The greats of British comedy have had a spotty record as far as catching on in the United States. The Monty Python troupe made it, for sure. So did Peter Sellers. As did Dudley Moore, though more as a louche stunt-casting curiosity of Hollywood’s high cocaine era than as the versatile performer he’d been in the 60s on the BBC. Moore’s old TV partner, the magnificent Peter Cook, never made it here, enduring the indignity of a failed early-80s CBS sitcom in which he played that hoariest of English stereotypes, the starchy butler. Then there’s an entire class of first-rate Brit comics, from Morecambe and Wise to Reeves and Mortimer, who have, by choice, remained strictly British phenomena, content never to hustle their talents beyond Blighty.

Steve Coogan would not mind conquering America. He is, by some distance, the most gifted comic performer to have come out of Britain in the last 20 years. But, somehow, he hasn’t connected in the U.S. the way Sacha Baron Cohen has with Borat, Ricky Gervais has with The Office, and Russell Brand has via his MTV appearances and his short-lived strategic marital alliance with Katy Perry.

“The kind of following I have in the U.S. is largely people who really like the very esoteric, Anglicized nature of what I’m doing,” Coogan says, roosting in the very esoteric, Anglicized workroom he keeps in his home just outside the seaside town of Brighton. There is a poster on the wall for Michael Caine’s 1966 Swinging London classic, Alfie, and on a bookshelf sit collectible Corgi models of James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger and Simon Templar’s Volvo P1800 from The Saint.

“Which, of course, stops me from breaking America,” he continues. “I do get recognized sometimes, but mostly”—and here he casts his eyes downward in pantomime dejection—“in Manhattan and in vinyl-record shops.”

Outside of this discerning boutique audience, Coogan registers on these shores as a character actor: the guy who played Octavius, the Roman-warrior pal to Owen Wilson’s cowboy, in the Night at the Museum movies, as well as Larry David’s incompetent shrink in Curb Your Enthusiasm, the white-collar heel pursued by Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg in The Other Guys, the harried director of the film-within-the-film in Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder, and the pompous brother-in-law to Paul Rudd’s title character in Our Idiot Brother.

Fine as they are, these performances provide little insight into what all the fuss is about when people fuss about Coogan. His reputation really rests upon a body of British TV work with which few Americans are familiar—in particular those programs in which he plays his most celebrated creation, a boorish, hopelessly square talk-show host named Alan Partridge.

“I first saw Steve doing Alan Partridge on TV when I was in London to do a play in ’99,” says Rudd, an American of British parentage. “It just killed me. It was so nuanced and so broad at the same time—and so funny.”

“Every American comic knows who Steve is, whether it’s Stiller or Ferrell or Jack Black or me, and the way we all discovered him is through the Partridge DVDs,” says Adam McKay, who directed The Other Guys and is Ferrell’s frequent co-conspirator, with Talladega Nights, Anchorman, and the Web site Funny or Die to his name. “And everyone watching those DVDs had the same reaction,” McKay says. “How did I not know about this guy?”

The good news is that Coogan may be poised, at the age of 46, to at last get his due—if not as a bona fide movie star, then at least as the pan-Anglophonic titan of comedy that he deserves to be. There was an intimation of this last year, when a clip of him and the Welsh comedian Rob Brydon trading Michael Caine impressions in a restaurant—“Yerronly supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”—became a viral sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. The Trip, the six-episode BBC program from which the clip was taken, won Coogan the warmest reviews he’d had in years, prompting its release last summer, in edited-down form, in U.S. movie theaters.

His profile has received a further boost from his real-life role as a vindicated victim of the phone-hacking scandal that has consumed Britain and toppled much of the upper hierarchy of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Coogan is one of the celebrities whose voice mail was hacked into by operatives of the Murdoch-owned tabloid the News of the World, and the paper’s closure occasioned a triumphally splenetic July appearance by him on the BBC program Newsnight. Handily swatting away the show’s designated pro-tabloid panelist, a former News of the World deputy features editor named Paul McMullan, as a “morally bankrupt” peddler of “tittle-tattle,” Coogan expressed delight that, at long last, the “misogynistic, xenophobic, single-parent-hating, asylum-seeker-hating newspaper” had been brought low.

