Alan Partridge: Big Beacon

“I never, ever look back, not my style. That way you have no regrets and it stops you crying in the shower.” So declares Alan Partridge, the King Midas of failure who could turn a gold bar to lead with his reverse alchemy of buffoonery. In his latest tragicomic memoir Big Beacon, fans can revel as Alan's touch flattens every enterprise he undertakes into a pancake of humiliation.

Whether fumbling his way into angering an entire seaside village or worming onto primetime only to be laughed off screen, Partridge's Olympian lack of self-awareness elicits winces and guffaws at a breakneck pace. His delusional inner monologue careens through misadventures like a drunken sailor crashing from one barstool to the next.

After being sacked from the BBC, Alan undertakes renovating a decrepit lighthouse in Kent, convinced his noble efforts will earn the locals' love. But his community “outreach” quickly stokes their ire as he dismisses their lighthouse's heritage for his gaudy vision: “Once a beacon is operational, it's nothing more than a toilet for birds with a kind of weak disco light on top.”

Alan bumbles through town halls and construction mishaps, mystified at the rising scorn. “It was like that scene in Ben-Hur when the lepers and cripples plead for his help,” Alan recounts, likening angry villagers to cheering fans.

Intercut is Alan exploiting the illness of his “This Time” cohost to weasel himself back on air. But despite Alan claiming he and Jennie have “no chemistry whatsoever... We're like two positively charged ions,” his obsession oozes off every page like the world's most obvious Freudian slip.

Somehow the Gibbons brothers have polished Alan's prose to a flawed shine, elevating cringe comedy to high art. Pedantic ramblings and tortured sentences combine in a blitzkrieg of second-hand embarrassment destined to mire Alan ever deeper in humiliation's quicksand, to the audience's masochistic delight. Partridge's bizarre capitalization elicits particular Joy: “Gary Barlow rarely misses one of Esther's renown Barbecues...”

Alan Partridge's lack of self-awareness remains unmatched across literature's pantheon of fools. Alan's steady unravelling leaves no doubt he lives in a fantasy as his ships sink in reality's cold waters.