“I never really wanted to be an entertainer,” says Steve Coogan. “I mean, I love entertaining people. But I always wanted to do work that had substance – that had some meat on the bones. I went to drama school, but got sidetracked into comedy, and I just went where the work was. My attitude was, ‘if you’re being offered work, do it – you can figure it out later’. And I did figure it out later. I had a deliberate pathway that I wanted to pursue. I didn’t want to be a TV personality, appearing on panel shows. It just didn’t float my boat.”
It’s more than 35 years now since that earnest young drama graduate found himself taking an accidental detour into the world of light entertainment, doing Ronnie Corbett and Sean Connery impressions on shows like Jimmy Tarbuck’s Live from the Palladium, and providing voices for satirical puppet show Spitting Image. All of which feels a long way from his current status as one of Britain’s most in-demand actors, writers and producers, juggling edgy roles like his Bafta-nominated performance as Jimmy Savile in BBC drama The Reckoning with Hollywood movies and, of course, regular stints as Norfolk’s most puffed-up broadcaster, Alan Partridge.
But Coogan’s latest project sees him coming full circle, after a fashion, by playing the political journalist and broadcaster Brian Walden – a man who was part of his Spitting Image repertoire all those years ago. Except this time he’s starring opposite Dame Harriet Walter in a prestige Channel 4 drama written by James Graham and directed by Stephen Frears – which in itself tells you a lot about the 59-year-old’s direction of travel over the past three decades.
Adapted from former BBC politics producer Rob Burley’s bestselling book Why is This Lying B*****d Lying to Me?, Brian and Maggie tells the gripping story of the fateful 1989 TV interview between Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher (played by Walter) – a combative encounter from which the then prime minister arguably never fully recovered.
It was Coogan who took the project to Channel 4 in his role as creative director of Baby Cow – the production company he co-founded 25 years ago, whose hits include everything from Gavin & Stacey to the 2013 film Philomena (for which he also wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay). And it was he who approached Graham, the award-winning playwright and screenwriter behind Brexit: The Uncivil War, Dear England and Sherwood, to write it. “It’s one of those projects where, if I want plum roles, I have to create them myself,” he explains. “It was Rob who said I should play Brian Walden. Which I thought I could do, ‘cos I used to play him on Spitting Image. And then Harriet was interested, which raised everybody’s game.”
A former Labour MP turned TV heavyweight, Brian Walden was a huge star in the 1980s. As an interrogator, he was famously hard-hitting, but was accused of going soft on Margaret Thatcher, with whom he’d developed an unusually close relationship – even helping write her party conference speeches. So when chancellor Nigel Lawson resigned as part of a growing rift within the government, the question was: did Walden have what it takes to deliver a knockout blow to his old friend?
“It’s a tragedy, but also a sort of political love story,” says Coogan. “Thatcher is obviously a very divisive figure, and what interested me about this was not so much her politics, which in many ways were disastrous for the social fabric of this country, but the fact she was an outsider. Both she and Brian Walden were state educated people who got into Oxford with a scholarship, and broke through to become incredibly successful in their fields. They had that in common, and that’s what bonded them.”
It’s something Coogan himself can relate to. “I’m not saying I’m a horny-handed son of the soil,” he says of his upbringing in a large Irish Catholic family in Middleton, near Manchester. “Like Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher, I’m lower middle class. It’s a sector of society which is the backbone of Britain – the working people, like teachers in neglected schools. Dramatists often ignore those people, because it’s not sexy, working class poverty porn. It’s not a world the upper middle class people who run the media understand.”
Studying drama at Manchester Polytechnic, Coogan fell in with a northern comedy crowd that included John Thomson and Caroline Aherne. But working on radio comedy On the Hour – which first introduced the world to Alan Partridge – and its seminal TV spin-off The Day Today brought him into the orbit of Oxbridge graduates like Armando Iannucci and Patrick Marber. So he knows what it feels like to be an outsider. “I’m certainly not part of the establishment,” he says, before correcting himself: “I certainly wasn’t part of the establishment. And I still don’t want to be. I’m not happy being part of a club. I don’t want to be one of those people who goes, ‘we’ve made it’. I find that distasteful.”
His parents, engineer Tony and housewife Kathleen, both valued education, and there was an unspoken assumption that all six of their children would go on to be teachers. They were also a political household, with Tony standing for the SDP-Liberal Alliance at the 1983 General Election. What does Coogan think his dad, who died in 2018, would have made of him going head-to-head with the winner of that election in a TV drama, 40-odd years later?
“I think he might be troubled by the idea we might be humanising her. Which does give me some consternation,” he admits. “But I’d hope people will approach it in a non-binary way. My mother watched it, and said it was fantastic. I don’t like this rewriting of history, where all these young Conservatives think Margaret Thatcher is this amazing person. Her grand experiment in privatisation ultimately failed. She was trying to empower a shareholder society, and that didn’t happen. She elevated a lot of people, but she abandoned a lot of people. Some people think that’s an acceptable price to pay. I don’t. But her legacy is indisputable.”
