Free I, Partridge by Alan Partridge

until I’d acclimatised. Phrases swirled around the room. ‘Where does Labour stand on that?’ ‘It’s over for Milosevic.’ ‘Alan, could you pass the biscuits?’ ‘This Rodney King thing is going to be massive.’ ‘GDP’s down by 0.5% this quarter.’ ‘Alan? The biscuits.’ ‘The Home Office aren’t going to comment apparently.’ ‘Fine, I’ll get them myself then.’
    How in the name of holy living heck was I going to bust my way into this conversation? I don’t know, I answered, inside my head. On the table next to me was the tea urn. Now this was a plus point because I loved tea urns. Still do. There’s something very reassuring about the concept of hot beverages dispensed from a lovely big drum. 62 Of course your problem with any kind of communal drinks station is the sugar bowl. People put the spoon back in the bowl after stirring in their sugar. No problem with that, you might think. Well think again. The residual moisture acts as a caking agent, forming the granules into unsightly asymmetric clumps. Worse still, those clumps are stained a grubby brown by the tannin-rich tea. Not nice, not nice at all.
    And let’s not forget the germ issue. Putting a damp spoon back in the bowl is the tea-drinking equivalent of sharing a needle. And I did not want to end up with the tea-drinking equivalent of AIDS.
    Instantly it struck me that if their ‘thing’ was intimidating intellect, my ‘thing’ could be beverage-related hygiene. Of course I later remembered that I already had a ‘thing’, namely sport (plus the Paralympics). But I wasn’t thinking straight, which should go some way to explaining what happened next.
    Kevin Smear (roving reporter) approached. This seemed somehow appropriate because while the others had stayed where they were, he had quite literally roved over.
    ‘Hello, Alan.’
    ‘Hello.’
    ‘Guys, I’m just saying hello to Alan.’
    The rest of them nodded in my direction, using their heads.
    ‘What are you doing sat over there?’ said Rosie May (environment).
    ‘Nothing much,’ I smiled. ‘Just thinking that you lot have probably got tea AIDS!!’
    Wham! I knew it was a winner as soon as it’d left my lips. If you’d stuck me in a room with a typewriter for ten years I would never have come up with one that good. But in that room, fuelled by nothing other than raw nerves, out it plopped, fully-formed and ready to go.
    Of course it wasn’t a winner at all. Not being privy to my train of thought, they had no idea what this ‘tea’ prefix was. As far as they were concerned their new colleague had just accused them all of having AIDS. Yet they didn’t have AIDS. And though the colourful lifestyle of one of them certainly put him in the ‘at risk’ category, he wouldn’t go full-blown until 2003.
    No, I was wrong to suggest they all suffered from a terminal beverage-based illness, whether that was tea AIDS, coffee cancer or hot chocolate tumours. I was so ashamed by my behaviour that I retreated into my shell like a turtle would if it realised it was about to have a car reverse over its head. (And for the record, Fernando shouldn’t have let it out of its cage in the first place.) And it was in my shell that I would stay for most of my time on On the Hour .
    To be honest, you’d find this unfriendly attitude across the whole BBC News and Current Affairs team. It saddened me because the department was populated by heroes of mine, faces I’d watched time and again on the news while eating my dinner: pork chops and gravy, beans on toast, hot pot, chicken pie and chips, maybe even a coq au vin , sometimes just a quick can of soup. Any meal, it doesn’t matter really. I’ve just realised I’m listing things I have for dinner when I should be listing faces I’d seen on the news. But I’m just saying I’d seen these people on the news and respected them. But their reassuring televisual demeanour was, I realised, a facade. In person, they didn’t like to mingle at