at all. We could have made Alan from Southend or something, but Norwich seemed to suit him because it's situated in the rump of Britain as it were and it was unusual and not talked about a lot. When you were filming at Felbrigg did many of the locals stop you and talk to you about Alan Partridge?Not really. I think a couple of people stopped me at the station. One guy stopped me and told me my accent wasn't a Norfolk accent when I do Alan Partridge and therefore it was wholly inaccurate to which all I can say is he's absolutely right. I didn't even attempt to do that. I did an approximately cultivated southern accent but I'm a northerner so there are lots of flat vowels in there which shouldn't really be there but for some reasons flat vowels help comedy and rounded ones don't. Don't ask me why! The character Alan Partridge still catches imagination of the people of Norfolk. Here at BBC Radio Norfolk we do still get letters regularly for Mr A. Partridge.Golly, but there you go, some people believe people in soap operas are real so there's no accounting for taste or intelligence. | 
