No funny business

We're so used to seeing Steve Coogan either playing an entirely fabricated character - most famously Alan Partridge, of course - or an exaggerated caricature of himself (on The Trip, and indeed on some talk shows) that it was refreshing to hear him talk reflectively and candidly about his life and career with Kirsty Young on Radio 4's Young Again. 

While Coogan's biography is one of many books currently sitting unread on my shelves, I was already aware of the insecurity and intellectual inferiority he felt early in his career, as a broadly working-class Manchester-born lad mixing with Oxbridge graduates on Spitting Image and On The Hour. He also spoke about how he'd managed to make a living out of his youthful fondness for acting the goat, something that used to exasperate his parents (and, you'd imagine, his teachers).

Pressed by Young on whether he regretted his wild years of excess and substance abuse, Coogan was forthright, describing it as a delayed adolescence that he wouldn't have counselled his younger self against, other than to get it out of his system before his career properly kicked off (and perhaps to buy a washing machine before a sports car). Getting involved with the Hacked Off campaign, he said, felt like less of a risk than it might seem simply because by that point the media had already dragged all of the skeletons in his closet out into the open so there was nothing left to fear.

Perhaps most interesting were his comments about self-consciously seeking to diversify the work he does, branching into drama, about 15 years ago. While he admitted it can be difficult to juggle his different projects (most recently, his starring role in the BBC's Jimmy Savile documentary and the publication of the latest Partridge book Big Beacon), it's also freed him from feeling "trapped in an Alan Partridge cage". The fact that he now knows he only needs to return to Partridge when he wants has, I think, had a noticeable impact on the quality of Partridge output since that point - for a few years, the character seemed to be stagnating somewhat, but no more.