A-ha! Alan Partridge returns in an awfully bigoted adventure While the BBC’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the main event of the Bank Holiday TV schedules, poetry of a […]

While the BBC’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the main event of the Bank Holiday TV schedules, poetry of a rather different timbre was provided by that great bard of banality, DJ Alan Partridge. Her was back with Alan Partridge’s Scissored Isle, a travelogue in which he headed to Manchester, on a journey to connect with the common man as penance for an incident in which he called a young guest a “chav” live on air. Inevitably, though, it turned out to be an awfully bigoted adventure, in which he patronised Tesco workers, freegans and supposed “street gangs” alike, while going soft on payday lenders and sucking up to landowners.

Nevertheless, come the end of the hour, he had convinced himself that he had emerged reborn as a “better, more sought-after broadcaster”. And, with Coogan and co-writers Neil and Rob Gibbons’ script once again a steady stream of exquisitely detailed one-liners (“I am gripped by a lonely introspection like Andrew Neil on a train, or an elephant at Chester Zoo”), long may Alan’s delusion continue.