I actually can remember the first time I encountered Alan Partridge. It was in 1991 or 1992 and I was waiting for the plumber to come and fix a radiator in my flat in Hackney. There had been a patch of rust in the pipe and one day it gave way and water began flooding onto my futon.

Hang on. That’s not important now. The point is I turned on the radio while waiting. I’d like to say that I initially mistook the spoof sports reporter on Radio 4′s On the Hour for the real thing, but that was not really the case. It became immediately apparent that we had a rather perfect blend of David Coleman and Elton Welsby on our hands. He was very funny, but he didn’t sound like the sort of character who could support his own show. How wrong I was?

Steve Coogan’s greatest creation — a compendium of mid-Thatcher vulgarities wrapped in casual knitwear — is surely unique in one regard. No other comic character can have gone through so many successful iterations. Frasier was in Cheers and Frasier. Lou Grant is odd in that he appeared in two different types of show: the sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show and his own excellent drama. But Partridge shifted about media and formats with quite dizzying momentum. On the Hour (spoof radio news show) led into Knowing Me, Knowing You (spoof radio chat show), The Day Today (spoof TV news show) and the television version of Knowing Me Knowing You. The first version of KMKY really shouldn’t have worked. It essentially used the format of a television chat show and took away the cameras, but it is still among the funniest of all Alan’s incarnations. “Smelly, smelly Alan Fartridge!” That’s what I say.

We had now reached 1994. Another three years passed before — surely this was a terrible idea — he turned up in a conventional sitcom (complete with audience laughter) entitled I’m Alan Partridge. What do you know? The show was as funny as ever. The character had become sadder. New personalities swelled around him and his Travel Tavern: the compliant Lynne, the scary Michael, the on-the-wagon Dave Clifton. Another series followed in 2002.

The new century started off quietly for Alan. Then, in 2010, he changed media for one of these new “web” things. The brilliant Mid-Morning Matters, following Alan on radio at North Norfolk Digital, is as loaded with top-rate gags as any other incarnation. The spoof autobiography I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan is a masterpiece of Pootterish agitation. There were a few specials and then the film, Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa, in 2013. Today, for viewers lucky enough to have Sky Atlantic, Alan returns with a new series of Mid Morning Matters.

Phew! Here is my contention. There have been only two significant dips in form during that extraordinary run: one very slight, one a bit more noticeable. There probably wasn’t much wrong with the second series of I’m Alan Partridge, but, emerging in the wake of The Office (indeed immediately succeeding series two in the same slot), it did feel just a little old fashioned. So what. It provided many more classic lines — “Stop getting Bond wrong!” — and added cleverly to Alan’s hilarious miseries. Alpha Papa does seem to be more of a problem. For the first time, the shift in medium seemed to strip some of his character away. He was nicer, less cowardly and just a little more human. There was a suggestion (just a suggestion, mind) of those dreadful 1970s film versions of British sitcoms that ended up diluting great characters as they transposed them to a wider universe.

I suspect we may be able to move on. The trailers for the new Mid Morning Matters are packed with superb one-liners. Oo! What am I waiting for. The episodes “drop” (as the young people say) right now. I’m away.