mostly david ephgrave

It was great to see Alan Partridge return to his much-longed-for home the BBC tonight. I've loved Alan pretty much since the beginning, when tapes of his early appearances in Radio 4's 'On the Hour' and 'Knowing Me, Knowing You' would pass between a few select friends who were in-the-know. I can still remember the first time I saw his face, in a trailer for the TV version of 'Knowing Me, Knowing You' - I didn't get to 'The Day Today' until a little later - and how excited seeing it made me; I was so obsessed, I recorded the audio of his ABBA medley with Rebecca Front with a tape recorder and would often sing along to it in Alan-style. The first series of 'I'm Alan Partridge' was a revelation, coming at the time I'd moved to college to do a BTEC in Performing Arts. Each week, I'd disappear to the upstairs bedroom where we kept our spare telly to watch the latest episode in near-religious style, to then pick it apart rev...

Sometimes, it pays to be childish. Wholly unedited. Like a fool, I today committed the double heresy of clicking on an article by Piers Morgan on the Daily Mail website, in which he bemoaned the terrible inconvenience of having to listen to people showing solidarity for whistle-blowing campaigns such as #MeToo, #TimesUp and #NeverAgain at the Oscars. True to form, Morgan seems to completely miss the point: for him, hearing - as he puts it - “actress after actress playing the victim card on Sunday night” is far too tiresome, as if somehow, years of patriarchy and gun crime have all been solved by being raised by figures in the media once or twice. (But would you expect anything less from a man who proudly displays a picture of himself standing shoulder to shoulder with alleged serial-committer of sexual misconduct, Donald Trump, as his Twitter profile picture?) Don’t get me wrong; I know the game people like Piers Morgan (and fellow Ma...