Fwiw, I don’t know most people in the UK but the ones I do know don’t hold such a simplistic view of Gervais. Plus, they’re generally more interested in what he writes or appears in.
Bear in mind, though, that the British love to hate their celebrities.
Nope, he’s just a cock.
Yeah, I scanned the title as “Do Americans Get Alan Parsons?” :smack:
Where would we be without such insights.
Thank you “most of the people in the UK”.
I think anyone who thinks Alan Partridge wouldn’t work in the US is overthinking it.
This is an interesting thread. Earlier today I watched a re-run of the American sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, which centres on the life and family of a New York sports correspondent, Ray Barone.
The episode opened with Ray at work, interviewing an Asian-American ice dancer. He apologises for being a little ill at ease, as the last time he was in the ladies’ changing room, some other guys at school had thrown him in there as a gag. His interviewee tells him not to worry about it - then as he tries to interview her, he is further discomforted by the fact she is casually undressing in front of him. This being American TV we don’t get to see the detail, but it is clear she is getting undressed because her hand comes back into shot holding the ice-dancing dress, which is casually discarded.
Now this is so like the scene in The Day Today where sports reporter Alan Partridge is interviewing a sportswoman in the changing room - and she casually undresses and changes clothes in front of him, reducing him to incoherence. It’s hard not to believe somebody on the ELR production team saw Alan Partridge doing this on TDT, and wrote it into Raymond. Which supposes Alan was not unknown in America in 1996-97. (The Raymond episode first aired in 1997; the Alan Partridge sketch beinhg homaged was first screened in 1994. So the time scale fits.)
The more I think about it, the more I see a lot of Alan Partridgisms in Ray Barone: not to the same obnoxious extent, or else he’d never have kept a wife like Debra. But he blusters, tries to cover up little lies with big ones, gets ultradefensive when found out, and while lucid on paper gets a little bit incoherent in speech, especially when stressed. His loyal wife keeps him earthed and often rescues him from crass blunders of his own making, something not accessible to AP.
So Patridge must have been known in America if one of its most popular sitcoms blatantly lifts a scene from one of his early shows?
But only by New Englanders, it seems.
Oh my lord. Yes, I adore AP, though the earliest venue I’ve seen him in is the TV Knowing Me, Knowing You. Have seen IAP, IAP2, MMM, and These Are the Places of My Life, and certainly plan to see Alpha Papa when it’s around here. But of all I’ve known of him, the best by far is the faux autobiography I, Partridge – the audiobook, in particular. Coogan utterly inhabits the character as he reads, and it’s basically 7 hours of comedy both nuanced and slapstick. I’m greatly looking forward to the film and especially more of Mid-Morning Matters, which I believe does have a third series coming up.
This has been quite a profitable few years for Coogan, including The Trip as well, costarring the lovely Rob Bryden (whose Marion and Geoff is one of my favorite shows ever–and oy, talk about dark!).
Ditto from me.
Or at least known to one of the writers on the show. There’s lots of stuff that Americans are unaware was borrowed from Brit TV. The biggest examples may be All in the Family and Sanford and Son, both of which were Americanized copies of British hit shows that Americans never knew about. (Till Death Us Do Part and Steptoe and Son, respectively.)
The most famous example is how the original Saturday Night Live cast and writers were huge Monty Python fans, back when the Pythons were completely unknown in the States.
I’ve been over here 7 years now, but before I left New Hampshire, somehow I caught both series of I’m Alan Partridge on cable, and I was hooked. For what it’s worth, I like Ricky Gervais in limited quantities, but the characters he plays always have such bile built up in them that I find it becomes unwatchable for me after awhile, as I grow to loathe the character. By contrast, with Coogan’s Partirdge, there’s still a bit of human warmth left in him.
I saw Alpha Papa opening week and, though there were only about 7 or 8 of us scattered through the theatre, we were all literally LOL’ing in unison at the funny bits. Would’ve sounded like IAP’s laugh track if there were a few more dozen of us.
Best scene from the Alpha Papa movie:
