Steve Coogan
Steve Coogan is a man of many faces, none more indelible than Alan Partridge, the puffed up pillock he’s played sublimely for nearly three decades. But Stan & Ollie, which opens in cinemas this week, finds him breathing new life into an even more iconic comedy figure with a beautifully observed portrayal of fellow Lancastrian Stan Laurel.
Set in 1953, the film follows Laurel and Hardy (a fat-suited John C Reilly) on a tour of sparsely-populated venues around the UK. With their glory days firmly behind them, Hardy unwell and Laurel bitter about the past (there’s quite literally an elephant in the room), their friendship begins to falter.
Moving but never mawkish, it’s had glowing reviews – which comes as a relief to Coogan, who admits that at the start of a project you never quite know how it’ll turn out.
‘You’re very anxious about it, but you try and do the best job you can,’ says the 53-year-old. ‘It’s like going on a mountain expedition. You hope that you’re going to get to the top, but you need to prepare. You can’t just head off into the cold in your T-shirt and underpants.’
And prepare he did, rehearsing for nearly a month with Riley and a movement director to nail the double act’s iconic routines. ‘It was a delightful period, and it was good for John and I to get to know each other,’ he says. ‘I always looked forward to going to work the next day.’
For Coogan, the film brought back memories of being clad in a dressing gown and watching Laurel & Hardy in his noisy childhood home in Middleton, near Manchester. The fourth of six children, he originally wanted to be a stuntman, ‘because they looked like they had really good fun jumping off things,’ but discovering he could imitate anything from John Cleese to screeching tyres took him down a less painful route.
‘I was popular with my teachers because I could do funny voices,’ he says. ‘The French teacher would come in and say “OK Coogan, get to the front and start doing all the teachers, or we’ll open our books and do some work”, and everyone in the class would go “You have to!”.’
After being told ‘You should be on the telly’ enough times, Coogan headed to Manchester Polytechnic School of Drama where, aged 22, he landed a job as an impressionist on scathingly satirical puppet show Spitting Image. Meanwhile, he busied himself creating comedy characters to perform live, including sweary lager lout Paul Calf and a certain cheesy sports presenter named Alan Partridge.
‘One thing I discovered early on is to find clever people and work with them,’ says Coogan, citing co-writers Armando Ianucci and Patrick Marber, who helped him refine Partridge for cult radio show On The Hour in 1991.
‘Patrick was the one who said “Why don’t you turn this into a talk show?” and I was very sceptical about it. He seemed to think it was more interesting than I did. But when we started to practise, it was a bit like alchemy: you don’t know quite how you’re doing it, but something seems to be coming out the end that’s making everybody laugh. And you think let’s just keep doing this, and see if we can mine it.’
It was a goldmine. With his misplaced sense of importance and buttock-clenching gaffs, Alan Partridge became the star of spoof chat shows and documentaries, and the awards began to pile up. But by the early 2000s Coogan was restless.
‘I wanted to do acting. I wanted to do other things, and there was a fallow period where I thought I was cursed with Alan. It was like “What the hell do I do now?”’
The answer came from director Michael Winterbottom, who cast Coogan as Factory Records legend Tony Wilson in the film 24 Hour Party People, ‘and he made me feel like I wasn’t a one-trick pony. I left Alan alone and tried some other things.’
Other things such as The Trip, also with Winterbottom, which sees Coogan and Rob Brydon outdoing each other with pitch-perfect impersonations as they eat their way around the Lake District, Italy and Spain, and an impressive clutch of films including Philomena, for which Coogan also wrote the screenplay, earning him two Oscar nominations.
‘So after I’d had success with other things I felt more comfortable about carrying on with Alan. I have new writers now, the Gibbons brothers, and they’ve given him new life.’
2019 sees Alan Partridge’s triumphant return to a BBC sofa (after accidentally but fatally shooting one of his chat show guests in 1995) in This Time, a One Show-style magazine series. When a clip was played at the Edinburgh Television Festival, TV critic Boyd Hilton tweeted that he laughed so hard he ‘almost coughed up a lung’.
Coogan doesn’t watch his shows once they’re edited, and often doesn’t remember the lines people gleefully quote to him. ‘The only time I see it again is if I’m channel-hopping, and I suddenly come across myself on a rerun. It’s quite an odd experience, watching yourself at half 11 in the evening and there’s no one else there, but I’m pleased with how funny it is. I don’t feel like I’m laughing at me, I feel like I’m laughing at Alan.’
He admits that there’s much of himself in Partridge, but is there any of him in Stan Laurel? ‘Not in terms of personality, but I’m a performer who writes, and I understand the pressures of that,’ he says. ‘Of course he did the one thing over and over, and did it very well, whereas I’ve been able to branch out.
‘I do like the fact that I seem to be able to have my cake and eat it, because I can do these roles and still do Alan,’ he concludes. ‘And I don’t want to not do Alan, but I want to be able to do more than that.’
Knowing me, knowing Coogan
Coogan, who has a 22-year-old daughter, Clare, is in a relationship and lives near Lewes in Sussex. He’s just finished making a film, Greed, in which he plays a tangerine-skinned clothing billionaire.
Stan & Ollie director Jon S Baird recalls meeting Coogan for lunch, and being instantly won over: ‘Without any warning he went into Stan, dropping his napkin then bumping his head on the table. The shivers went up my spine and I thought “Wow”.’
Coogan, who previously battled a cocaine addiction, was a victim of the phone-hacking scandal and is a prominent supporter of the Hacked Off campaign against press intrusion.
His father Tony died last year, and he went through ‘a very sad period. That’s quite a seminal moment in anyone’s life, but it made me very grateful for the things that I’ve got. It changes your outlook.’
An edited version of this feature ran in Waitrose Weekend on January 10 2019. (c) Waitrose