Steve Coogan interview: ‘There's no such thing as a no-go area in comedy'

Telegraph

18-04-2025

'I had no burning desire to do a f—king penguin movie,'says Steve Coogan. 'Anyone who has seen my work would not say that's obviously the next step.'
Yet here he is, having very much done a f—king penguin movie, The Penguin Lessons, and he is sitting in the drawing room of a hotel in Soho to tell us all about it. As a journalist on a conservative newspaper, one approaches Steve Coogan with a certain degree of trepidation. He is as famous for his Left-wing politics as for his performances. He has supported Extinction Rebellion and the Green Party, campaigned to halt arms sales to Israel and for greater press regulation. He has railed repeatedly and vociferously against the Right-wing press and the 'handful of billionaires who control our print media'. They are all subjects on which he tends to disagree with The Telegraph.
Still, he also has a lot to promote at the moment, and needs must. A trim, tanned 59, in a casual green suit he has just purchased after wearing it for the photo shoot, Coogan is more relaxed and upbeat than he sometimes comes across. Compared to the blithe Alan Partridge, his enduring comic creation, there has often been an antsy, unsatisfied quality to Coogan.
Perhaps this is a preview of his late era: sober, at peace with Partridge, earnest but not furious about politics, and with a constant supply of interesting work. He has just come off playing Dr Strangelove in the West End and Brian Walden opposite Harriet
Walter's Margaret Thatcher in Brian and Maggie. In 2023 he played Jimmy Savile in The Reckoning. Another series of
Partridge is imminent, more The Trip is in the works, more films and books and plays and telly. His production company, Baby Cow, has helped launch dozens of comic careers.
'I'm never not grateful that I'm making a living,' he says. 'I've never had a proper job really. I remember student jobs cleaning out vegetable crates for Sainsbury's with horror. I try to remind myself of that. The fact I've got a varied career is great to me.'
The Penguin Lessons is an adaptation of Tom Michell's 2015 book, a true story about his time working as an English teacher in Argentina in the 1970s, when he struck up an unlikely relationship with a Magellanic penguin he named Juan Salvador. Coogan plays Michell, a little older than the 20-something of the book; Jonathan Pryce plays the headmaster of the exclusive boarding school where he teaches.
It was a febrile political atmosphere that helped Jeff Pope, the screenwriter, bring Coogan around to the film. The pair have worked together many times, including on the Savile series and on Philomena, the 2013 film about a journalist helping an elderly woman (Judi Dench) who has been searching for her son for 50 years, which earned Coogan Oscar nominations (his only ones so far) for best picture and best adapted screenplay.
'Pope said, 'I'm doing a penguin film,' and I was like, 'What's it about?'' Coogan recalls. 'He said, 'Nice guy rescues penguin, it makes him a slightly better teacher.' I said, 'I'll give that a miss.'
'But then I went to Buenos Aires and became fascinated by it. It's this strange European city that's been beamed down into South America. I went to the Naval Academy where they kept the disappeared [dissidents who were summarily arrested and held without charge]. It was very bleak. I said to Jeff, 'We need to fold that in. And make him someone who doesn't like penguins and children particularly, just ambivalent.'
'I mean, Martin Sixsmith in Philomena is pretty much the same character,' he adds. 'Cynical bloke meets Judi Dench, becomes uncynical at the end, and enlightened but not stupid. Ditto [with The Penguin Lessons ], but switch Judi Dench for a penguin.
'I had to have something called 'penguin familiarisation',' says Coogan with an expression that suggests he was surprised, 40 years into his career, to experience something genuinely new. 'I've never had that in my diary before. I had to learn to stroke them, talk to them, lift them up in the correct way. I jumped in with both feet. Jonathan [Pryce] didn't want to touch the penguin. Another actress wanted to wear rubber gloves to touch it. It's like, get over yourself. It's just an animal.'
The penguins helped create a calm atmosphere on set. 'Walking into this maelstrom of kids and animals was not the ordeal I thought it was going to be,' he says. 'You couldn't raise your voice or make loud noises when the penguin was there, which had the unintended consequence of making everyone calm. And the penguin doesn't always do what you want. Eight times out of 10 it will walk in the wrong direction. But you can't be annoyed; it's just being a penguin.'
