Coogan is out on parole duty

Steve Coogan was on Top of the Pops recently. His task was to introduce Atomic Kitten, whose Eternal Flame plays over the closing credits of his new film, The Parole Officer.

In the circs, you?d think he?d be right behind them. And so he was. With a blade. He introduced them as ?the sound a cat makes when you put it in a microwave?. Down on stage, before the cameras cut to them, three blonde Scouse moggies looked a bit wounded. ?I came up with that one,? says Coogan afterwards in his tatty dressing-room. ?Another was, ?And now, the best thing to come out of Liverpool since the Manchester Ship Canal, only dirtier.? And the producers came up with ?Nuclear pussy?.

"Kids watch the show so you can?t do that one. There?s a time and a place for crap gags and that was it.?

The girls looked hurt, I tell him. ?Oh did they? That?s good. I think it?s all right now and again to hurt pretty girls. God, that?s probably going to come out All Wrong. I didn?t mean it like that.?

He is wearing a black T-shirt announcing the legend in white lettering: ?The Parole Officer is a film.? On the back it adds: ?And I?m in it.? It matches the flecks of white in his black hair. Top of the Pops? T-shirts? These are more flagrant promotional tactics than anything Coogan has had need of thus far.

The next instalment of the Alan Partridge story, which is currently being written and will be greeted like a long-lost Dead Sea Scroll, will need no such push. But a film vehicle which intends to appeal to as broad an audience as possible is new territory. You can tell how mainstream it intends to be from the table-dancing scene. However brief, all the girls are in bikinis.

?We did a rude version with all the clothes off as well. If Steve Buscemi was playing my role it would probably be better to go for the tops off. But I?m in it. Although I have a cult following I also have a broad following too; it?s quite a weird place. When I did my live show there?d be lots of young people there as well as the cult brigade.

"I wanted to do a film that was entertaining, intelligent but accessible. I did The Day Today. I?ve done that kind of cult comedy which is great fun. It was like, can I do something broader without selling out? Can you square that circle? That was what we set out to do.

"I?ve done everything I wanted to do on TV. To do a really successful half-hour comedy series was one of my landmark ambitions. And I sort of did it through Partridge. Doing good-quality comedy that has a broad appeal is more difficult than doing esoteric stuff that appeals to one?s core audience.? Coogan plays Simon Garden, a parole officer who witnesses a murder and then has to break into a bank to retrieve the evidence.

Of the 1,000 clients who have crossed his path, he enlists the three who are going straight. It?s knockabout stuff, a far cry from the wild realism of Partridge, and yet there are undeniably echoes of one role in the other. Coogan says he?s ?not bothered by that. It?s kind of inevitable.

When people think, ?Oh, that?s a bit like Alan?, in actual fact that?s not like Alan, that?s me. They are just recognising the bits in Alan Partridge that are Steve Coogan. There is an anal retentiveness that Alan Partridge has which Steve Coogan also has that I put into the character and so it looks like an overlap.? For anyone searching for clues to the real Coogan, they are here. He says that if he hadn?t gone into comedy, his shambolic sense of idealism might have led him towards the public sector, towards doing good. The Parole Officer, a highly populist expression of his liberalism, comes at a time when his ?colleague and distant friend? Chris Morris has ploughed a much lonelier furrow in the paedophile edition of Brass Eye. ?I fully defend Chris, unlike a lot of the Islington liberal TV executives who crawl into a hole and hide because they?re scared they might get some negative publicity, which I find odious. The way the media have been making a big fuss about it is really depressingly Philistine. I resent the thing I?ve read in some tabloids ? oh, this is comedy for cappuccino-quaffing Soho elitists ? because I am from Manchester and I don?t regard myself as a Soho elitist and I think it?s funny and it?s challenging and it?s different.

"If it?s all right for drama to tackle a sensitive issue why is not all right for comedy to tackle a serious issue? The idea that if a difficult topic is tackled by comedy it trivialises it, that means that comedy is trivial. Comedy is a legitimate, proper grown-up art form. Comedy should deal with things which are difficult. And all these Government ministers slagging it off 10 years ago would have been bleating on about freedom of expression. I think that?s atrocious.