In Partridge-land with the family
A-HA! That woke you up, didn’t it? I can only apologise and put my outburst down to last weekend’s jaunt to the homeland of Alan Partridge, the chief knight-errant of chat who is one of the twin pillars of comedy in my estimation, the other being the lesserspotted Chris Morris. As an aside, it was Morris who spearheaded the Radio 4 show On the Hour which first gave flight to the fledgling Partridge (aka Steve Coogan) almost 25 years ago. Bonkers.
The aim of my visit to north Norfolk was not a pilgrimage to the ABBA-worshipping broadcaster and accidental assassin but rather a family get-together to mark the 70th birthday of her nibs’s father, yet it didn’t require a Herculean effort to discern which elements of Norfolk life inspired Coogan, Armando Iannucci and Patrick Marber to spawn their monstrous mash-up of male British broadcasters from the 1970s and 80s.
Settlements such as Heacham, Hunstanton and Wells-Next-the-Sea seem to occupy a hinterland of modern Britain peopled by self-made, almost exclusively white men called Ray and Geoff who drive Jaguars and Range Rovers. Boards entreating a vote for the Conservatives or Ukip litter the fields and there is an obsession with wading birds. The hotel/golf resort we stayed at has a bar and changing room area improbably called Avocet Barn, presumably not in tribute to Bert Jansch’s 1979 album of that name.
Norfolk, or at least its north-eastern shoulder, has a whiff of the timewarp about it, so much so that on a trip to King’s Lynn (Partridge’s birthplace, FYI) we stumbled upon a courtyard filled with strange characters garbed up in medieval costumes and undertaking anodyne workshops in coin-making, stick whittling, how to use a crossbow and suchlike. Even the pa-in-law was nonplussed, which made me feel slightly better about the Olympian levels of scorn emanating wordlessly from my pores, levels barely tempered by the ersatz galleon a stone’s throw away on the muddy Great Ouse.
At low tide the north coast becomes a flatland of unparalleled majesty and no little menace. At one point as we strolled along the beach at Brancaster I could feel its immensity doing strange things to my mind. A few hours later, though, the mental kinks were ironed out thanks to a lifesaving 12 holes of crazy golf in Hunstanton. I’d sworn off the sport for the duration of the trip (the chipping yips can do that to a man) but the peer pressure was impossible to ignore. I won ...
Knowing me, Sean Guthrie; knowing you, north Norfolk. A-ha!
‘‘ We stumbled upon a courtyard filled with strange characters in medieval costumes