5. A Curiously Bright Outlook On Life

He might be a closed-minded, sexist, homophobic Daily Mail-reading bigot with alarming illusions of grandeur and a tendency to immediately alienate almost everyone he meets, but even a stopped clock shows the right time twice a day. In the midst of his painfully bumbling and lethally awkward adventures, I do believe that it's possible to glean some genuine inspiration from the life and opinions of Alan Partridge.Alan Partridge's career is a train wreck and his life is a disaster. He's divorced, his children don't want to see him, and at time of writing, he's filling the mid-morning slot on a radio station that might not even be the biggest station in North Norfolk. And yet, Alan's outlook always seems to be bright and optimistic. He never got depressed. Rather, he was officially fed up. During his lowest ebb, he never turned to drugs or alcohol. Instead, he binged on Toblerones. He might be rude, abrasive and inappropriate when interacting with any other human being; but whilst he leaves a trail of insulted and bemused people in his wake, he always seems to emerge with a smile and a quip. During Season 1 of I'm Alan Partridge, he's living in a Travel Tavern and working the graveyard shift at the radio station. In such circumstances, most people would be downright miserable. Alan, on the other hand, skips every day through reception singing choice excerpts from Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds. Alan has such an aptitude for remaining jolly as his world crashes around him that he might well be the reincarnation of Mark Tapley from Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit.