EARLY in his career, English actor Steve Coogan became a household name in the UK playing radio DJ Alan Partridge on TV.

Director Declan Lowney and writer Peter Baynham have ongoing associations with Coogan, who co-wrote this film. The trio, supported by a strong cast (Colm Meaney, Anna Maxwell-Martin, Sean Pertwee and more) attacks the task of giving life to a plot that, at its best, is a drawn-out sitcom episode.

Alan P. is unrelenting in the awfulness of his persona, unaware of the needs of any other person on the planet. The Brit talk-back radio audience loves his crass. Between the film’s lines dwells a guy whom no human being with an ounce of compassion for the disadvantaged could like.

The movie’s plot builds when a takeover of the station leads to a token redundancy that Alan P contrives to remove his on-air colleague Pat (Meaney) who loses his cool, takes all the station staff, except Alan P, hostage thereby initiating a crisis of the kind that TV channels adore to report live.

It’s more clever than comical, more comical than credible, the anatomy of a profession that, let’s face it, you’d enter only if no-one would give you a job requiring brains. The money may be good; the notoriety may feed the ego, but nobody could call being a shock jock a socially-useful calling.

At Dendy and Palace Electric