It is 2021 and Alan Partridge’s career as a BBC TV presenter has come to a screeching halt. In the middle of a belligerent television discussion on BBC One’s This Time, he had gone off-script, leaving his producer apoplectic. Partridge decided to pre-empt his removal from the show by announcing his resignation. “It’s a shame to be leaving the BBC at a time when most of its senior roles are finally being given to supporters and donors of the Conservative party,” he notes. “But leave I must, or rather left I have.”
Big Beacon is the third memoir from Alan Partridge, written by Steve Coogan with longstanding collaborators Neil and Rob Gibbons. In the prologue, our protagonist explains, in excruciatingly Partridgean detail, how the book “employs a daring structure known as a dual narrative”. While one of those narratives reveals his attempts to resuscitate his career, the other sees him “spurn the world of broadcasting for a more humble life spent restoring a dilapidated lighthouse and, in doing so … tenderly breathing new life into both the abandoned seaside building and, in a funny kind of way, my own soul.” And so, after leaving Norfolk and “emigrating” to the Kent coast, Partridge goes into battle with locals outraged at his renovation plans.
