Alan is handed a career lifeline - the chance to stand in (temporarily) as co-host on This Time, a weekday magazine show. But can he capitalise on the opportunity?
Critics Of "This Time with Alan Partridge - Season 1"
The Mail on Sunday (UK)
March 04, 2019
The genius isn't in the gags as such, even though they are fine gags, as in the small details like the fact it took him slightly too long to walk across the studio to conduct an interview.
The level of invention was low and the viewer was left wondering if this marvelous comic creation shouldn't have been left to our memories and to reruns.
The television signal could have cut out six minutes from the end of Monday's episode of Steve Coogan's This Time with Alan Partridge and I'd still have spent the remainder of the evening grinning like an idiot.
Susannah Fielding is a terrific asset. I'm immensely looking forward to further intense interplay between those two egos sitting slightly too forcedly close together on the couch.
Only very occasionally...does it soar into unexpected places. Still, for a character that came along a quarter of a century ago and still isn't old, maybe fresh delights are a bit too much to ask.
This Time is a much more trenchant comedy than the BBC satire W1A. You don't have to care about life in the media to relish the spectacle of Alan Partridge making another hideous mess of his life.
There's a sharp skewering of disposable TV journalist going on here but the bottom line is that Coogan/Partridge understands that we all like a daft bit of schoolboy/girl humour.