“I got to experience the hyper-intense white heat of extreme Schadenfreude,” he says. “The cynics say the scandals won’t change anything, but I don’t think that’s true.”

Indeed, for an encore, Coogan appeared as a star witness, alongside Sienna Miller, Hugh Grant, and J. K. Rowling, at last November’s public inquiry, ordered by Prime Minister David Cameron and presided over by Lord Justice Brian Leveson, into the ethics of the British press. The public apologies he had received, Coogan said sternly at the Leveson Inquiry, were the equivalent of “closing the stable doors after the horse has bolted. You can’t give back the pound of flesh you’ve taken.” Coogan has also joined a U.K. pressure group called Hacked Off, whose goal is to effect new privacy laws that will protect citizens from undue press intrusion.

And now comes word from Coogan that he is at work on something his fans have long hoped for: an Alan Partridge movie. He is writing it with two of his frequent collaborators, Peter Baynham, who co-wrote the Borat movie with Baron Cohen, and Armando Iannucci, the creative force behind the BBC political-satire series The Thick of It and Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s new HBO show, Veep. The plan is for the Partridge picture to be filmed this summer and released in 2013.

We Need to Talk About Alan

That Coogan is even revisiting Partridge is notable, for it’s been as much a curse as a blessing to be so readily identified by the British public with a single character. He would love to play a James Bond villain, for example, but is convinced it will never happen because “people would go, ‘Well, he’s not really a threat, because he’s Alan Partridge.’ ” Similarly, Coogan missed the boat on the Harry Potter films. With his donnish swoop of hair and naturally imperious facial features, he would have been perfect for them, but the call never came. “I must be one of the only people in Britain, of a certain caliber of performer, that’s not been in any of the Potters,” he says. “It’s almost like they’re deliberately trying to fuck with my head. My daughter asked, ‘How come you’re not in Harry Potter?,’ like she was embarrassed. I had to content myself with a guided tour of the set. Not for me, you understand.”

Still, enough time has elapsed—it’s been 10 years since Coogan last played Partridge regularly on a TV series—that his feelings toward the character have softened. “It’s like an old school friend,” he says. “You get sick of someone because you spend a lot of time with him, and then, when he’s been away for a long time, you think, You know, I kind of miss that person, even though I found him annoying at the time.”

In the U.K., Alan Partridge is a national treasure, even as the man who plays him is more ambivalently perceived. It’s an odd juxtaposition. Partridge is as cherished a part of British comedy heritage as John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty and Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean—destined to appear someday, as Peter Cook and Eric Morecambe already have, on the face of a Royal Mail postage stamp. His Coogan-written mock memoir, I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan, was a best-seller last year. His “A-ha!” catchphrase is ingrained in the U.K. lexicon, up there with Eric Idle’s “Nudge, nudge, wink, wink” and Matt Lucas’s “I’m the only gay in the village.” (“A-ha!” derives from the refrain of “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” a song by Partridge’s favorite pop group, Abba; it was the theme to Coogan’s first TV show wholly devoted to Partridge, the aptly named talk-show send-up Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge.)

But Coogan himself is another story. He has spent most of his adult life an unmarried man, one who has dated his share of sylph-like women and done his share of drugs and drink: circumstances too good for Fleet Street to pass up. He has been tormented by the tabloids nearly from the moment he became famous, portrayed down the years as a cad, a coke abuser, a sex fiend, and a bad influence. During his first flush of 1990s success, a lap dancer and model named Nancy Sorrell told one of the papers that Coogan had spread £5,000 worth of £10 notes on a big bed and commanded her, “Lie on them, go on, lie on them!”—an account Coogan later confirmed with the ingenious yet disingenuous explanation that it was “me being crassly ironic about what you do when you’re famous.”

Less amusing was a report by the News of the World in 2005 that Coogan had impregnated Courtney Love in the course of a fling in a Los Angeles hotel. Coogan flatly denied the report, and Love dismissed a quote attributed to her in which she confirmed the pregnancy. But it’s evident that the sting of this bogus-story ordeal has stayed with Coogan.

