Steve Coogan (alive and well)

don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Partridge & Coogan in general but

not even anyone close?

really?

Ronnie Barker for me, Clive.

I know the trip exists but I hope someone makes a proper film about his life one day and the Rob Brydon rivalry is a major aspect. Imagine having a rivalry with Rob Brydon for real.

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Remember when John Thomson was really funny? Joe Beazley & Cheeky Monkey, Bernard Right-on, The Fast Show.

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Read an article not long ago about him saying the Bernard Righton stuff doesn’t go down well now. It’s interesting as I guess the original intention was to subvert those old fashioned bigoted joke set ups, but maybe now that stuff’s less common the BR shtick doesn’t hold up so much.

Yeah, i suppose it was very of the time and a lot of younger people today wouldn’t get the joke as they wouldn’t be familiar with the likes of Bernard Manning, Jim Davidson & Mike Read…this is definitely a good thing. Bernard Righton is still very funny when you consider the context of the time though.

OK. Brent.

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John Thompson said that rather than just being a pisstake of Manning et al there was also the suggestion that if you let people dictate too strongly what can or can’t be joked about then you’ve no jokes left. It was, he said (on the Coogan episode of The South Bank Show if I’m not mistaken) a bit of a wind up of “futon socialists”. Seemed a novel idea at the time, but less so in the current climate (after Ansari, Louis, etc).

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you’re dead right with this, he captures a kind of tragic petty arrogance so beautifully. Met so many people that are exactly like that character. Also as someone from a really bland and depressing part of the midlands the strange local pride thing is very true to life.

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Partridge as a character is a nicer person than Fawlty or Rigsby or Mainwarring or Blackadder or whoever. Maybe that’s part of his charm.

Not many people seem to have seen the old teenage cancer trust adverts (they were on cable in the early 00’s) but they show off Coogan-the-controlled-performer brilliantly. No props, no laugh track, no other actors, just him waffling away and it’s fantastic.

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I live 20 minutes walk from that pub.

Love that scene but I’ve still never been in there!

Hmmm. Not sure on this.
All of them fulfil the stereotype of the frustrated Englishman trapped in his own Hell/life, and all have a certain arrogance that continues to trip them up. But I would say Partridge as a person is far more awful than, say, Rigsby or Fawlty.

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Never saw that before! What’s it from?

Paul Calf’s Video Diary:

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I never knew Steve Coogan’s older brother was in that band from the eighties that I never much liked.

The Mock Turtles, wasn’t it?

Epitome of one hit ‘wonder’.

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yes! but also partridge really captures a certain desperate bleakness about life in the uk in general, too. motorways, premier inns, soulless pubs attached to the premier inn with 2 lonely people drinking in them. windshield wiper fluid, the works, b&q, florence and the machine on the co-op radio station. just the most depressing island nation aren’t we.

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His other brother was (very briefly) a presenter on Top Gear, too.

Never watched it.