S03E10: Dreams

[opening theme music]

Hello, Alan Partridge here today, and I'm out and about... Pootling along the high street with a shopping list and a Bag For Life. A chap in a wheelchair back there has asked me to post a package for him, which I'm very happy to do, all part of the community spirit. 

Hello. 

[postmistress] "Good morning".

Yes, I'd just like to post this package. 

"Where did you get this?".

A chap outside, a disabled chap, asked me to post it for him. 

"Well, what did he look like?" 

Well, I don't know, what does it matter what he looked like... he was in a wheelchair? 

"No, I'm ever so sorry. We're closing". 

It's ten past three. 

"I can't take this, you'll have to come back". 

Sorry, what are you talking about? It's just a harmless guy in a wheelchair. I don't understand why... 

"The man wasn't disabled".

Well, how do you know? 

"Because he's standing behind you. With a gun". 

[sudden sounds of a struggle]

Throw me that.

[continued sounds of fighting]

Ha-haa!

You pretend to be disabled? I'll make sure you are disabled! 

[repeated impact noises] 

That's what I do with the head of someone who pretends to be disabled. Bastard!

[Alan sounds exhausted]

What? No!

[strained voice of Alan trying to talk in a headlock, followed by a gunshot and a body slumping to the floor]

No. How did you...? Janet! 

"What's wrong? You've never seen a postmistress with a gun before?".

Oh my God. Well, he's dead now. The good thing is, we've killed an able-bodied person. Make that absolutely clear to anyone listening.

God, I really didn't expect that. I just came in to post a bloody letter for a disabled... Certainly he wasn't disabled. That's the whole point, isn't it? 

[opening theme music]

Hello. I'm Alan Partridge, coming to you not from a blood-spattered post office but from my garden shed with wheels, which is based on David Cameron's garden shed with wheels. Except mine is green and his is cream.

While what you thought was happening was real, it was in fact a dramatisation based on the movie 'Hasselback: Bad Spud Rising'. Why start the podcast in such an alarming way? Well, it was a deliberate ploy to confuse and disorientate, much like a flash grenade used by Special Forces. It doesn't harm, it just confuses, because it's much easier to shoot a confused person, much like the late, controversial Osama bin Laden.

I was trying to create the feeling of being in a dream, unable to separate fact from fiction. Because, just as what you heard felt real, and you believed it to be true, as many of you did, I'm sure, the scenarios that fill my head every night seem real too. Anyway, 'Hasselback: Bad Spud Rising' - I don't know if you know it, you might. There's a lot of buzz about it - it's an unproduced screenplay by Alan Partridge, the same one as me.

And that was what we call a 'taster tape', temporarily starring Alan Partridge as Cal, and introducing Lynn Benfield as Woman in Post Office. I imagine when it gets made, Lynn and I will happily stand aside for Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman in the roles of Cal and Woman In Post Office, respectively. 

I think Lynn surprised a few people with her performance then, but I'd seen her turn in a lovely performance as a prison guard in an amateur dramatics version of Sophie's Choice. Anyway, 'Hasselback: Bad Spud Rising', is a story about a lumberjack and potato farmer called Cal who falls foul of three brothers on what appears to be a neighbouring farm, but is actually just a front for laundering the proceeds of the Brink's-Mat bullion theft. So, you know, lots going on. 

Cal's walking his dog one day when one of the brothers confronts him and says this is private land.
Cal says, no, it's a public right of way. The brother disagrees, insisting it's actually just a permissive walkway. It escalates and turns into a very fast fight with no weaponry, very interesting, but they are in woodland, so they improvise with what they find. Branches become lances, twigs become daggers, there's a brief sword fight with two long stiff sticks, and they end up clubbing each other with big logs. If there's a fight you can have with wood, they have it. I actually got the idea from seeing these two guys have a fight over a Christmas tree in a garden centre.

I'll skip forward. There's a subplot involving the er, the Triffids. Sorry, the Triads. The whole thing culminates in a standoff on the arm of a crane in London's Docklands.