Waddling hurriedly on the heels of The Penguin Lessons will be a more familiar personage. How Are You? With Alan Partridge will air 'soon-ish' on the BBC, six half-hour mockumentaries with an unusual starting point for a comedy: mental health. 'I think if saying a topic out loud causes you some anxiety, that's a healthy sign,' he says. 'As long as it's not repulsive, of course. But if you feel that if you handle this badly it will blow up in your face, if you feel like you're trying to defuse an incendiary device, that's a good thing for comedy. As long as you defuse it properly. But I'm excited. I think it's funny.'
How Are You? is the latest in Coogan's decade-long collaboration on Partridge with the sibling writing duo Rob and Neil Gibbons. Under their guidance the hapless broadcaster has continually pushed forward into new formats: books, podcasts, travel documentaries, a spoof magazine show.
When Coogan's most famous character was created for On the Hour on BBC Radio in 1991, the joke was that he was a reactionary figure out of step with the broadcasting elite. While the world has moved on, Partridge has attempted to move with it, always on the lookout for worlds to infiltrate. Where one might have thought #MeToo was risky for him, he saw it as an opportunity, as it took out most of the competition.
'It's about, where can I get back in, where's the schism in the current social/cultural climate that I can validate myself or make myself relevant or resonant?' Coogan says. 'But he's smart enough to know how to bend with the wind. He's a Trojan horse. You can talk about stuff but you have this level of protection.'
Partridge has attempted to exploit his depression before. Trying to impress a woman in an episode of I'm Alan Partridge, he confesses: 'I've had mental health problems […] I won't bore you with the details but I drove to Dundee in my bare feet.'
Coogan has spoken about his 'love-hate' relationship with the character, which he sometimes felt he had been 'saddled' with. But after more than 30 years, Partridge's longevity has become an asset. His career has straddled the birth of the internet and social media and the fragmentation of audiences. He emerged from a monolithic TV culture, in which Saturday night game shows attracted audiences of many millions.
'I don't think he would come to the fore now,' Coogan says. 'Uniquely in comedy, because your audience is familiar with the character, people feel like Partridge is theirs and they understand him best. You can explore topics that would normally be off-piste or wide of the mark. It gives you this superpower that has only been arrived at through 30 years of exposure. We don't want to jump the shark. One argument is to stop; that way you protect the canon of stuff. But we like doing it. There's a myth that you can't be funny about certain things. I think you can be funny about absolutely everything. There's no such thing as a no-go area in comedy.'
This helps explain Partridge's broad appeal. Not everyone sees him in the same way. 'At a live show there was a party of firefighters on a work outing,' he says. 'They said, 'We love Alan, he tells it like it is.' Sometimes he says things we agree with, but we won't tell you what they are. He started out reactionary and Middle England but then we evolved him into being socially progressive but economically conservative. Cameron-esque. Touchy-feely, but not when it comes to the bank balance.' What would Alan make of Nigel Farage? 'Fifteen years ago I'd have said he'd like him, but he's antsy about it now. Farage is like Bitcoin. You don't know if his currency will be really valuable or worth nothing.'
The differences between Coogan and his alter ego are becoming harder to notice. 'One morning shooting this last series I got to my trailer and there was a checked shirt hanging up for Partridge that was identical to the shirt I was wearing. It was literally the same shirt, hanging up for Partridge to put on. I still had to take mine off and put that one on, psychologically, so I could feel like it wasn't me. I sent it to the writers and said, 'The singularity has happened.'
'I used to put crow's feet on him,' he adds, reaching for the sides of his eyes. 'We're very unspecific about his age; I might pass him. I don't mind.' See: relaxed.
Rob Brydon and Coogan are also working on a fifth series of The Trip, the series in which they play fictionalised versions of themselves travelling around and eating in the world's best restaurants, although nothing has been formally confirmed. The news broke in an unusual fashion when Coogan used working on it as an excuse to escape a driving ban. He can't say much about it. 'I don't want to be rapped on the knuckles,' he says. 'But The Trip is not over. It will rear its head in some form. Something's going to happen.'
