...including what never made it to screen

The  initial version of Alan Partridge film Alpha Papa was almost twice as long as the finished version and was ‘the worst first cut’ writer Neil ​Gibbons ever saw.

He and his co-writer brother Rob revealed many details of the early drafts of thee 2013 film at a recording of the Script Apart podcast in London last night.

Characters that didn’t make the cut included a very right-wing black cleaner, a long-haired yoga-instructing courier whom Partridge loathed, and a sub plot in which Partridge’s PA Lynn played a Hetty Wainthrop-style character exposing radio station owner Gordale Media’s business shenanigans, as an ‘All The President’s Men corporate sleuth’, Neil Martin writes.

Another plot strand not pursued was Lynn’s alternative employment in which she had a sleazy boss who was worse than Partridge. Also left on the cutting-room floor was a scene in which Alan has an on-line date, and a discussion about why Herbie went bananas.

One of the very early drafts, written by Patrick Marber, had the BBC and Alan under siege by Al Qaeda and, later, Alan as a Fox News presenter undergoing a similar fate – but these were considered too close to the bone.

The antagonist, Pat Farrell, was also originally a more sympathetic character than the final version. The DJ who takes hostages after he is fired was originally conceived as a sweet, gone-to-seed presenter, and they hoped to cast  Matthew Kelly in the role.

However the character was not considered exciting enough and did not generate enough peril, so they  introduced a much more aggressive counterpoint.

Colm Meaney was cast  in the role 10 days before shooting and, according to the Gibbonses, was slightly uncomfortable with the team’s writing process, which involves revising and rewriting up to the day of filming.

Also cut was a deliberately anti-climactic denouement, originally set under Cromer Pier. In the early version, only one shot was fired and Alan and Pat discussed how anti-climactic it all felt. But it was so genuinely anti-climactic it was dropped and replaced with the more dramatic ending seen in the film.

Even after script changes, the original cut of the film was 2 hours 50 minutes long and no one laughed at the in-house screening. ‘It was watched in total silence,’ said Neil, ‘and was the worst first cut I ever saw.’

In the end, the cinema release – also written by Steve Coogan, Armando Iannucci and Peter Baynham – ran to 90 minutes.

Both Gibbons commented on some of the tensions involved in transferring from small to big screen, but on a tight budget. At one point, a production manager flew into a rage after walking into a room where both writers were laughing like drains while writing and yelled: ‘You’re fucking around like schoolkids.’

And after one late-night writing session, the writers asked if they could get a taxi home – but were told cars were only for ‘the talent’. Neil said: ‘I nearly walked off the film at that point. It is true that television is for writers and films are for directors.’

Neil told the audience at PictureHouse Central how they sometimes keep the best jokes back until later in the production process to stop comedians including  Coogan becoming bored with the gags.

He also cited Richard Curtis’s strategy of underlining the lines in a first script that he knew were very good so that they won’t be lost later through the re-telling, when the laughter had died away through repetition and ennui.

On the process of writing Alan’s books with Coogan, both writers say they enjoy extemporising in Alan’s voice much more liberally compared to the tightness of a script.

‘Alan doesn’t do research. The joy of the books is you can hammer through it quite quickly,’ they said. And because ‘Alan has a slapdash approach  to quality control,’ they don’t have to get too hung up on minutiae.

The next Partridge outing is And Did Those Feet, a BBC show which sees Alan ‘jumping on the mental health bandwagon and leaving him to find himself’ after a visit to Saudi Arabia.

There is also talk of an Alan Partridge board game, while the writers said they would also like to write a second Partridge film.

Published: 12 Mar 2024