Cal's on the tip, and Duan is an evil Chinese agent. Cal says, you know, it doesn't have to end like this, Duan. Duan just smiles and says, "It always had to end like this", but, you know, with the accent, which I can do, but I can't do.

Duan is about to shoot Cal, but doesn't realise the woman from the post office is in an adjacent crane and is swinging the wrecking ball towards his crane! She connects and nearly brains the bastard, but Duan jumps in the cabin and starts trying to swing his wrecking ball at her, and you realise what's happening is basically a giant game of conkers. 

Eventually Duan's crane is toppled over and he is crushed under his giant wrecking ball slash conker, killing him instantly. Cal just looks at Janet and says very dryly, "Well, Janet, you came, you saw, you conkered!". It's sort of funny, but then a tear rolls down his cheek and he takes two conkers from his pocket, and you remember... [Alan swallows] he lost his son who loved conkers. 

Anyway, I'm not going to go on about 'Hasselback: Bad Spud Rising', I hadn't even intended to talk about it in this episode but funnily enough that was the best I've ever described it. I suppose pitching a movie is like riding a bike. If you think about riding a bike whilst you're riding it, you forget, don't you, and you just fall off!

I should add, by the way, the sound effects came courtesy of my sometime collaborator Nathan Griggs, whose day job is producing sound effects, jingles and compositions. He really brought the thing to life! I don't for the life of me know why BBC Radio 4 dramas don't do something similar. Why don't they have fights and car chases? All you need is action sounds! Their sound design is just posh men and women who talk and sigh in rooms. 

If there's anyone out there who likes Radio 4 drama, please do get in touch. I'd love to talk to them and just ask them why they like Radio 4 drama. 

[theme music sting]

Every night of late I've found myself visited by dreams so vivid and gripping that my sheets are drenched in sweat and on occasion not a little wee. 

Sometimes I even somnambulate, or rather, I suffer from somnambulism. Now that's not one of those words you make up when you need to cheat at Scrabble. It's a very real phenomenon of combined sleep and wakefulness, and that's why this episode is going to be focused on the delicate subjects of mental health.

Like it or not, mental health is hot right now. Everything has a name, but none of this stuff's new. OCD is what we used to call fussy, or house-proud. 

ADHD used to be fidgety, or ants in your pants.

Bipolar people were called moody, panic attacks, flapping. 

Of course back then we didn't all expect a blue badge, you were just expected to pull yourself together, stop making a song and dance about it. But as I say, we are where we are. So let's get straight down to business. I'll just close this window. 

It's funny, the weather's, the weather's very changeable today. There's a dark cloud over there. Very dark, looks like, er... looks like insects. 

Oh my God, lock the doors! It's locusts. They must be a foot long! They're coming in the chimney!
They're coming in the chimney into the wood burner. Shut, close the door! Jesus Christ, they're taking the dog! Don't look! Two locusts have taken the dog. One's took his hind legs, the other, the front ones.
Oh God, they're eating him in mid-air! Dirty gets! There's no way they're going to eat me alive,
pass me the pump-action shotgun. It's in the umbrella stand! Okay, I'm going to make a run for it.
Keep the door locked. You bastard locusts! Here I go!

[loud buzzing of insects]

I hate you bastards! Oh my God, look at this, they've got inside my jacket! Put me down! Don't... don't fly away with me. Oh God, they're going to eat me in mid-air! God forgive me!

I'm too much meat for two giant locusts. One, I'll try and shoot one. [gunshot] That's one of them.
Oh God, now I've only got one. If I shoot him, I'll fall to my death. I've got a choice between being eaten by a locust or falling to my death. That's an impossible choice! That's like Sophie's Choice, but not as bad! [Alan screams, fade out]

[intro theme song]

Yes, I'm not being attacked by locusts! The only locusts feeding on me are the tax man, the VAT man, and... my charitable direct debits. 

Anyway, I'm back in my comfy lounge, in my sizeable house, with my big leather Ottoman-cum-coffee table. Great space. Yeah, I love the shed on wheels, but... cozy but cramped. About the size of two disabled toilets knocked through. 

