The new series of Alan Partridge will be on our screens in February, creator Steve Coogan has said.

The Middleton-born actor gave details of the new series during a candid chat with American comedian Marc Maron.

Alan will take on a range of serious topics, including the #MeToo movement, in his new magazine style series This Time With Alan Partridge.

The comedian explained: “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’.”

The new show will lampoon magazine programmes such as The One Show.

It will be the first time Alan has returned to the BBC since his 90s chat show Knowing Me, Knowing You, which ended disastrously when he accidentally shot a guest live on air.

In a candid chat with comedian Maron on his podcast ‘WTF with Marc Maron’ Coogan discussed the evolution of his most famous character as well as his work in the new film Stan and Ollie.

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He said: “We’ve just finished a new TV series which starts next February.

“It’s another Alan Partridge series but this one is like a magazine type show. So it’s like a sort of a morning thing with a female and male co-presenter.”

He added: “I’m really excited about the show, it’s a thing where Alan tackles serious topics like the whole 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. And this is the crucial thing, because you’ve got a comic character he can say stuff that you go ‘that is so off message’ but sometimes he can say stuff that’s true that I can’t say. So the fool can point something out that everyone secretly knows to be true.”

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Coogan added: “You’re not saying that he’s right and you’re not saying that he’s wrong. It allows you to sprinkle a little humanity on arguments that are atrocious.”

Coogan told the presenter that he tired to approach his writing process in a very ethical way.

“I don’t like to use comedy to attack people who don’t have any power,” he said. “Some people do that and I don’t like it.

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“Are you laughing at a prejudice or is the prejudice why you’re laughing? Intuitively that’s what I want to do.”

Explaining how Alan Partridge has evolved since his early days, the comedian said: “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.”

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The spoof show is being described as: “a heady mix of consumer affairs, current affairs, viewer interaction, highbrow interview and lightweight froth”.

Co-starring Susannah Fielding as co-presenter Jennie Gersham and Tim Key as Simon Denton, it is expected to run for six episodes.

It will be the first time Coogan has reprised the role since the 2016 Sky show Alan Partridge’s Scissored Isle.