While other celebrity phone-hacking targets of the paper, such as Sienna Miller, have accepted settlements from News Corp., Coogan has not. “I’m in the mood for a fight,” he says. “Ironically, because I was turned over so thoroughly by these papers, I have no skeletons in my closet. I have been picked clean. They have made me invulnerable.” He won’t comment further, given that he has a lawsuit against the company still pending, apart from noting that voice mail, these days, is a pretty lame thing to hack into. “I mean, who leaves voice mail now?” he says. “Apart from saying ‘Give me a call,’ no one leaves long tracts of monologue on voice mail, do they?”

What’s funny is that this is precisely the sort of thing that Alan Partridge would do.

North Norfolk Digital could be any provincial radio station, with a cheery jingle sung by a canned female chorus and a soundproof broadcast booth outfitted with a console and two swivel chairs. Alan Partridge could be any provincial radio host, a middle-aged man in a lime windbreaker, a polo shirt, and half-glasses on a cord around his neck, their lenses resting atop a slight paunch. As is the case with many radio programs these days, Mid Morning Matters with Alan Partridge is simulcast on the Web, with a video feed allowing viewers to watch the headphoned host chat live with his guests.

On this morning, Partridge has switched things up a little: the studio’s second chair has been replaced by a stationary bicycle, and on it sits a sincere young man in a tracksuit (actually the actor and comedian William Andrews) who is eager to promote an anti-obesity campaign for kids called On Your Bike.

“I am in the studio with Jim Jones,” Partridge announces, turning to his guest. “Now, just to clear something up, you’re not the Jim Jones who led a mass suicide in the Jonestown Massacre by feeding his followers poisoned broth.”

“Of course not!” says the bewildered young man.

“Glad to hear it,” says Partridge. “Well, you’d be dead, wouldn’t you? Along with your 900 followers.”

This should be the end of the conversational detour, but it isn’t.

“Do you know that’s the population of a village like Hickling?,” Partridge continues, unable not to. “It’s an awful thought, isn’t it? Imagine seeing the streets of Hickling littered with dead corpses. It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

And this should be the end of the detour, but … “And it would be doubly shocking,” Partridge goes on, “because the town won best-kept town in Norfolk for three years on the trot.” He pauses and casts a suspicious look upward at Jim on his bike. “Do you ever have dark thoughts?”

Mid Morning Matters is a series of short webisodes that went live in late 2010 and early 2011. (A dozen new webisodes are due later this year.) It was the first the public had seen of Partridge, apart from some stand-up appearances, since the sitcom I’m Alan Partridge ended its run, in 2002. Coogan was enticed into doing the webisodes by Foster’s, the brewing company, which offered to underwrite them in order to launch its new comedy site, Foster’s Funny.

Coogan accepted the offer because he was intrigued by how the format would allow him to ease back into the character but at the same time reflect Partridge’s downward professional mobility. In Knowing Me, Knowing You (1994–95), Partridge presided over his own talk show on the BBC, only to endure the humiliation of learning that his time slot would soon be given over to a lesbian-affairs program called Off the Straight and Narrow. Required by the BBC to have this program’s two female hosts as guests on one of his last shows, he asked them, “Does it bother you when you hear people use these slang expressions?” Asked to clarify precisely which expressions he meant, he replied, “You know, the usual: lesbos, lezzers, les-be-friends, dykes, bull dykes, Dick Van Dykes, sparerib ticklers, cat flaps, pussyfooters, knicker pickers, men, backpackers, tent peggers, trout fishers, melon farmers, Kwik Fit fitters, baggage handlers, and, uh, left luggage. Do those names hurt?”

By the time of I’m Alan Partridge, whose two separate seasons ran five years apart, in 1997 and 2002, Partridge was hosting an early-morning radio show called Up with the Partridge in Norwich, a small-market city in the East of England.

And now he is reduced to a still-smaller market, in the poky realm of streaming digital radio and its hypothetical listeners. Mid Morning Matters cannily mirrors a real media world that, even as it fragments and gets less lucrative, affords its hackiest members more opportunities than ever to remain, however inexplicably, employed. (With his cross-combed hairstyle and crow’s-feet at the eyes, Partridge bears a physical resemblance to a prime exhibit of this phenomenon, the acharismatic American sportscaster Brent Musburger.)

