Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge

I can't recommend this series highly enough. Chat-show host 'Alan Partridge' is like nothing you've ever encountered before, and yet 'believable' - if you've not seen this, you're in for a fantastic ride!

Watch out for guests: Joe Beasley and Cheeky Monkey - as AP says "hold onto you're sides, they might just split".

When I first watched this show, I wasn't sure. My friend told me how funny it was but at first it seemed a bit normal. However, I gave it a chance and watched some more. It was too late, I was hooked.

This show is brilliantly written and the jokes are so different to other comedies it feels refreshingly different. It does require a different view point for it's comedy but when looking from that perspective, this show stands tall.

The character himself, Alan Partridge, is a wonderful creation and Steve Coogan has cemented his name in comedy history. I love everything about this character and can quite easily watch this show over and over again.

The funniest thing is, you seem to be laughing at Alans crashing career which is sick but you just don't care.

The best part of this show was the ABBA medley. Truly brilliant.

This is comedy at it's very best. The supporting characters are truly wonderful and as for Alan Partridge himself, fantastic and brilliant.

AHA.....

Elevated from his radio show onto television this is presenter Alan Partridge's big break to take the art of chat to new heights. Unfortunately from the faulty studio fountain onwards it's all downhill for his ambitious project.

KMKY is six episodes of chat show spoof comedy heaven. There are too many funny bits to list but my favourite is the political debate where harrassed Conservative candidate Adrian Finch finally loses his nerve with the 'Bald Brummies' candidate and turns violent.

It is probally true that many presenters have skeletons locked away in the cupboard, but with Alan the skeletons tend to be released on camera, to ruin things for him every time. Maybe the real genius of the series is the fact that I have met people who genuinely believed that Alan was for real.

A program delivering a laugh a minute ratio is a rarity, which makes Knowing Me, Knowing You all the more essential viewing.

This is one of my favourite comedies, I so wish they had made more of this series. "I'm Alan Partridge" was good, but the 2nd series of that started going downhill a bit, like he was trying too hard.

But this is ultimate Partridge, the jokes and laughs come thick and fast, he's so bad at doing his job and insults the guests all the time, but your always on his side, especially in the French one, which happens to be one of my favourites. "What if your arm bursts?" I recommend this to any comedy fan, it's just so funny. Hopefully one day he'll get his 2nd series of his chat show.

But don't let me deter you from his two "I'm Alan Partridge" series though, the first series of that is also fantastic!

Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge character just wouldn't lie down. After filling the sport slot in Christopher Morris's brilliant TV news show spoof "The Day Today", Coogan and his co-writers devised this devilishly funny and close-to-the-bone mickey-take of the ever-popular celebrity chat programme, with all the accoutrements of real-life prototypes by the likes of real-life stereotypical hosts (we know who they are) complete with guest house-band, fake starry guests and all their other familiar trappings (mix and match guests, the shared couch, the shallow content).

Coogan in particular rips into the title character with relish, a gormless, ignorant, sexist, bigoted, power-crazy narcissist who says what he thinks before he even thinks it. To play his guests, stock supporting actors like Rebecca Front, David Schneider and Patrick Marber change clothes and personalities from show to show, but somehow always end up as the unwilling victims of Partridge's prejudices.

All of the shows in the series are big on laughs, my favourite characters being the dead-on-his-feet ventriloquist act Cheeky Monkey, the cringe-worthy "Knowing Another Alan Partridge" section involving a recently deceased namesake and of course his quite literally go-out-with-a-bang climax.

Once you settle down to watch it, so convincingly played are the characters that you actually do end up thinking it could somehow be for real on an obscure satellite channel, although after the final bombshell which ends each episode, you snap out if it but realise how close to the truth it actually was.

For Coogan the character has never gone away, spawning the brilliant "I'm Alan Partridge" sequel and most recently a movie incarnation "Alan Partridge Alpha Papa", which I've not yet seen but it will be hard-pressed to beat the plentiful laughs on show here.