The comeback kid

Far be it from me to encourage genocide, but couldn't we at least lobotomise caravanners? The embodiment of grey, joyless, narrow-minded Middle England en vacances, they need an hour to negotiate the one-minute car wash, and annually take their risible tin homes on wheels on a lethargic tour of England, thereby causing the nation's road system to become as thrombotic as their own lard-clogged arteries. When they eventually reach their final destination (a field of mud), they sit in the rain for a week, mournfully eating Vesta chow mein in a minuscule galley kitchen that smells of urine and butane, while watching David Attenborough nature programmes on their portable satellite television, until it's time to leave. Then, having never once had the temerity to venture out into the real, raw, natural world that lies beyond their plastic-net-curtained window, they tow their wretched sarcophagus back home again at 15mph. Tiny on the inside, yet big enough on the outside to cause a 10-mile tailback, and seemingly wafted here from another epoch, these caravans are rather like Dr Who's Tardis, only in reverse. A re-Tardis, perhaps.

With his Pringle jumper, his nylon polyamide trousers and sports jacket, the star of I'm Alan Partridge (BBC2) is quintessential caravan man, and last night's new series revealed that he's now even living in one. Steve Coogan's brilliant comic creation remains as hilarious as ever, not simply because he dresses like his dad, but because he's sublimely oblivious to his own absurdity and never learns humility, even though he's constantly being humiliated. Five years ago, Alan was at rock bottom, "clinically fed up" and living alone in the Linton Travel Tavern, but now his career is on the up, with "the third-best slot on Radio Norwich, a military-based quiz show for cable TV called Skirmish and a girlfriend". Yet he remains as crass and boorish as ever, and the programme's deliciously excruciating humour is primarily generated by his complete lack of awareness that he's about as funny as an outbreak of rabies in a guide dogs for the blind home.

When I first encountered Alan almost a decade ago, he was a sports reporter and chatmeister on The Day Today, and his cringemaking bonhomie brought Alan Titchmarsh to mind. Then, when he became a DJ, he had much in common with Tony Blackburn, from the hair hat down to the penchant for unspeakably weak and forced puns (last night, for example, he poorly imitated Rhett Butler and quipped: "Flatley my dear, I don't Riverdance"). But seeing him present a compilation of auto smashes (entitled Crash, Bang, Wallop What a Video), I realised that there's also a lot of Jeremy Clarkson in the character because both share the same locker-room mentality and dubious political views, and both are just intelligent enough to realise that they're just not intelligent enough. Oh, and both have a huge lorry following their car wherever they go. You know, the lorry they need to transport their ego in.

Alan's attempts last night to recapture the media heights he'd once attained were painfully funny and highlighted the absurdity of trying to maintain a youthful and carefree media image after the age of 30. The innocent enquiry, "Didn't you used to be on television?" elicited the tetchy response, "Yeah, I got out of that - unpleasant people, bitter bastards" (though who can forget Partridge once desperately begging a BBC executive to commission his "Monkey Tennis" format, just so he could remain inside the magic rectangle?), and his attempts to ingratiate himself with the public were invariably cack-handed ("I really admire you teachers, doing what you do for such rubbish money"). His boasts of a successful broadcasting comeback were further belied when his favourite nocturnal haunt turned out to be an allnight BP garage run by Michael (the ex-army Geordie who formerly worked behind the tavern bar), a venue that enabled some timely satire to be slipped in. "You work in a petrol station, it's not the Gulf War," said Alan, adding, "which, ironically, is like a large petrol station."

After Coogan formed his Baby Cow production company, he entered a period when he seemed able to achieve success for others (notably Rob Brydon), but not for himself. However, with Armando Iannucci producing, and Talkback overseeing this series, he's back on form, giving us comedy that is rich, multi-layered and doesn't rely solely on embarrassment for its effect (unlike that runt son of Spinal Tap, The Office, which despite almost unprecedented media hype ended its run with 56 million people still not watching). Particularly appealing are the spectacularly vulgar sexual euphemisms from Alan, who loves to boast about his young Ukrainian girlfriend and confided to his builders that "occasionally, I dost venture South". Which was almost as funny as the euphemism a taxi driver once used for the same hobby when I was travelling in the back of his cab. "Can't be doing with it mate. It's like eating sushi from a barbershop floor." Whatever that means.