One of the conceits in The Trip is 'Steve Coogan''s longing to be taken seriously as an actor, ideally in America, while being constantly borne back to Alan Partridge. He refers frequently to his work with famous American actors, his Oscar nominations, his Baftas. He bellows 'Aha!' into the wind. The script delights in the narcissism of the small differences between his and Brydon's characters, their relative statuses within entertainment, their competitive impressions.
Partridge, too, is hyper-attuned to anything that might grant him a sense of superiority, if only in his own eccentric world view: the blazers, the driving gloves, the desperation to be granted another series or invited to Esther McVey's barbecue.
Coogan has always been sensitive to class. He was born in October 1965 and grew up in north Manchester, one of six children of an IBM engineer and a housewife, Irish immigrants. 'Depending on your point of view I was upper working class or lower middle class,' he says. 'I can't be written off as a Hampstead liberal. My father had a respectable career. Our aspiration was not material, it was to try to be a better person. My dad bought an encyclopaedia before he bought a colour TV. I'm not easily pigeonholed. I'm not some privileged Lefty, neither am I a horny-handed son of the soil. I'm sort of in the middle somewhere: I think that's my superpower.'
His politics are less ambivalent. He is feeling 'not great' about Keir Starmer's run as PM. 'I understand there is no single virtuous way to be Prime Minister,' he says. 'But when you look at the things he did as DPP and an advocate, you think, 'What happened?' He has to be a pragmatist. The one thing Margaret Thatcher did do was offer an ideology. It was specific and clear. That's not Keir Starmer. Populism is the fault of the centre-ground politics, the failure to deliver for those people.
'You can't be all things to all people. Sometimes you have to nail your colours to the mast and accept that some people won't like what you've done. I feel everything is a strategic political decision. Sincerity is at the bottom of a long list of priorities.'
Press regulation is another long-standing cause of Coogan's. He was a witness during the 2011 Leveson Inquiry, after he was set up in what he called a 'sociopathic sting' by the News of the World. Earlier this year, Prince Harry became the latest high-profile figure to settle out of court with Rupert Murdoch's organisations.
'Murdoch has never had to have his day in court,' Coogan says. 'I accepted a settlement from News International and the Mirror Group for fairly substantial sums of money, which was very nice for me.
'When you have unlimited funds like Rupert Murdoch you can buy your way out of justice. With the Mirror Group they kept offering me more money. I kept saying I wanted to go to court. Eventually I got to the point where they said if you go to court and don't get what they've offered, you'll be liable for the entire costs. That's when I could have lost my house.
'Intrusion into anyone's life is wrong, even Prince Harry. Despite the soap opera that is the Royal family, it took guts for Prince Harry to take on the press.'
Coogan is relaxed about the prospect of turning 60. 'It's weird, when I started out I was 22 and everyone said, 'God, you're so young,'' he says. 'Then one day they stopped saying it. If I go to east London and eat I know pretty much anywhere I go I'll be the oldest person in the room. But I live in Lewes [East Sussex]. One of the most gratifying things was that when they had the Covid vaccine I was one of the last ones to get it, because I was one of the youngest people in Lewes.'
Since his brush with tabloid notoriety Coogan is more careful about his private life. His daughter, Clare, 28, is a chef and food stylist, in a relationship with the actor/comedian Jamie Demetriou, star of Stath Lets Flats. The Christmas table must be intimidating. He has been sober for years, after well-publicised problems with booze and drugs, but doesn't regret his wild days.
'I think the most interesting people are people who partied once, rather than people who've never partied,' he says. 'I don't regret it at all. There's levels of responsibility. I regret some things if you get into the nitty-gritty, but I don't particularly want to. The Dylan Thomas myth that you have to be self-destructive to be creative is nonsense. The complexity of that conflict in the human heart between being hedonistic and selfish and instant gratification, versus contemplative delayed gratification, that's the stuff of life. That conflict is the stuff of comedy: wanting to do the right thing but doing the wrong thing.'
There are other benefits to ageing too.
'As you get older, you're less bothered by what people think of you,' he says. 'I don't do social media. I don't need to know if someone's slagging me off. I don't want to be a grumpy old man. You get more comfortable in your own skin. Your priorities change. And you do get happier.'
He sounds surprised, but if a penguin can teach an important lesson, so can experience.