So after that mind trick, you're probably not quite sure what's real now, are you? But that serves to give you a flavour of what life has been like for me, with highly complex dreams, or sometimes dreams within dreams, tearing at the very fabric of reality, so you're never quite sure what to believe.

So how did it get this way? Well, rewind to three months ago and, I was not a man at the end of his tether, but in spitting distance of it. I'd say I have twenty-five percent of usable tether left. I was just having one of those weeks where I was busy as hell but getting nothing done.It was people, people, people, people, people. 

Here's just a flavour of it: In a moment of madness, I agreed to interview the guy from Armadillo Security Blinds on stage at the Ideal Home Exhibition, and he kept coming to the house asking if we could rehearse again because he was once on Dragon's Den and he was so nervous he kept letting off.

Dave from my proper quiz team kept sending me funny WhatsApp videos about Greta Thunberg. He's unemployed and it shows, but it's not my problem. 

The team at Audible, forever asking for marketing content; a ten-second trailer, a fifteen-second trailer, a thirty-second trailer, or a forty-five-second trailer, or a sixty-second trailer, or a trailer for Twitter, a photo for Twitter, a trailer for Facebook, a photo for Facebook, a trailer for Instagram, a photo for Instagram... Seriously, guys, [laughs mockingly] fuck off! 

Why do they even need trailers? The people who buy the podcast are going to buy it regardless! You might as well charge them for the fucking trailers because they'll fucking pay for it!

I had a chatty plumber in the house all week trying to mend the toilet system. I mean, I wish he'd put my ballcock in his mouth. For Christ's sake, it's part of a cistern! I started to get seriously razzed off. In the end, I had my assistant cancel all future engagements. I just wanted a quiet evening on my own, watching dogs behaving badly with a big bowl of oven chips bathed in Oxo, which I invented.
It's called Oxo Chippy. 

Finally, some Me Time. But unbeknownst to me, my assistant had organised a surprise birthday party for me at the Oasthouse. Fifty friends and well-wishers, mainly well-wishers, "Surprise!". I tried to be polite. I tried to give hints, you know, checking my watch, looking this way and that. I did my best, but in the end, it got too much. I asked them to leave politely.

They wouldn't go, so I borrowed a phrase Oliver Cromwell used when he dismissed the Rump Parliament in 1653. I said, "Go, get out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! Lock up the doors, in the name of God, go!". 

Tony Robinson was there, and he said, "That's Oliver Cromwell", I said, "I know Tony, don't you start!. Time Team passed on the chance to find Richard III, the last Plantagenet King of England. He ended up being found by a housewife while you were digging up, what? A piece of pot? Half a Saxon cup? A brick from the war? Some 80s Lego? A Viking sock? Instead of finding a long-lost King of England, you find a kid's clog from the year 10!".

"'Oh, this used to be a Roman kitchen', well it's fucking not now, Tony!", admittedly, by this time, I wasn't just challenging Tony, I was goading him. 

"'Sir Tony?' For what? Digging up a bog and finding half a Viking sink?". By now, he was trying to get into his car. "So you're a knight of the realm because of what? Let's go through the list again; a piece of pot, half a Saxon cup, a brick from the war, some 80s Lego, a Viking sock, a kid's clog from the year 10.
Looking for a crock of gold at the end of the rainbow? It's a crock of something, Tony, but it ain't gold, pal". 

To be fair to Tony, I think he knew it was more about me than it was about him. He just said, "Happy birthday, you've got a beautiful home", and quietly drove away. I just thought, where did that come from? Time Team was a great show, I do think he should have found better things, but it was great! But long story short, I realised then I needed to be alone.

Whatever I said, it did achieve the desired effect, solitude. A bit of peace and quiet. 

[upbeat music]

Ever wanted to milk a cow? Thanks to an electrical failure, Cowley's Farm in Barnham is urgently looking for manual milking volunteers for its 300-head of healthy cows. 

Milkers can learn about traditional dairy farming, before drawing as much or as little milk as they like.

