...And Ed Gamble and James Acaster were there

James Acaster and Ed Gamble said they once saw guests dancing to an Alan Partridge audiobook at a wedding disco.

The pair shared their anecdote with Steve Coogan on their Off Menu podcast, and he replied simply: ‘Wow.’

Acaster told him: ‘We were both at a wedding once where the in the evening there was a DJ… and people could like do the Silent Disco thing with the headphones. 

‘And I noticed that some some of them had a green light on, and some of them had a red light and it turned out there was a switch you could flick and it was the first Partridge audiobook. And people just listened to that at the wedding. 

‘Really?’ Coogan said.

‘Yeah, it was one like music channel and then you look around the dancefloor and some people were just stood there laughing and they were listening to the Partridge audio.’

‘Wow,’ said Coogan. ‘Dancing to…  wow. You need to get out more.’

The comic star also spoke about what he liked in comedy.

‘A polished mediocrity, I'm less interested in,’ he said. ‘I can see why people quite like it. It's like an easy read, isn't it? Like an airport novel’.

‘[When people mention] a kind of a journeyman… people go "he’s really good, isn't he?" I go, "he's all right". That's my response to most of them. 

‘But what I like is when I see someone where  I can't quite figure out why they're why they're funny.  Tim Key, for example.When I met him that it must be 15/16 years ago. He auditioned for me when he was in his early days. I remember watching him and he's making me laugh, and I couldn't figure out why he was funny. That's always much more interesting to me.

‘With Tim Key I couldn't see what he was  doing. I didn't understand what what was going on. Why I was laughing?  Or why what he was doing was funny.  I was a bit lost. And that's weirdly exciting, because I don't understand that I can't deconstruct it.’

Coogan has frequently worked with Key, including on the BBC One programme This Time With Alan Partridge and the sitcomThe Witchfinder – which was made by his production company Baby Cow.

He added: ‘Things that are interesting and different and and not not perfect are more interesting to me.

‘I was quite challenged when I started working with Armando Iannucci and Patrick Marber. I had to learn to go down that avenue of of experimenting and potentially failing to discover different, more interesting ways of being funny.’

Coogan concluded ‘If you're very very professional in this business and you consistently deliver stuff which is just above average you can have a very long career… and good luck to those people’ – but that was not for him.’

Coogan’s Off Menu interview has also attracted headlines in royalist newspapers because of his criticism of the Monarchy.

He said: ‘Most people who are into [the Royal family] are flag-waving people who, I think, are kind of idiots because they support a power structure that keeps a foot on the throat of working-class people and I’m just not really keen on that type of people.

"But having said that, the Queen worked very hard so she was alright – the rest of them, they’re problematic for me.’

» Listen to the Off Menu podcast here

Published: 26 Oct 2023