Steve Coogan makes an inept television host worth spending time with, provided embarrassment is your idea of an evening’s entertainment. This is sharp, tightly focused comedy, though its appetite for awkwardness can make a full helping tiring.
Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge is a sharp comedy about a man whose job requires him to understand other people and whose chief qualification is not noticing that he cannot. Steve Coogan gives Alan Partridge enough confidence to keep him presenting, which explains both the laughter and the discomfort. We recommend it, with a warning for anyone who finds public embarrassment more painful than funny. Its host can be hard company for half an hour.
The variety-show format gives Alan a position of authority before he has done anything to deserve it. He is supposed to help the entertainment along; his obtuseness is what derails it. We laughed at his failure to recognise himself as the difficulty, then felt uneasy about enjoying his humiliation quite so much. Steve Coogan makes that response possible by keeping Alan recognisable as someone trying to do a job, even when we would rather someone took it away from him.
Writers Armando Iannucci and Patrick Marber understand what makes a bad presenter worth watching in a comedy. Alan’s limitations have to generate trouble, rather than merely provide a list of things for us to dislike. The familiar format does much of that work, because we understand how a host should behave and can register each failure without an explanation. As proceedings become more surreal, Alan’s inability to understand them remains the strongest source of laughter.
Dominic Brigstocke’s direction keeps the television programme credible enough for Alan’s failures to matter. As the entertainment becomes stranger, Alan’s confidence stops looking like much of a qualification for running it. Dennis De Groot’s production design supports the same difficult pretence: this is a programme somebody has agreed to put on air. It does that job without becoming more interesting than the man presenting it.
The limitation is that Alan gives us only so much room to move. Once we understand how badly he reads the occasion, further trouble does not always tell us anything new about him. The stranger passages also risk making his incompetence seem ordinary beside the programme itself. That is a real weakness in a comedy whose strongest reason to keep watching is its presenter, and it makes some of the escalation feel unnecessary.
The critical consensus is negative, though it consists of one review stressing the difficulty for American viewers unfamiliar with the character. We disagree with that objection. No advance affection for Alan is required to recognise a man doing a job he is not equipped to do. The variety-show conventions may be more familiar to some viewers than others, but his confidence in his own inadequate abilities needs little translation.
Against broader television satire, this is deliberately narrow: the host keeps drawing our attention back to himself. That concentration pays off in Steve Coogan’s performance, but it also explains why we would not hurry through all six episodes. The half-hour length is useful; there is only so much time we want to spend feeling responsible for a stranger’s conduct. Try one episode and see how much pleasure Alan’s lack of self-knowledge gives you before committing to more.