The “Jim Jones” sequence is quintessentially Coogan: starting with the smallest speck of grit—the fact that the fellow on the bike is named Jim Jones—and building it up steadily into a pearl of unseemliness. He is not averse to broad strokes, such as Partridge’s relentlessly inane setups for music breaks—“Keep your clubs away from his young: it’s Seal!”—but Coogan traffics mostly in nuance: gestures, tics, tiny awkwardnesses.

This approach has probably held him back in America. In a climate where premise-in-the-title unsubtlety prevails—think of the Lonely Island’s songs “I Just Had Sex” and “Dick in a Box,” or the movies Bridesmaids and Horrible Bosses—it’s hard to summarize, much less speed-pitch, what it is that Coogan does.

You could sort of lump him in with Sacha Baron Cohen and Mike Myers, in that he does a lot of characters of his own invention, but the characters are less predicated on shtick and more fleshed out and lived in. In Mid Morning Matters, Partridge develops a desperate, unconsummated crush on a comely young co-D.J. that is, amid all the goofery, heartbreaking to watch. In his series Saxondale, which ran for two seasons, in 2006 and 2007, Coogan achieves a delicate balance between wistfulness and comic belligerence: his Tommy Saxondale is an exterminator who spent his glory years as a roadie for major rock bands in the 1970s and is now compelled to attend anger-management group-therapy sessions.

To the Partridge Born

Coogan discovered his penchant for doing characters as a youth in Manchester, growing up as a middle child in a large, noisy Catholic family of Irish descent, with five biological siblings and assorted foster children passing through. His father was an engineer who serviced mainframe computers for IBM, but his parents, he says, were devotees of the arts and committed socialists, “never joining in any of that royal bullshit.” The Coogans listened to Monty Python’s Flying Circus LPs reverently on the home stereo, and attended new Bond films as soon as they premiered at the local cinema, opening the young Steve’s eyes to “this other world, a glamorous world down in London, beyond my reach as a child.”

He wasn’t much of a student, but after studying drama at Manchester Polytechnic, Coogan moved to London in the late 80s and found remarkably quick success on the stand-up circuit, mostly by doing dead-accurate impersonations of British TV stars. It was a living, but Coogan didn’t want to end up pigeonholed as an impressionist. “I can’t stand them,” he says. “Because to me it’s the apotheosis of vacuousness. It’s just a trick—impressive but meaningless.” (Notwithstanding this, his Richard Gere impersonation in The Trip is astonishingly good, all the more so for being almost entirely nonverbal.)

Fortunately, Coogan fell in with two other young scufflers on the comedy circuit, Patrick Marber and Armando Iannucci, who encouraged him to develop his repertoire of original characters. Marber and Iannucci are slightly older than Coogan, and both are Oxford-educated, circumstances that, Coogan admits, intimidated him and motivated him to up his game.

“Steve comes from a large family, with older brothers, and Armando and I were like his comedy older brothers,” says Marber. “He liked being the naughty one, and he liked us telling him, ‘That’s funny … that’s not funny.’ ”

Alan Partridge was born in one of the comedy bull sessions that took place among the three young men. “The original notion was just to get Steve to do a sports-presenter voice, but when he came out with the voice, the whole persona came together almost instantly,” says Iannucci. “I think I might have said ‘That guy is an Alan!,’ and someone else said, ‘Yeah, and he’s a Partridge!,’ and then it made sense to have him come from Norwich, because it’s never really been the focus of any comedy geographically. It’s off to one side, just annoyingly a bit too far away from London for someone who has ambitions.”

It was Marber who saw in Partridge the character that Coogan would still be doing well into his 40s. “Steve had a lot of characters before Alan,” Marber says, “but I could tell that, as an actor, he could see the world through the eyes of that character forever. He knew that man’s car, that man’s sofa, his wife, his kids. He found this other Steve—this nightmare Steve.”

