A Partridge that’s now struggling to take wing

Steve Coogan as Sligo farmer and ballad singer Martin Brennan in This Time With Alan Partridge (BBC One)

Reviewed This Week

This Time with Alan Partridge: BBC One

After Life: Netflix

Getting a great comedy off the ground and keeping it airborne for any length of time is extraordinarily hard to do, and that’s disregarding the supernatural levels of talent needed to make it happen in the first place. Even Fawlty Towers, the sublime acme of self-defeating English smallness until something even better superseded it, lasted for just 12 half-hour episodes ...