Me, you, me, me

Each of us lives inside a little bubble of culture -- containing the things we like -- inside a bigger bubble of culture that holds the things that are available to us to like. The world is made of these bubbles, which can intersect to greater or lesser degrees. The culture bubbles of the United States and Finland, for instance, meet with relative infrequency, while those of the U.S. and England can seem to overlap to such a degree that it seems sometimes we must be living identical lives, culture bubble-wise.

But this is not true. Let’s take British television comedy, which has been regularly broadcast on PBS for more than three decades and on multiplying cable outlets since, right up to BBC America. Yet we know only what we’re served -- “Benny Hill” and “Mr. Bean,” “Ab Fab” and “Blackadder,” “Monty Python” and “Are You Being Served?” -- and though the recent stateside success of series like “The Office,” now replicated in an American flavor, means that we’re getting more British shows sooner, we’re still only fractionally informed and behind the times.

Take Steve Coogan, who is now nearly 40 and has been a force in English comedy for more than a decade -- he was recently ranked 17th among the all-time-greatest comics, according to a survey of comedy professionals, ahead of Rowan Atkinson, Michael Palin, Stephen Fry and Ricky Gervais of “The Office” fame, who has certainly been influenced by Coogan. But he is just coming into focus in this country: What might have been his mainstream breakthrough, last year’s big-budget remake of “Around the World in 80 Days,” did badly, and he is breaking into Hollywood by way of high-cachet but lesser-seen independent films such as “24 Hour Party People,” in which he plays impresario Tony Wilson, and Jim Jarmusch’s “Coffee and Cigarettes,” in which he plays “himself.”

You might have seen him there, or in Terry Jones’ “Wind in the Willows” (distributed here as “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride”), in which he is a sweet Mole among a cast of Pythons. But unless you have made an extraordinary effort, or had the right friends, you will not have seen the real core of the comedian’s work, little of which has crossed the Atlantic. You will not have seen “Coogan’s Run,” a kind of suburban-English “Spoon River Anthology” that includes a pitch-perfect re-creation of an old Ealing comedy; or his “Dr. Terrible’s House of Horrible,” a six-part tribute to the Hammer House of Horror; or “The Tony Ferrino Phenomenon,” in which he becomes a politically incorrect Portuguese pop singer; or his films “The Parole Officer” or “Cruise of the Gods.” Most crucially, you will not have encountered any of several works featuring the young philosopher-drunk Paul Calf and his sexually overactive sister Pauline Calf (both played by Coogan), or Alan Partridge, his greatest creation, a chat-show host forever rocketing between desperate fawning and disdain.

But now, as if to acknowledge the belated rise of Coogan’s star over American shores -- he’s acting in Sofia Coppola’s next movie, will be doing something soon with Ben Stiller -- BBC America is about to show “The Alan Partridge Experience.” Presumably, if we can handle “The Office,” we can handle Partridge, whose mix of self-approval and arrogant insecurity anticipates that show’s David Brent in many ways.

Beginning Saturday and running for 19 weeks, the package doesn’t represent the complete Partridge. It leaves out, for example, the character’s first TV appearances, as a sports reporter, in the news parody “The Day Today.” But it will give you a sense of Coogan’s development as an artist, from the 1994 “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” through a Christmas special (“Knowing Me, Knowing Yule”) and on to the “fly on the wall” sitcom “I’m Alan Partridge,” from 1997 and 2002, which follows Alan after his fall from grace -- as he lands on late-night radio back in Norwich and plots his return to television.

There’s a sense in which Alan is an impossible creation -- he is too extraordinarily bad at what he does to have ever made it as far as he has. But he is real, nevertheless, as are all of Coogan’s characters, however broadly drawn. What makes them real is their humanity -- not in the warm, cuddly sense to which the word is usually put, but in the way that each is supported by a web of sharp detail in which we can recognize a fellow faulty human, and our own potential awfulness.

It’s all about him

Because he’s more interested in himself than in any of the people he interviews or otherwise meets, except as their approval might advance his career or burnish his self-image, Alan manages to tell us quite a lot about Alan. We know that he sang in the choir in primary school “before it all dropped,” that he was bullied, got a B General Studies, “which, of course, I’m quite pleased about,” and saw ELO at the Birmingham National Exhibition Centre in 1976. He is fond of owls and, though homophobic, fascinated by “ladyboys”; he has flaky skin and “a fat back, a buildup of fatty deposits just above the belt line. It’s fairly well concealed in casual clothing, but you don’t want to see me in my underpants!” And there is the obsession with Abba, whose song of the same name gives “Knowing Me, Knowing You” its title and catchphrase (Ah-haaaaaa!), and after whose song of another name Alan named his son Fernando.

He takes great stock in his own name, which he pronounces with a final, rich, descending note of relish. One feature of his chat show is “Knowing Me, Alan Partridge, Knowing You, Another Alan Partridge,” “in which I meet an ordinary member of the public who shares my name and is therefore entitled to membership in that exclusive club -- Club Alan Partridge.” He gives each an “Alan Partridge tie and blazer badge combination pack,” featuring his own invented crest. One guest on his show keeps mistakenly calling him “Alec,” until he explodes, “Alan! Alan! Alan! Alan Alan Alan Alan Alan Alan Alan Alan Alan Alan Alan Alan Alan Alan! My name is Alan Partridge. That’s who I am. Alan Partridge. There are no excuses.”

There is a dark, aggressive, even tragic streak to this comedy that doesn’t really flourish in America, because our national myths are founded on mobility and triumph -- we’ve yet to experience the fall of our empire, whereas much post-imperial British comedy is based on people not knowing their place, or even that they have a place, within a small island of limited resources.

Partridge is the very personification of class consciousness -- when someone calls him working class, he points out, “I did go to East Anglia Polytechnic, and I’ve got a couple of pretty good A-levels, and as regards working class, my parents did own their own home and we holidayed once or twice in Spain, so that’s not quite right.” He views the world around him with habitual resentment -- class resentment, resentment of the more talented, of the lucky, of the “clever” and of those who are merely happy without having any of the things he deems necessary for happiness. His deepest desire is to continue helming his low-rated, disastrous TV talk show, and, once he’s lost it, to get it back, which makes anyone with the power to grant that desire a potential enemy: “You’ve not witnessed pure evil until you’ve looked into the eyes of a man who’s just canceled your second series.”

Because he can only relate to people in a utilitarian way, he saves his real love for things: Forced to choose between downsizing his car and his staff, he fires everyone. His (never seen) wife leaves him for her fitness instructor; his children don’t care to know him. He is hopelessly competitive, even though he’s always outmatched and he invariably couches the battle in the wrong terms. Even announcing a song, he has to get the upper hand: “That was ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ by Joni Mitchell, a song in which Joni complains they ‘paved paradise to put up a parking lot,’ a measure which actually would have alleviated traffic congestion on the outskirts of paradise, something which Joni singularly fails to point out, perhaps because it doesn’t quite fit in with her blinkered view of the world. Nevertheless, nice song.”

Unlike David Brent, who finally gained enough perspective on himself to begin a healthy human relationship, Alan is a permanently hopeless case. Each succeeding installment of the Partridge saga only makes clearer the height of his self-delusion and the depth of his unrecognized loneliness. And yet so musical, so well timed and so thoroughly imagined is Coogan’s performance that there is endless pleasure in his awful, hysterical company. Here he comes now. Or as the host himself might put it: “Knowing me, Alan Partridge, knowing you, the United States of America. Ah-haaaaaa!”