Partridge was first heard by audiences on the radio, in this role of an oafish sports presenter, in the mock-news report On the Hour, which debuted on BBC Radio 4 in 1991. “I remember Patrick said to me after our first radio recording, ‘This character will change your life,’ ” Coogan says. “I went, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘This character is going to change your life—I hope you’re ready. Years from now, people will shout “A-ha!” at you from across the street.’ He really was terribly prophetic.”

*On the Hour’*s principal creative forces were Iannucci and Chris Morris, a radio D.J. from Bristol with a barbed, wicked sense of humor. Coogan and Marber joined them as members of the cast. In light of their subsequent and disparate achievements—Coogan and Iannucci with their TV shows and movies, Marber with his plays Dealer’s Choice and Closer (the latter adapted for film by Mike Nichols), and Morris with the muckraking-TV parody Brass Eye and the sleeper-cell film satire Four Lions—it was an extraordinary concentration of talent; as if, say, Will Ferrell, Aaron Sorkin, Jon Robin Baitz, and Wes Anderson had launched their careers by working together on the same rinky-dink radio program.

On the Hour begat the BBC2 TV show The Day Today (1994), a forerunner of The Daily Show in the fake-news game, albeit a very different animal: less an expansion of *Saturday Night Live’*s “Weekend Update” format than a tonally and graphically precise send-up of the 24-hour cable news networks, then at the height of their omniscient pomp. Only six episodes were ever made, though they retain a devoted following among comedy connoisseurs. (Coogan is proud to note that Stiller and Jon Hamm are big Day Today fans.)

Coogan appeared on The Day Today as Partridge and in other roles, but it was really Morris’s showcase. Only when Knowing Me, Knowing You made it to air, a few months after The Day Today (and with many of the same writers and cast members), did his star take off. “We were shocked—we never thought Alan would be as big as Basil Fawlty, but people responded immediately,” says Iannucci. “It’s funny, a lot of people tell me they know an Alan Partridge, but no one ever says they are Alan Partridge. But that’s the key: people felt like they already knew him, maybe because we spent a lot of time on all the background detail.”

Indeed, in Episode One, Partridge bounded onto his set—“modeled on the lobby of a top international hotel,” he claimed—with his tackiness fully formed, right down to his soon-to-be-signature ill-fitting double-breasted blazer. (He wore it in burgundy on opening night, but would later unveil a billiard-green version that came with a crest on the breast pocket that included images of a partridge, a pear tree, a microphone, and the words cognoscens me cognoscens te aha.) “Tonight is what I call a J.F.K. kind of a night,” Partridge announced with bravado and good cheer. “Because just as everyone can remember what they were doing when President Kennedy was shot in the head, I like to think that, 30 years from now, people will remember what they were doing when I first said, ‘A-ha!’ ”

Knowing Me, Knowing You was the beginning of an extraordinary hot streak of great TV that offered much more than the Partridge character. Not since John Cleese, who made only 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers, had a writer-performer taken such full advantage of the BBC’s indulgence of limited-run comedy series—a model that, HBO aside, is evidently not economically sustainable in America.

The Coogan catalogue runs deep with dense, labor-intensive half-hours filmed just six at a time. The series Coogan’s Run, which aired in 1995, is a particularly bravura example, with Coogan starring as an entirely different character in each of its six episodes. They’re all terrific, and one, the black-and-white Ealing Studios homage Handyman for All Seasons, set in the 1960s and featuring Coogan as a virtuous, mustachioed small-town Mr. Fixit who thwarts the evil plans of a shady developer, is simply perfect: a miniature piece of great cinema.

Still, as he cut a swath through broadcast television, Coogan proved as susceptible as any comic to the fallacy that someone in his line of work must “graduate” to major film roles in order to be truly validated. Only recently has he come to his senses on this front. “The best work I really do is when I generate it myself,” he says. “It’s taken me a long time to realize that no one’s going to walk through the door and give me the role of a lifetime, just hand it to me on a plate. It’s never going to happen.”

