Alan Partridge's Norwich – the tour Aug 5th 2013, 18:55
It took Norwich a long time to embrace Alan Partridge. But to celebrate the release of his new film, Alpha Papa, it has done so with gusto, hosting the world premiere and rolling out a new walking tour of the city for Partridge fans
“Alan didn’t have much luck on The Broads, did he?” smiles Jude Sayer, our guide to Norwich, as we stand by the river Wensum watching the motor boats puttering towards Wroxham. Sayer is referring to the Watership Alan episode of I’m Alan Partridge when irate farmers drop a dead cow from a bridge on the hapless DJ while he’s trying to film a crummy commercial for Hamilton’s Water Breaks.
“I didn’t know a great deal about Alan,” admits Sayer, a Blue Badge guide, “but recently he’s become a very big part of my life.” I’ve bagged a spot on the first ever Alan Partridge tour. Visit Norwich are running three more of these 90-minute walks this weekend (Aug 9,10 and 11), and after that you can book them any time you want.
The tour ties in with the release of Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa, on August 7, which was shot in Norwich and Cromer. At the world premiere in Norwich, there was hearty applause for the scene where Alan flags down a car outside City Hall and asks to be driven to the nearest police station because “There’s a guy with a gun!” A baffled motorist takes him just 20 yards round the corner and brakes outside the real Norwich police station. These local touches help make the film – and the tour brings Alan’s Norwich to life.
We press on to the jewel in Norwich’s architectural crown, the cathedral, where Sayer remembers one visitor: “A gentleman once looked up at the spire, paused, and asked me: ‘So what is this building used for?’”, a line Steve Coogan would surely enjoy. Sayer takes us to the cloisters where Alan, replete with shellsuit, yelled: “300K or we take it to Sky!”
We walk past the chocolate box medieval merchants’ houses of Elm Hill to London Street, where we muse on the pedestrianisation of Norwich city centre, a subject close to Alan’s heart. In 1967, this became the first pedestrianised street in Britain.
We pass the market, where Alan tried his hand flogging fruit in Welcome to the Places of my Life, a show he took to Sky (for how much, we don’t know). Then it’s on to The Forum, where Partridge and rogue DJ Pat Farrell escape in the film at low speed in the Radio Norwich outside broadcast van. The Forum is home to BBC Radio Norfolk.
Next it’s Anglia Square, sometimes regarded as one of the city’s 1960s eyesores, yet actually buzzing with an eccentric brand of Norfolk streetlife including a plastic gorilla painted like Partridge. One wall of James Benedict Brown’s derelict Sovereign House office block is draped with a huge Alpha Papa mural. This former home of the HMSO government stationery department is one of Norwich’s forgotten modernist icons – as is the Hollywood Cinema upstairs, which screened the premiere of Alpha Papa and where Alan himself declared “I love Norwich!”
Yet the relationship Norfolk’s second most famous son (after Nelson) has with the city is conflicted. Alan only ended up back here when the BBC axed his chat show. At Norwich Station, I spy the spot where he hawked his book Bouncing Back, before it was pulped, and before catching the train to London. The train, Alan warns, that calls at: “Rejection, Disappointment, Backstabbing Central and Shattered Dreams Parkway.”
• The tour departs daily on 9, 10 and 11 August and costs £6 per person (including a pot of Colman’s mustard and an I Love Norwich bag). It can be booked on a private basis thereafter, costing £48 for groups of up to 20. Details and times: visitnorwich.co.uk
- Norfolk
- Norwich
- United Kingdom
- England
- Alan Partridge
- Walking holidays
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