The milk is then weighed, and you can take ten percent of your yield home with you to drink, froth, churn, or freeze. 

Just bring your own containers and clean gloves. Also, we've run out of churns, so please bring your own churn. Stools provided. 

At first, my God, it was good. The tranquillity proved to be a fertile environment for fresh thought, a veritable petri dish in which tiny spores of good ideas sprouted into brilliant brainwaves.

They say no man is an island, but this man, and I'm pointing at myself, became an incredibly productive island, e.g. the island of Nauru, which grosses a hundred million a year from phosphate mining alone. Or Jersey, which is just full of good people! 

I may not have been rich in untaxed offshore income or phosphate, but I was growing fat with new ideas and initiatives. Where to start? I came up with two animated characters to encourage northern children to read more. They're essentially books with faces called Bookie Arkwright and Liam Chapter. They learn to understand each other because they can read each other. One of them splays himself open, and the other puts his face in the gap and just enjoys reading his friend, which, I admit, needs work, whereas 'Hasselback: Bad Spud Rising', that's ready to go.

I jotted down a rough outline for a new Home Office policy on small boats in which those granted asylum had to enrol in the British Army for two years with the sole purpose of filling every pothole in Britain. The result? Smoother roads in rural areas and, one hopes, a kinder attitude to asylum seekers. I sent it to Grant Shapps to pass on to Suella and the team.

Honestly, I was having ideas like nobody's business, which was one of the ideas, funnily enough, a Radio 4 panel show called Nobody's Business, in which Sue Perkins, et cetera, had to come up with amusing made-up jobs. It's only half thought through, but the great thing about Radio 4 is it doesn't have to be funny, you just have to make tired people and retired people chuckle once or twice. This idea ticks every one of those two boxes. 

I had loads of other ideas. Powdered orange juice. Edible cutlery. Cock-shaped pepper pot, bit of fun!
They were coming thick and fast. The pepper pot just dispenses pepper, by the way. It was a happy time, but in my eagerness to avoid others I began to withdraw from the world, refusing even to converse with my assistant and communicating with her via notes left in the bin bags of dry cleaning I left at the end of the drive, just short three-word instructions. More biros, please. Get leather gloves. Cancel charity walk. Cancel charity talk. More sweets, please. 

Sometimes, for much-needed levity, I'd use alliteration and abandon the three-word rule. Four fudge fingers, fast. And with no one to talk to, my mind began to gum up. Normally, thoughts tumbled around my head like trainers in a washing machine, but now they clattered around like football boots in a tumble dryer. Unable to escape, they emerged in the form of vivid dreams.

Soon enough, I began to unravel. It began one day when I raided my closet to find a Panama hat I wanted to wear on a narrowboating holiday with the singer Geri Halliwell. I was ransacking my closet, desperate to find my hat before the minibus arrived to pick me up. And then I paused and I thought, "Minibus? I don't think so!". And that's when I came round.

The narrowboating holiday was a dream, I'd sleepwalked to my closet. I don't even own a Panama hat,
I lent it to Damon Hill and never got it back. He's shifty. Nor had I ever been boating with Geri Halliwell, nor would I go boating with Geri Halliwell, or indeed any woman too slight to open the sluice of a canal lock. Even confined to the galley kitchen, she would be of little use. 

No. It had been a dream. So, with the help of my friend Nathan, who works in a recording studio and writes sound effects, jingles and compositions with me, when he's not working in a recording studio, I set up a recording system in my room which was activated by any sudden noise and could record my somnambulance. The results, the next morning, made my blood run cold. 

I play the recording with a trigger warning; the following contains sudden noises, incoherence and imaginary peril. 

Help me into a boat! The ship's just hit an iceberg! Everyone? Everyone, to the lifeboats. You've got to get away. You've got to get into the boats. Excuse me. Excuse me, it's women and children first. Are you a woman or a child? No, well, back off then! Unbelievable. 

And you, sir. Sir, I know. I know you're a good man. Sir, hold my hand. We cannot board these boats, but we will go down in this vessel knowing in our hearts that we died so that they would live. Oh, my God, there's Rod Stewart!

