Alan Partridge Audiobooks

Alan Partridge is not, strictly speaking, a person – he is a British comedy character created and portrayed by Steve Coogan, and one of the most durable inventions in modern British comedy. A parody of a certain kind of television personality – tactless, inept and monstrously self-regarding – he first appeared in 1991 on the BBC Radio 4 spoof On the Hour, devised by Coogan with Armando Iannucci, and has since colonised radio, television, books, podcasts and a feature film.

The landmarks include the chat-show spoof Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge, the BAFTA-winning sitcom I’m Alan Partridge, the film Alpha Papa (2013) and the spoof memoir I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan. Since 2010 every Partridge project has been co-written with Rob and Neil Gibbons, and the character has only deepened – critics praise his complexity, realism and pathos, and Coogan won a BAFTA in 2025 for the spoof documentary series How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge). One national newspaper called him one of the greatest comic creations of recent decades; on the evidence, hard to argue.

Audio is where Partridge began, and it remains where he is at his purest. From the Oasthouse: The Alan Partridge Podcast – all four series sit in our catalogue – hands him a microphone and no adult supervision, which is precisely the joke, while Alan Partridge: Nomad and Alan Partridge: Big Beacon deliver his prose in the only voice it could conceivably have. This is cringe comedy refined over three decades, from a character credited with influencing a whole school of British sitcoms. For UK listeners, needing no introduction; for everyone else, consider this the introduction.