Age: 55.

Appearance: As if Pringle threw up on him.

Aha! What's going on with Alan, then? The futility of his essentially barren and meaningless life has at last overwhelmed him and he's thrown himself off Norwich cathedral? Au contraire. The former DJ, former chatshow host and – "star" is the wrong word, "personality" even wronger, but "roiling mass of ego, insecurity, increasing neuroses and half-understood terrors forming a human void around which others orbited in appalled fascination" takes too long – focus of documentary series I'm Alan Partridge, is back!

What's he doing? Has he finally got the legendary monkey tennis made? No. His creator Steve Coogan has announced that Alan will appear in a series of 10 12-minute online episodes as part of a Fosters promotion.

What do you mean "creator Steve Coogan"? You know Alan Partridge isn't real, right? He emerged as a character on the Chris Morris/Armando Iannucci Radio 4 programme On the Hour, then moved to TV in The Day Today before hosting Knowing Me, Knowing You . . .

Aha! OK, it's not compulsory. And then two series of I'm Alan Partridge. Then things went quiet for a bit while Coogan went to Hollywood, starred in one brilliant film – A Cock and Bull Story – a variety of non-brilliant ones and appeared in an unsettling tabloid story about sleeping with Courtney Love.

I see. That does explain why last time I saw Alan he was in a show called Steve Coogan is Alan Partridge and Other Less Successful Characters Live. The clues were always there. You really just had to know where to look.

So Partridge is a pitch-perfect rendering of all that is inadequate and agonising in the human condition rather than simply an inadequate and agonised member of this sorry race? Indeed.

That's genius. I shall adjust my thinking accordingly. But you know, someone should tell his PA, Lynn. She should start looking for a proper job. Yes. OK. I will.

Not to be confused with: Dickie Bird, Russell Crowe, Christopher Wren, Florence Nightingale, Steve Coogan.