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In its original Radio 4 incarnation, the On The Hour offshoot Knowing Me, Knowing You – wherein Alan Partridge, sports-desk incompetent and all-round loose cannon, is misguidedly given his own chat show—is an instant comedy landmark. As inhabited by Coogan, the hapless but ever emphatic Partridge goes beyond straightforward caricature into the realms of immortal comic characterization.

Alan will pursue a metaphor until it turns and fights like a wild animal at bay, and in his own freedom from shame there can sometimes be discerned a form of primal innocence. When he hits a child prodigy, or informs a recently freed hostage that their time in captivity was equivalent to watching 9,000 episodes of Inspector Morse – ‘it doesn’t sound so bad when you put it that way’ – he seems in some strange way to strike a blow for everyone who has ever felt hemmed in by the constraints of conventional etiquette.⁵⁴

Part of what makes Knowing Me, Knowing You special is the precision of its cultural references. ‘It’s about fine judgements,’ Coogan insists, ‘making the right choice of a name or a word without being obvious, but also without disappearing up your own arse.’ While the time and trouble Coogan and his writing partners invest in getting details right – from Alan’s car (a Ford Scorpio) to the exact layout of his East Anglian home turf – pay off on their own account, the laughs which accompany brand recognition are easily come by. The real greatness of the show comes in achieving a level of emotional acuity that matches and even surpasses that of the product placement.

It would not be unreasonable to assume that a good deal of Alan Partridge’s remarkable intensity comes from Coogan’s own pre-Partridge fears that his life might be vanishing down the toilet of middle-rank showbiz.

‘It was that,’ admits an impassioned Coogan, ‘it was…Impressions are just a facility – something I can do…I hated being a known quantity. If people really want to annoy me, they still say, “Oh look, it’s Steve Coogan – top TV impressionist”.’

There’s a great moment in a radio episode of Knowing Me, Knowing You, where Alan encounters top TV impressionist Steve Thomson, played by Marber (who while he modestly insists that he is ‘not in the same league as Steve as a performer’ contributes a series of beautifully judged supporting characters to radio and TV series alike). ‘I want to be funny, but with dignity,’ begs Steve. ‘Do your Frank Spencer,’ Alan whispers malevolently.

No disrespect is intended to Marber’s later career as an award-winning dramatist in saying that nothing in his subsequent canon surpasses the acuity of some of these exchanges. The happy knack of translating your own personal anxieties and hang-ups into subtle but brilliantly accessible comedy is given to very few comedy writing partnerships, and at this point Coogan and Marber seem to have it in spades.

‘Certainly in Knowing Me, Knowing You in general, I tend to play the characters who try to usurp Alan’s status,’ Marber admits. ‘I’d like to write something one day about what it’s like to be “the man behind the man”,’ he continues. ‘When you start off, it’s great – the other guy takes all the pressure – but eventually it’s just not enough. Your ego gets bigger and you want to go and get some of the glory for yourself.’

One of the strange features of this kind of partnership is that (as the career trajectory of Paul Whitehouse will demonstrate even more dramatically) however successfully the person in the subordinate role subsequently defines themselves as a creative individual, they can never quite escape the shadow of their former incarnation.

Watching Marber on TV, winning an Evening Standard Laurence Olivier drama award for his play Dealer’s Choice, the look on his face when he finds out they’ve got Coogan to present it to him might well be described as ‘a picture’. He can laugh at the memory now, though: ‘I think one part of me was thinking it was lovely to be standing there with Steve and it being me getting a prize, and the other part of me was thinking “Couldn’t I have someone legit?’”