Ready for immersion on the American side

Steve COOGAN remembers what it was like to be an Irish Catholic lad in Manchester, England, hearing what Los Angeles was like from an older sister who’d crossed the Atlantic.

“She said, ‘I’ve seen a world where you get hot pizzas delivered to your door! And people go out for breakfast!’ ” Coogan said recently as he ate lunch on the Sunset Strip, at Asia de Cuba in the Mondrian Hotel. “We thought this was something from the future.”

Now, in a cross-continent reversal of sorts, it’s the 39-year-old Coogan who’s talked of in sanctified tones by the kind of Americans who keep up with all things English.

His Peter Sellers-like gift for total immersion-style comedy characterization has made Coogan a superstar in Britain, where Alan Partridge, the character he invented who started out as an obnoxious sports reporter on a radio news spoof program and ended up hosting his own mock TV talk show, was often mistaken for a real chat-show host. “I’ve got a letter of complaint framed from an outraged listener saying, ‘Why was this man given his own talk show?’ ” Coogan said. “ ‘He asked a very gifted child genius if he had pubic hair!’ ”

Alan Partridge became an icon of self-absorption -- and hilarious self-destruction. “British comedy is about people who feel ... that they’ve been cheated about their rightful place in the world and are angry about it,” Coogan said. “It’s more painful” than American comedy. With Alan’s lack of an inner censor, though, “you can speak a universal truth, and that’s good. Alan would say ‘The emperor’s not wearing any clothes.’ ”

For the Alan Partridge Christmas special “Knowing Me, Knowing Yule” (airing on BBC America May 14), Coogan and his co-writers set about trying to figure out how to make it funny -- and understandable -- that Alan would hit a guy in a wheelchair.

The idea was to earn the audience’s laughter, so they worked backward to set up the circumstances. “It makes you inventive,” he said, “when you build yourself a wall and try to get over it. Bad comedy is when you go for the obvious target.”

Coogan has always admitted that Partridge is more a horrific extreme of his own insecurities than a dig at any particular celebrity, but he also seems to enjoy playing himself unflatteringly at times -- “Uncool is the new cool,” as he put it.

In Jim Jarmusch’s “Coffee and Cigarettes,” he was Steve Coogan the Hollywood snob acting dismissive toward Alfred Molina, and later this year in Michael Winterbottom’s “A Cock and Bull Story” -- about the making of a film version of the 18th century novel “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman” -- he’ll be Steve Coogan the Hollywood wannabe. “It partly plays on the notion that I’ve done something that I can’t escape from,” Coogan said. By one point in Winterbottom’s film he’s been defined so often as “the Alan Partridge guy” that it starts to invade his nightmares. “There’s a dream sequence, and I’m curled up naked in this womb, going, ‘Yeah, I’ve done other stuff, you know.’ ”

Other stuff includes the film “24 Hour Party People,” in which he starred as music impresario Tony Wilson. He will play Lisa Kudrow’s gay stepbrother in Don Roos’ new ensemble comedy-drama “Happy Endings,” opening in July. He’ll also costar in the thriller “The Alibi” and play the Austrian ambassador to France in Sofia Coppola’s film about Marie Antoinette.

Meanwhile his production company, Baby Cow, already a force on British airwaves, is looking to make inroads in America. Coogan is planning to spend the second half of 2005 in Los Angeles, promoting films or setting up projects that he hopes will bring together the best comic talent from here and Britain, whether it’s in movies or TV.

“I could do a thing where Alan Partridge tries to do a talk show in America,” Coogan said. “But I would not do it with real celebrities. I like the idea of using good comic American actors playing fictitious guests.”

But as weird as it has been for him to introduce to one world a character that in his old world is an albatross, Coogan is fine with the chronology mix-up that’s seeing Alan hit here after the U.S. success of that other beloved British import about a deluded sap, “The Office.” Alan was first, and he certainly helped pave the way for Ricky Gervais’ David Brent.

“For those uninformed, it may look like I’m being derivative, but it’ll also mean that those same people will also think I’m the latest thing,” Coogan said. “So it all comes out in the wash.”