Felicity Montagu (plays Alan’s long-suffering PA, Lynn, in I’m Alan Partridge and Alpha Papa): Comedy needs a bit of pain in it for me. If I’m watching one of those American shows that’s just about zingy one-liners I switch it off because I don’t care about those characters. It can be cruel, but it’s got to come from some place that feels real.

Iannucci: I think the Partridge stuff is some of the hardest work we do as writers. It’s very easy to write things that Alan would say. What’s difficult is reining him in and making sure that the world around him is vivid, that the characters stand up and the structure is sound. With I’m Alan Partridge, we wanted to tell the story entirely from his point of view, so we had to make sure that he was in every scene. It almost drove me insane.

Montagu: Everyone thought I was corpsing along with Sally Phillips in some of those scenes in I’m Alan Partridge, desperately trying not to laugh. But actually, it was simply that Lynn was constantly mortified by Alan’s behaviour and was bowing her head in shame. So I’d like to set the record straight on that.

3. The comeback

After a gap of seven years, Alan returned in 2010 with Mid-Morning Matters, a series of YouTube shorts which found him further downsized, DJ-ing on the micro-station North Norfolk Digital. The shorts were eventually picked up by Sky Atlantic, which also commissioned Alan’s guide to Norwich (Welcome To The Places Of My Life) and Open Books, in which he discussed his literary influences (it turns out his favourite Dickens character is “Mr Tickle”) while publicising his autobiography, I, Partridge: We Need To Talk About Alan, published in 2011, a bestseller whose postmodern brio was such that David Baddiel, only half in jest, suggested it should be nominated for the Booker. Alan’s third, fourth and fifth winds were given impetus by the recruitment of two new writers to the team, 36-year-old twins Rob and Neil Gibbons.