Steve Coogan: the jumper that created Alan Partridge

The comedian cherishes the practical and the daft

This sweater bought me my house
Alan Partridge started as a radio character. When I was doing him for a live audience for the first time in 1991, I thought: “I should have a look.” I bought this jumper in Lillywhites on Regent Street. It’s something middle-aged men would wear to say, “Look, I’ve got a nice sweater.” I put it on, combed my hair to one side, and that’s how Alan Partridge was born. The design is horrible but it’s good quality.

This Bakelite reminds me how much TV educated me
I got this old Bakelite TV in Affleck’s Palace, a second-hand shop in Manchester. I have a romantic attachment to the post-war boldness and optimism of its design, the idea that as a society we can lift everyone up together. The BBC really did educate me, and made me intellectually curious. At the same time there were broad comedies like “Fawlty Towers” – everyone laughed at the same thing. You’d turn the TV off after watching a funny show and put the kettle on and talk about it and consign it to memory. That’s where I learnt to be a mimic. I’d act shows out for my mum’s friends. The BBC gave you your treats, and they gave you your greens. Nowadays people can just eat crap their entire lives, and get intellectual scurvy.

This album symbolised my ambition to stand out
When the Sex Pistols brought out “Never Mind the Bollocks” in 1977 I was 12 years old. My older brother Martin was an alternative voice to my parents, a taste-maker. He would say: “Don’t listen to the music everyone else is listening to, don’t follow the crowd,” and I wore that idea as a badge. I liked stuff that was anti-establishment. Someone needed to put a bomb under the nice, insipid pop music of the time, and that’s what the Sex Pistols did. I went halves on the album with a friend, we shared it one week on and one week off. The word “bollocks” was seen as slightly obscene by my father, so I had to smuggle it in and out of the house in a Val Doonican sleeve.

My father and I both had the same cap
I bought two of these caps in Lock & Co on St James’s Street in London: one for me and one for my father. The day he died, he wore the cap to walk to church, and on the same day I was wearing mine. He liked the fact, as I do, that when you pull the ear flaps down it looks a bit rubbish but it’s very, very practical. It’s sort of that attitude to life, which is: “I don’t care if I look daft.” It’s a nicely crafted, well-made thing.

This statue is a tribute to my parents’ faith
When I wrote the screenplay for the film “Philomena”, it was a way of expressing my feelings about faith. At the end of the film Martin Sixsmith, the journalist who I portrayed as a non-believer, gives Philomena a small statue of Christ to put on her lost son’s grave. It’s him acknowledging the importance of faith to somebody else, an act of generosity. That’s my attitude to the way I was raised, as a religious Catholic. I’m an atheist but the things I think are important were given to me by people of faith – my parents. I gave that statue to my mum and dad after we finished the film and it’s on the mantelpiece at my mum’s house now.

I can still feel the excitement of winning the Perrier award
I won it at the Edinburgh Festival in 1992. It felt like my whole world had shifted on its axis. Two years before I’d been to Edinburgh and everyone said I was crap. The next year I did a corporate gig in Greece instead. In 1992 I came back as part of a character comedy show directed by Patrick Marber, and we felt like the Young Turks. Everyone was doing angry stand-up in scruffy T-shirts and jeans, and having a director was seen as bourgeois. But Marber made me rehearse and cut out the fat. The first show we did had six people in the audience, and a month later we were the toast of the town. Whenever I look at the award I still feel the excitement of winning it.

As told to Abigail Fielding-Smith
“From the Oasthouse: The Alan Partridge Podcast” will be released on September 3rd

Images: Baby Cow, Getty, Alamy, Lock & Co

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