Earlier this year I had the privilege of reading the very amusing Alan Partridge ‘autobiography’, I Partridge – We Need To Talk About Alan. It had me chuckling down memory lane and remembering all the excellent Partridge featuring/fronted TV and radio shows of the past like On The Hour, The Day Today, Knowing Me, Knowing You and I’m Alan Partridge. It also left me hankering for more from Norfolk’s finest broadcasting export.
It’s a well-timed hankering, as it looks like after years in hiatus, the world is finally going to see an Alan Partridge movie.
Speaking to Empire magazine today, co-writer Armando Iannucci said of the project, “It’s just about all come together now, so that’ll be shot later in the year,” adding, “The script is written [but] we’re always rewriting, rewriting and rewriting.”
Rumour has it that the finished product will probably hit cinemas next year sometime – a full nine years after rumours of a movie first surfaced.
Along with Iannucci, writers who’ve also been working on the script include Steve Coogan, Rob Gibbons, Neil Gibbons and Peter Baynham. And as for the plot – all Slacker Shack knows at the moment is that it won’t involve Alan moving to America, like earlier rumours suggested, with Iannucci admitting back in 2010, “We don’t see Alan, for example getting Simon Cowell’s spot on American Idol and going over there. That’s too good for Alan. Alan’s future is always brighter in his head than it is in the real world. I think Alan harbours this distortion that, with reality TV bringing back your Keith Chegwins and your Tony Blackburns and so on that his time will come, but it hasn’t come, he hasn’t had that call”.