Hello? Rod? Mr Stewart? Mr Stewart?! Stewart, hi! Alan Partridge, First Officer. Good to meet you.

We're going down, yes. We are going down, I'm afraid, yes. You should pop into one of these lifeboats.

No, you don't have to worry about that. It's just a- excuse me? Excuse me, can you and your daughter just stand to one side, let this gentleman through? Thank you. 

There you go, you just hop in there, Rod, here. Anything you need? No, just look after these ladies. I'm sure you don't need any help from me in how to do that!

No, you can have that life jacket. It won't fit, she's too little! Okay, lower it down now. It's full enough, Rod. Rod, it's full enough! You don't want it too full, it's like bloody sardines! You're all right, Rod, you just spread out.

Okay, down she goes! What are you doing?! You've got to lower the ropes at the same time, otherwise you'll tip it up! Rod! Oh, my God. Okay, okay. Rod's got in. I'm going in after him. It's okay, Rod. I'm coming! Rod! [leap and a splash]

Occasionally I was not quite following what went on there. It appears I was dreaming I was aboard the Titanic that fateful night. Why was I dreaming that? And why was Sir Rod Stewart on board? All I know is it was horrific. Remember, fifteen hundred people perished that night simply because there were too few lifeboats. But in my dream, it was even worse because myself and Rod Stewart were among the dead. 

[sounds of splashing with a muffled voice trying to calm a somnambulant Alan down] 

"Give, give us your hand, come on".

It's so cold!

"That's what she said...".

Yes, I'm sorry about that. It was very vivid.

"That's alright, don't worry".

I can't promise it won't happen again, but the pool should really be covered when it's not in use.

"Let's just get you warm...".

Yeah. Yeah, get me warm, yeah. I'll bring the blanket back tomorrow.

"Don't worry about it, you're safe, that's the main thing".

Okay. Yes, thank you, thank you. You've been very kind.

Fortunately, my neighbour with the pool was quite a nice man. I find people with pools generally are. He let me back inside, helped me upstairs, dried my hair with a towel, left me a mug of cocoa on the side before calling me a silly old bugger and giving me a pretend punch. I like Paul, he's nice, but as I say, people with pools generally are. 

I knew as soon as I'd listened back to the recording of this that I needed to beat it. I didn't want to seek psychiatric help because the lads at the racket club would have a field day, so I began quite simply to meditate. I found myself contemplating the wonder of wood, of walnut and bamboo, oak and ash, teak, rosewood and mahogany. 

Unlike most people, who wouldn't know the difference between shit HomeBase pine and aged pippy oak if you beat them over the head with it, even though the shit pine would splinter and give them a bruised head, while the aged oak would kill them... I adore wood! It comes from the earth, lives its life, then, in death, it is reborn as a table, a chair, a cupboard, a fitted cupboard, an airing cupboard, a cupboard door, a door.

I decided to take up carpentry and, for a few days, it was a pleasant enough diversion. I made a blanket chest and a three-legged stool, but then I got a splinter lodged between my thumbnail and it really hurt and I realised that broadcasting is my carpentry! The wood I whittle is the minds and ears of 'wood'-be listeners. So I put away my block plane, try-square, sliding bevel and bradawl and went back to my first love, watching telly. 

I still enjoy wood, though. Take bamboo, far from it just being a panda's tea, it's incredibly light, but has extraordinary tensile strength. Boom mics used to be made of bamboo before the advent of aluminium, which was later superseded by carbon fibre. But nicest of all, it's a panda's tea. 

If you want to know more about bamboo, Google bamboo. Goodbye. 

[theme music]

Postscript. Many of you might think that this episode is lacking in structure and form, but that's the way dreams are. The podcast was emblematic of the chaotic nature of a dream. Stream of consciousness, that's the word. That is an editorial decision and not, as an unkind person might call it, a bag of bits, or as Scottish people call it, haggis. I could just eat some haggis now. I wonder if Waitrose sell haggis? [taps on phone] No.

[closing theme song]