Steve Coogan confirms when Alan Partridge will return

Alan Partridge fans rejoice! Steve Coogan has confirmed that he will return to TV as Alan Partridge this February.

The 53-year-old actor and comedian revealed details of the upcoming series This Time With Alan Partridge during a guest spot on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast.

Coogan says the show will be chat show in style, and loosely based on The One Show. Promising to provide the ‘voice of Brexit’ he says the show will debate topical issues including the #MeToo movement.

“What we do is we have him trying to jump on the bandwagon and say, you know, he says ‘Hey! I’ve made mistakes, I’ve stood on the side of the sidewalk and slow hand-clapped while I watch a woman try to parallel park, you know, and I feel bad about that. And now if I saw a woman doing it now, I would shout instructions,” Coogan told Maron.

And he added that Partridge will struggle to grapple with some of these issues but will ultimately ‘try to do the right thing.’

“He’s sometimes ignorant and prejudiced but he tries to do the right thing. Early on we made him too predictably conservative a bit like shooting fish in a barrel – a caricature.

“Whereas now we do him as someone who realises that he’s got to get on message. He’s struggling to do the thing he’s supposed to.

“Me Too – there’s a whole episode about that. That’s such a difficult topic for anyone to talk about for anyone to say anything about, but if you’re doing a character it weirdly gives you this licence to. You can get things wrong in a big way and it’s fine because it’s him doing it.

“You’re not sanctioning or agreeing with what he’s saying, you’re saying “this guy gets things wrong” so you have licence to do it,” he explained.

Coogan will be joined by co-stars Susannah Fielding as presenter Jennie Gersham and Tim Key as Simon Denton.

The series is expected to run for six episodes and Coogan admits the show will be ‘very much the sweet spot for a man whose CV boasts over two decades of weekday local radio’ for Partridge.

He confirmed that the series will begin in February on BBC One. This will be second chat show format show for Alan Partridge, as Knowing Me Knowing You ran on BBC2 1994-1995.

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