Images via walesonline, partridgewikia. 

It happened.

The Viewer is devastated to report that after eighteen years of watching Alan Partridge flounder his way through the wreckage of his life, it has stopped being funny for her.

A period of mourning will be announced shortly.

The boys are back in the barracks. Image via inpressonline.

Like a thrilling and mysterious stranger that one first hears word of during hushed exchanges in darkened rooms, then seeks out with the determination and purpose, Alan first caught The Viewer’s attention when he made his television debut in a chat show, ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’.

She was entranced by his debonair style, natural interviewing technique and more importantly, an innate ability to make  his guests feel comfortable, regardless of background or personal circumstances. She followed his career with the dedication of a stalker, seeking out all of his work and peppering her conversation with his catchphrases to the point where her friends and family threatened to disown her.

But now the love affair is over. Having stayed true to Alan through allegations of manslaughter, medical problems, serious weight fluctuations, even more serious hair fluctuations and descent into madness, The Viewer tuned in to Alan’s latest foray into broadcasting last night, Sky Atlantic HD’s ‘Mid-Morning Matters’.

She was disappointed, and is beginning the long, slow process of withdrawal.

It isn’t the fact that the Alan’s celebrity has diminished now he’s back in radio – she isn’t the type to bask in the reflected glory of another – and besides, some of her favourite Partridge moments came via his interviews in the Radio 4 incarnation of ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’. Like the time he made an eight-year-old genius wet himself live on air.

The Viewer loved that.

It’s rather more that Alan himself has lost his drive, his joie de vivre, that total lack of self-awareness that results in him genuinely believing that he a misunderstood broadcasting genius, whose career has been deliberately curtailed by a combination of circumstance and one man’s campaign of hate (left).

The Viewer is glad that Alan seems settled in his his new role at North Norfolk Digital. And while she has reconciled herself to this, she freely admits that she is nursing a faint hope that the same frustrations and homicidal impulses still reside beneath the Roger Moore-like calm.

Getting drunk on air while interviewing a wine specialist and being hostile to female callers indicates the same old Alan is in there somewhere. But until he gets his mojo back, The Viewer will avoid the agony of watching a cornerstone of British broadcasting crumble.

Cook Pass Babtridge, Alan. As they say in Norwich.