The much-anticipated Alan Partridge podcast has finally dropped.
From The Oasthouse: The Alan Partridge Podcast is Steve Coogan's latest instalment from the world of the veteran disc jockey.
The series consists of 18 episodes, each 20 or so minutes in length, of Alan speaking his mind, whether that's from his 'oast-style house' or while running through the countryside - or even hiding in a neighbour's garage.
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But while while it's mainly just Alan talking to himself, save a couple of one-sided phone calls with his assistant Lynn, Coogan tells LADbible he thinks it offers a whole new side to his most popular character, one which fans have never seen - or heard - before.
"There's minimal interaction with his housekeeper and there are a couple of people who come round, but not many," he says.
"When you're doing a TV show or a narrative, it's all about interaction. All these things are a trade-off. When we did a narrative, like I'm Alan Partridge, in Alan's universe there are no cameras, so the conceit is that Alan is not on camera, so his behaviour is different.
"And you learn things and hear things from Alan that you wouldn't have - in the podcast - if he was on camera. But when he is on camera there is another kind of comedy you get because he is self-conscious and he's aware that people are witnessing what he's saying. So he tries to edit himself.
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"But when you do a podcast, what you lose with the interaction, you gain with Alan being a little bit more unguarded with his thoughts, so you get what appears to be a stream of consciousness from Alan."
Coogan adds: "Every medium you try with a character, you gain something and you lose something.
And that's fine, because across the whole gamut of Alan you get to explore different sides of his character."
But while the podcast might have meant considerably less time in make-up for the 54-year-old, he says he and fellow writers - Rob and Neil Gibbons - worked hard to give it a level of 'dynamism' that reminded him of the earliest days of Partridge.
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He said: "We were asked whether we wanted to do a podcast and we ummed and ahed about it and then we thought, actually, it's quite easy and I don't have to dress up.
"We recorded it around my home in Sussex and we did go out, we wandered through the countryside, we took it out, we recorded some stuff in the car. So it's not just static, we gave it a dynamic feel.
"And if you try and replicate those things like a Radio 4 drama, they always sound a bit sterile, so we put it on its feet."
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Adding: "It was quite liberating in some ways. It reminded me of the early days of Knowing Me, Knowing You. And what was great about that was, you could have an idea and execute it really quickly, because when it's audio you don't have to have this machinery of production to gear up before you implement your idea.
"So it means there's a spontaneity about the material that's hard to replicate when you have a huge production process."
But if you think the podcast is just Coogan improvising throughout, you would be way off the mark.
He explained: "One of the curses of Partridge is that people go, 'Oh, you must just turn up and improvise'. Every single word is written, every single pause is written, every single hesitation is written.
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"We do improvise in the writing process, so we'll use improv as a way of searching for material, but when we've got it then we really lock it down."
From the Oasthouse: The Alan Partridge Podcast is available to download now from audible.co.uk.
Featured Image Credit: Audible