For me, the past 12 months have been about one man, and that man is Alan Partridge. The veteran broadcaster’s return to BBC screens this autumn, with a documentary about mental health, was only part of the story. The bigger issue is that at the turn of the year, my 13-year-old son discovered Partridge’s podcast, From the Oasthouse, and became completely obsessed. No everyday interaction, no matter how humdrum, can now pass without a Partridge reference. Should we hear, say, King’s Lynn mentioned on the news, my heart sinks, for I know that an enthusiastic anecdote about his birth at the local hospital in 1955 will soon follow. In no household in Britain are Daryl Flench’s tanning centres discussed with greater interest. And nowhere else, surely, are visitors greeted with the Partridge handshake – clasp their right hand with yours, while gently pushing their shoulder away with your left. They’re pleased, because you’ve touched them with two parts of your body, while you have swiftly terminated the unwanted encounter. Such is my son’s mania, in fact, that when I was ordered to London by my own podcast team during half term, which meant I had to drag the young man with me, I spent much of the train journey begging him to restrain himself. But I knew I had wasted my time when, some hours later, I heard my producer Theo imploring him: ‘Arthur, I thought we said no more Partridge until four o’clock.’
As Partridge obsessives will recall, one of his more memorable encounters was with his deranged fan Jed Maxwell, whom the great man uncharitably described as a ‘mentalist’. There are, of course, no mentalists in the audience of The Rest Is History, but I do enjoy reading the more outlandish comments on our Reddit page. American listeners, in particular, take great offence at the most unexpected things. One throwaway remark about Ulysses S. Grant provoked howls of outrage, but nothing incensed the Yanks more than my retelling of the story of Mary Todd Lincoln, an almost parodically difficult woman who made her husband Abraham’s life a total misery. After his murder in 1865, she was even accused of making off with half the contents of the White House, as if she were Kentucky’s answer to Lobelia Sackville-Baggins.
Still, the trend among American historians these days is to feel sorry for Mrs Lincoln, so perhaps we should be kind. By contrast, my co-presenter, Tom Holland, was absolutely savage about another woman we discussed on the show a few months ago, Emma Hamilton, whom he described as ‘one of the worst people in history, up there with John Lennon and Pol Pot’. As Spectator readers surely know, the lady in question was born into grinding poverty in Cheshire, exploited her physical charms to become the mistress of Britain’s man in Naples, Sir William Hamilton, and then traded him in for Horatio Nelson, who died at Trafalgar with her name on his lips.
It puzzles me why my colleague should be so down on some of the women we discuss on the show. In the 1780s, visitors to Naples swooned at the spectacle of Lady Hamilton’s ‘attitudes’, in which she would pose as characters from classical mythology, like a cross between a Parisian mime artist and a performer on OnlyFans. No less an observer than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe thought her attitudes were brilliant. Yet Tom called her ‘the 18th century’s answer to Bonnie Blue’. I had to look this person up, but he’s clearly very familiar with her work.
But I should end on a festive note. When I was growing up in the 1980s, Christmas was about one thing more than any other – that thing, of course, being television. As a firm believer in preserving the customs of yesteryear, I’ve tried to keep the tradition alive, and every year we mark Advent by watching the BBC’s brilliant adaptation of John Masefield’s fantasy novel The Box of Delights. First broadcast at the end of 1984, it’s not quite the last good thing the BBC made, but it’s not far off. For readers unfamiliar with the book – can such people be Spectator readers? – it’s the story of Kay Harker, a boy home from boarding school for Christmas in the mid-1930s, who has to protect a magic box from an evil wizard called Abner Brown. The adult cast are terrific, with Robert Stephens and Patrick Troughton on great form; the child actors really aren’t that bad; and the effects are tremendous by the standards of the day.
Above all, though, it’s a window into a vanished age – by which I mean not the 1930s but the 1980s. The story develops at a leisurely pace, with breaks for tea, and is all the better for it. Above all, the producers make no effort to disguise the extraordinary social entitlement of Kay and the other children. When they return home to find their house burgled by villains hunting for the magic box, their first reaction speaks volumes: ‘What I want to know is – where are the servants?’ I love it. Happy Christmas.
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