Rob Gibbons

In How Are You? It's Alan (Partridge) (2025), a magazine photoshoot interview lets us briefly glimpse the oddities of Alan's home. We laughed at those domestic details and wanted longer to inspect them. Rob and Neil Gibbons, who direct as well as co-write with Steve Coogan, are right to move on without explaining them. Their scrappy mockumentary style makes the jokes seem accidental, though the brevity is carefully judged. It is the sort of precise character comedy we want more of from Rob, and which this uneven series does not supply often enough.

The long Partridge collaboration began with Mid Morning Matters with Alan Partridge (2010), co-written with Neil and Coogan. The brothers went on to help write Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013), while their work with the character has spread into books, podcasts and live shows. That history helps explain how readily they can make Alan recognisable through a small detail of his behaviour. It also helps explain the reliance on recognition when a scene needs a new joke, though familiarity is no excuse for settling for less.

The brothers also wrote an episode of Veep in 2015, then created, wrote and directed The Witchfinder (2022). We recommend Veep with reservations about its opening and closing seasons, but that judgement covers much more than their contribution to one episode. The original sitcom The Witchfinder marks a clearer move beyond Partridge, though it remains a shared undertaking rather than evidence of a separate comic voice for Rob.

With Coogan, the Gibbons brothers still give Alan mistakes that feel personal rather than merely foolish. The problem in How Are You? It's Alan (Partridge) is how readily that pleasure becomes all a scene offers. Too many jokes could fit any documentary Alan happened to front, and we can too often anticipate the next mistake. Recognising him is enjoyable, but it does not make each new situation funny. We would welcome another series that trusted small, unexplained details as much as the photoshoot does.