The Albatross

The Trip was purgative in this respect. In it, Coogan and Rob Brydon play lightly fictionalized versions of themselves, bantering competitively as they drive through the rural North of England to visit the region’s finest gastro-tourist destinations. (Ostensibly, Coogan has been assigned to celebrity-review these places for a magazine.) The concept for The Trip was hatched by another of Coogan’s frequent collaborators, Michael Winterbottom, who directed him in the mischievous films Tristram Shandy and 24 Hour Party People, but Winterbottom allowed Coogan and Brydon plenty of latitude to develop the plot and come up with their own lines. The result is another masterpiece in six half-hours—what a Hope-and-Crosby Road movie would have been like if Bob Hope had talked openly of his tomcatting and Bing Crosby of his affinity for dope. (Coogan says it’s looking likely that he and Brydon will revive The Trip for another season, this time in Italy, with the duo “retracing the steps of Shelley and Byron, with all the attendant pompousness and portent.” He is also about to start shooting another feature with Winterbottom, a biopic of the U.K. pornography magnate Paul Raymond.)

For Coogan, The Trip was an opportunity to work out his career anxieties and also to play with the public perception of him as a “troubled” person. Brydon, merrily vaudevillian in spirit and temperament, is presented as a contented family man, at peace with his role as a provider of light entertainment, while Coogan is the brooding loner, bitter over the chances he’s been denied for choice roles and Hollywood cachet. “I’ve got an albatross round my neck,” he tells Brydon at one point, “and it’s got the face of Michael Sheen.”

In another scene, a dream sequence, Ben Stiller makes a cameo, excitedly walking Coogan through the pool area of a luxury L.A. hotel while enumerating the opportunities that await him. “It’s incredible!” Stiller says. “Everybody wants to work with you. I get a call from P. T. Anderson. I get a call from Wes Anderson. Noah Baumbach, Todd Haynes, Alexander Payne, all of them The Farrelly brothers want to work with you, O.K.? The Scotts, Tony and Ridley? They want to do a movie together—never done that before It’s incredible. The Coens? Calling up. Wachowskis? Both of them want to work with you. All the brothers, my man—all the brothers want a piece of Coogs.”

If Coogan had gotten his way—he was overruled by Winterbottom—this scene would have gone an excruciating step further, with Coogan replaced midway through it by the actual Michael Sheen, playing the role of Steve Coogan. “Like I’m not even good enough to be cast as myself in my own dream,” he says.

It’s almost a disappointment to discover that in real life Coogan is not the malcontent he is in The Trip; Miserable Steve is one of his funniest characters and, liberated from the gargoyle makeup and humiliating wardrobes he’s been saddled with in the Partridge shows and other projects, certainly his handsomest. Actual Steve is an affable guy who wears an old man’s porkpie hat, smiles easily, and insists that his character in The Trip represents “the ugly side of my nature pushed to the front.”

He is not the coldly efficient repartee assassin of The Trip, either. (Brydon: “Would you come to my funeral? Would you turn up, do you think?” Coogan: “Course I would—if only to pad out the numbers.”) Actual Steve is rather syntactically disheveled, his thoughts and words spilling out all over the place—the reason, he says, he always works with a collaborator.

“It’s like working with someone in a Looney Tunes cartoon,” says one of these collaborators, Peter Baynham. “When Steve is starting a sentence, it’s like the end of the sentence is somewhere in the room, and he’s walking around the room trying to find it, checking the drawers, opening the windows.”

Coogan’s Bluff

Miserable Steve, from The Trip, resides in a glass-walled modernist bachelor pad in a London high-rise. Actual Steve resides in a rambling 16th-century house on the south coast of England. There are bachelor-ish elements to be found chez Coogan, such as a drum kit, that Alfie poster, and loads and loads of automotive magazines. (Coogan owns nine cars at the moment, having just taken possession of a vintage Morris Minor woody wagon.) But there is also a big, familial eat-in kitchen, a garden, and a girl’s bedroom. Coogan lives in the area to be close to his daughter, Clare, who is 15 and lives nearby with her mother, a lawyer named Anna Cole. (He never married Cole; his one marriage, to a society figure named Caroline Hickman, lasted from 2002 to 2005.)

