Critics have welcomed the return of Alan Partridge to the BBC with a flurry of five-star reviews – but ITV won the ratings slot with a Long Lost Family special.
Steve Coogan’s grotesque creation dominated social media last night as the first episode of This Time with Alan Partridge – the Norwich broadcaster’s much-anticipated return to terrestrial TV – aired on BBC One.
It secured 3.3million viewers but lost its slot to ITV’s Long Lost Family: Born Without a Trace, which was watched by 3.8m having started at 9pm. This Time’s predecessor in the 9pm slot, Warren starring Martin Clunes, also hit 3.8m.
In her five-star review for The Guardian, Lucy Mangan wrote that writers Rob and Neil Gibbon had “accomplished the feat of finding new layers in Alan” and that the show had brought “Alan back, in all his glory and his tragedy, at just the right time”.
The Independent called the first episode “exquisitely painful” and that Coogan had “only added to the Partridge persona he had done so much to perfect”.
The Telegraph said it was a “sublimely excruciating return” while The Times claimed it was a “perfect reimagining”… “At last. Something we can be thankful to Brexit for.” One of the few dissenting voices was Jim Shelley, who wrote in the Daily Mail that the new Partridge “really was a shadow of his former self”.
The reaction on social media was largely positive – and here’s a reminder of the scene when Partridge mimed a hands-free train toilet drill.