“I do get anxious about things, but I try to coach myself into being more relaxed. I’m not as precious as I was”
Brian Walden is far from the first real-life person Coogan has played, of course: as well as Jimmy Savile, previous roles have included Stan Laurel, Factory Records boss Tony Wilson and BBC journalist Martin Sixsmith in Philomena.
One part he auditioned for but didn’t get was the lead in the 2004 film The Life & Death of Peter Sellers, starring Geoffrey Rush. But now he’s having the last laugh, winning rave reviews for Armando Iannucci’s West End stage adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s cold war satire Dr Strangelove.
In the film, Peter Sellers played three central roles – the eponymous German scientist, an RAF captain and the US President. But Coogan adds a fourth by also playing Major T ‘King’ Kong, the gung-ho B-52 commander who famously hitches a ride on one of his own bombs. “Armando initially asked me to play three roles, but not the US President, because it was technically too difficult to have me and Dr Strangelove in the same scene,” he explains. “And I said, ‘well can we try? Because if we’re going to do it, I’d like to do all four’. I thought we should try to top the film. Sellers was a troubled man, and dropped out of playing Kong, probably because he lost confidence or, I dunno, he was bored. Whatever it was, he was a narcissistic person, and his narcissism meant he didn’t fulfil that brief. Whereas my narcissism means I do fulfil the brief.” He laughs at this somewhat harsh self-assessment.
When I video call Coogan at his temporary London digs, it’s early morning, the night after a show, but he assures me he’s “had his seven hours”. As an interviewee, he is thoughtful, engaged and serious, clearly preferring matters of substance – that word again – to showbiz chit-chat. You can see why he has a reputation for being intense – a reputation, to his credit, he happily sent up on The Trip, the lightly fictionalised TV travelogue in which he and Rob Brydon ate their way around a succession of fine dining restaurants.
A running gag on that show was how anxious the thin-skinned ‘Steve Coogan’ is about how he’s perceived by the outside world: whether, to return to our theme, he is taken seriously enough. Clearly there was more than a nugget of truth in that – but has age helped bring some perspective?
“As you get older, you do feel a lot more gratitude,” he reflects. “I try to remind myself of that, and I think I’m less fraught. I do get anxious about things, but I try to coach myself into being more relaxed. I’m not as precious as I was. But some things still hold true, like not wanting to be part of the [showbiz] establishment. I saw Rob the other day, and I said to him, ‘I’d still rather be outside the tent pissing in’. Whereas I think he’s happy inside the tent.”
Coogan’s early struggles with fame are well documented. A self-confessed “square” growing up, money and success triggered a “delayed adolescence” of women, fast cars (he bought a sports car before he owned a washing machine) and a cocaine habit that led to a stint in rehab. He’s had several high-profile partners, and was briefly married in the early 2000s, but says the most important relationship of his life is with his grown-up daughter Clare.
As a victim of the News International phone hacking scandal, he’s also been an energetic campaigner for press regulation: it was evidence obtained by his lawyers that helped bring down the News of the World, and he memorably told the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics that his closet was so “empty of skeletons” that he now felt immune from further tabloid attack. Today, he lives as quietly off the radar as he can in East Sussex.
For all his many successes – including four Baftas, three British Comedy Awards and two Oscar nominations – there was a time when Steve Coogan felt eclipsed by the long shadow of Alan Partridge, describing his most famous creation as an “albatross”. These days, though, Alan’s more like a “battered comfy leather jacket” that he regularly slips into for TV shows, podcasts, audiobooks and live shows.
“It’s sort of a love-hate relationship,” he suggests. “It’s like a marriage – you go through some rough times, and eventually you start to appreciate what’s good about it. I’m blessed that I’m able to do other projects – to have my cake and eat it, to some extent. I love doing Alan, as long it stays fresh.”
As we speak, he’s just finished filming a new BBC mockumentary, How Are You? with Alan Partridge. “It’s ostensibly about mental health,” he explains. “It’s Alan jumping on the mental health bandwagon.”
Though Alan’s still a reliably pompous berk, Coogan admits he feels more affinity with him these days, both men having evolved in their own ways. “We live in a really sensitive era now, where people are terrified of putting a foot wrong or getting cancelled,” he says. “It’s all become so binary – you’re either someone who likes Top Gear, or you’re someone who’s woke. And I hate Top Gear more than I hate woke, but I don’t think either should be immune from mockery. So Alan is a safe space to laugh at all that stuff.
“The fact is, some of the things we put in his mouth are things I find objectionable – and some of them are things I sort of half agree with. We [Coogan and co-writers Neil and Rob Gibbons] do target certain things that annoy us. It’s been said that censorship used to come from the right, and now it comes from the left. Which is very simplistic, but I think that’s broadly true. So we laugh at both sides. Lots of Guardian readers love Alan Partridge, ‘cos he’s their bête noire. But then I also had a team of firemen come to see the live show, and when someone asked them why, they said: ‘We love Alan – he tells it like it is.’”
Stream Brian and Maggie on Channel 4 now
This interview was first published in Waitrose Weekend on 23 January, 2025
Interesting Media 