In other words, there is no sign of the nefarious libertine who, in wilder days, wreaked such havoc in Hollywood that Courtney Love spoke of him as if describing some sort of pathogen-carrying weather system. “Hopefully, the guy leaves us alone in this town and goes back to Brighton, or wherever the hell he comes from, and maybe stays there,” she told a TV reporter in 2007, adding, in a touch that could have come right out of The Trip, “He’s not even known over here.”

In The Trip, we see the character of Steve Coogan have a couple of one-night stands, smoke pot in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s house in the Lake District, and barely resist an offer of cocaine from one of his female conquests. He also glugs down plenty of wine over his meals with Brydon. But Actual Steve has been by and large sober since shortly after The Trip wrapped. The whole meta-textual exercise of playing Miserable Steve seems to have been a kind of demarcation, a farewell to a period of his life in which he indulged in serial naughtiness and misplaced his career priorities.

“I was just talking to Rob Brydon the other day about how important humor is as you’re growing older, to process all the imperfectness of life,” he says. “To laugh at the things that aren’t achievable, at our own follies. What’s doubly sweet is that, if you’re creative, you can use everything and channel it creatively.”

Not, mind you, that Coogan thinks he was ever that far gone. He has often been compared to Peter Sellers, another prodigiously talented man of a thousand faces whose private life was messy; indeed, Coogan just narrowly missed out on getting the lead in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, the 2004 film adaptation of Roger Lewis’s damning biography of the same name. (Geoffrey Rush played Sellers instead.)

“It’s an attractive parallel, but he was a horrible man,” Coogan says. “For me, I think maybe I missed out on adolescence. I was so ambitious that I kind of had this belated thing where I was like, ‘Wow, I’ve got money and people like me!’ Peter Sellers was a complete train wreck. There’s a difference between someone who is a brilliant artist and a train wreck, out of control, and someone who’s a brilliant artist and a bit of a dick. And that’s what I was—I was a bit of a dick.”

Coogan is reluctant to wear his newfound sobriety as a badge of honor—“It just means that I get more done,” he says—but he grants that it emboldened him to publicly take on the hosts of Top Gear, the BBC2 car-talk program, when they made tasteless jokes at the expense of Mexicans in January 2011.

Top Gear not only is the highest-rated show on BBC2 but also is hugely popular overseas, its global reach extending to more than 350 million viewers. Generally, it’s all in good fun: Jeremy Clarkson, the program’s burly auto-columnist host, and his two sidekicks, Richard Hammond and James May, yammer about cars, engage in the occasional driving stunt, and have a celebrity guest on to join in the chitchat and take a fast car out for a lap around the Top Gear test track. (Coogan has been on three times; others who have test-tracked include Tom Cruise, Simon Cowell, Jay Leno, and Dame Helen Mirren.)

But in a broadcast that month, while discussing a Mexican sports car known as the Mastretta, Hammond blurted out, “Why would you want a Mexican car? Because cars reflect national characteristics, don’t they?” Whereas a German car would be efficient and an Italian car sporty, Hammond continued, “a Mexican car’s just going to be lazy, feckless, flatulent, overweight … leaning against a fence asleep, looking at a cactus, with a blanket with a hole in the middle as a coat.”

May chimed in that Mexican food is “like sick with cheese on it.” Clarkson added that there was no way that the Mexican ambassador to Britain would call in to register his displeasure at their jokes, “because he would be sitting there with a remote control like this,” and then he pretended to be passed out in his chair.

As it happened, the ambassador, Eduardo Medina-Mora Icaza, saw the show and was outraged, prompting the BBC to issue a halfhearted apology that stated, “Whilst it may appear offensive to those who have not watched the programme or who are unfamiliar with its humour, the executive producer has made it clear to the ambassador that that was absolutely not the show’s intention.”

For Coogan, who found the jokes reprehensible, this apology wasn’t enough. “It makes me angry, the fucking postmodernist idea that you can get away with saying anything racist if it’s done in inverted commas,” he says. “Speaking out is not something I would have done before, but I just felt that this time it wasn’t right to keep my opinions to myself. I know it’s a dangerous thing to wade into a discussion about what is or isn’t correct in comedy, and if someone raises objections, you could easily ask them, ‘Well, what do you know about comedy?’ But in my case, I happen to know a fucking lot about comedy.”

