Alan Partridge has had more incarnations than Barbie

Alan Partridge is back, and this time he’s restoring a lighthouse. The third volume of the Norfolk microstar’s faux autobiography is a meticulous parody of the celebrity-in-search-of-a-televisable gimmick genre, blending fan-friendly, behind-the-scenes tales of his more recent public adventures (This Time, Scissored Isle, From the Oasthouse) with a classic midlife lurch for purpose, part Griff Rhys-Jones rescuing threatened buildings, part Clarkson’s Farm.

Though Steve Coogan’s id-slaying monster started out as a media satire, Alan Partridge has become a vital national mirror in which middle-aged, middle English, middleweight, middlebrow man (let us call him Homo Partridgensis) can watch himself weather and crumble. The act of restoring a suitably phallic landmark on the Kent coast is linked, using heavily underlined prose, to yet another Partridge-from-the-ashes resurgence. But the character’s attempts to shore up his own career alongside ‘the Abbot’s Cliff Lighthouse in association with Alan Partridge’ aren’t just a good joke; they point to one of the most remarkable things about the ever-more-fully-realised Partridge Extended Universe: that Alan endures because he himself is regularly restored.

Partridge has been with us for more than 30 years, in more versions than Barbie, whether sports-casual Motson minion, blazer-clad Travelodge mini-Madeley or bootcut-jeaned post-Top Gear social crusader. For Big Beacon, he’s a weatherbeaten Coast-style nostalgist, with a Kevin McCloud property-makeover-show hardhat (and megaphone for ordering his builders about).

British comic characters don’t usually change at all. If they last decades, like Del Boy or Captain Mainwaring, they are trapped within the format of their sitcom. If they burn brightly and briefly, like Basil Fawlty or Tom Good, they are fixed in their time by the habitual short runs of British television. Uniquely, Partridge has lasted, uninterrupted, because, it turns out, Alan contains multitudes.