On spec, Coogan wrote a spirited and surgical dissection of the Top Gear trio’s Mexican jokes, which the newspaper The Observer agreed to publish in early February. “I normally remain below the parapet when these frenetic arguments about taste break out,” Coogan wrote. “But this time, I’ve had enough of the regular defence you tend to hear—the tired line that it’s ‘just a laugh,’ a bit of ‘harmless fun.’ ” He went on:

What makes it worse is that the Lads wear this offensive behaviour as a badge of pride, pleased that they have annoyed those who they regard, in another lazy stereotype, as sandal-wearing vegans with beards and no sense of humour.

Well, here’s some Twitter hot news: I don’t have a beard, I’m not a vegan, I don’t wear sandals (unless they’re Birkenstocks, of course), and I have, I think, a sense of humour. I also know something about comedy. It’s true there are no hard fast rules; it’s often down to judgment calls. It’s safe to say, though, that you can get away with saying unsayable things if it’s done with some sense of culpability

If I say anything remotely racist as Alan Partridge, for example, the joke is abundantly clear. We are laughing at a lack of judgment and ignorance. With Top Gear it is three rich, middle-aged men laughing at poor Mexicans. Brave, groundbreaking stuff, eh? …

The Lads have this strange notion that if they are being offensive it bestows on them a kind of anti-establishment aura of coolness; in fact, like their leather jackets and jeans, it is uber-conservative (which isn’t cool).

Steeled for blowback from those who might argue that he, of all people, was in no position to get up on his high horse—“I’m a paradox or a hypocrite, depending on your choice of words,” Coogan says—he was pleasantly surprised that the response to the Observer piece was overwhelmingly positive. It was a Top 10 trending topic on Twitter for a couple of days after publication, and many of the comments, Coogan notes, were along the lines of “Thank God someone said this” and “I used to hate Steve Coogan, but now he’s my hero.” Clarkson sent Coogan a text message that said simply, “I don’t know what to say.”

“I texted him back: ‘Jeremy, it’s called tough love,’ ” Coogan says.

Avoiding the Trap

Newly admired, chemically unaltered, and with a tabloid publisher now his prey rather than the other way around, Coogan finds himself in a position where the most dangerous thing he’s now doing is potentially sullying the TV legacy of Alan Partridge by making a bad movie. He, Iannucci, and Baynham are consciously working to avoid the traps that such a project can lay: the temptation to blow things up to Cinema-Scope size, to have Alan go to America, or on holiday, or into an al-Qaeda camp.

Coogan is cagey about the plot, except to say that “there’s quite a large event in a small town. And Alan is not the protagonist. He’s … an unwilling participant.” Baynham says he and his partners are confident that the material is good because they are writing to please themselves, unbound and unpressured by any deal thus far with a studio or production company. “It’s been great when Armando and Steve and I have been together,” he says. “Everyone’s laughing, everyone’s doing Alan. Three Alans in a room—torture, really.”

“I could stop it completely, but I’ve realized I don’t want to stop being Alan,” says Coogan. “Because when I go into the writing room, it still feels fresh to me. And if I’m walking down the street on my own, I’ll start chuckling at a thought that would be funny for Alan to say. And then I think, I’m laughing at a character in my head that’s already known to everyone in this country. It’s a bit weird.

“In an intellectual sense, I’m really pleased that he’s been hugely successful. But then again, it’s not always fantastic. If someone shouts ‘A-ha!’ at you, there’s no possible response. You can’t say, ‘Great—I’m glad you’re shouting “A-ha!” Neither can you say, ‘Don’t shout that—that’s really annoying.’ So you take your pick. You try all kinds of things. On a tube train once, some boys were going ‘A-ha!’ at me, and I got off the tube. As soon as the doors shut, I hammered on the window to get their attention, and I went, ‘A-HAAAHHH!’ ”

Coogan pauses to contemplate what he’s just described, and then concludes, “It’s a complicated relationship I have with Alan Partridge.”