How Richard Madeley became a real-life Alan Partridge

Richard Madeley doesn’t wear underpants. We know this because he has told us so, on a few occasions, and there’s no reason to doubt him. I mean, why would you make that one up? During a typically pointless segment on ITV’s Good Morning Britain a couple of years ago, the “peg” being a survey about how often blokes buy a new pair of shreddies, Madeley just came out with it, so to speak – “I can’t remember the last time I wore pants” – explaining that, provided you shower daily, there’s really no need. Then, typically, he pushed things a bit, asking his fellow presenters Charlotte Hawkins and Kate Garraway: “How often do your fellas change their underwear… do they regularly refresh and buy?”

As with his most recent “controversial” point of view, a slightly garbled comparison of ex-Isis bride Shamima Begum and the Hitler Youth, Madeley’s dissertation illuminated two key features of his persona. First, that he seems to possess no “filter” when he speaks his mind; and, second, that he has the mind of Alan Partridge.

For the record, Madeley expressed this view, not necessarily endorsed by ITV: “It’s quite an interesting point, and I was thinking about this last night. Obviously, we had the Nuremberg trials after the war and we hanged quite a few Nazis and imprisoned a lot of others and we let them out eventually.

“But we didn’t go after the Hitler Youth as far as I’m aware. We didn’t go after the Hitler Youth – we only went after adults who served in the Hitler regime. And that’s something to reflect on, I think.”

The unlikely Begum-Hitler Youth analogy sent Twitter wild with claims that he had gone “full Partridge”, but the truth is that Madeley has been morphing into a real-life manifestation of Alan Partridge for a very long time, and it will do him no harm if he ever wanted to be the permanent replacement for Morgan on Good Morning Britain (and apparently he is up for it just as much as Alan wanted a second series).

Madeley’s a star, he’s a big personality, he’s capable of going off on one and going viral, but not obviously partisan or nasty – and he’s cheap (well, maybe not by comparison with Morgan). There are YouTube videos of Madeley’s many Partridgean moments, and they are indeed striking. Partridgeologists can identify clear parallels between the two creations, with life eerily mirroring satire.

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Both men, for example, have strong links to East Anglia. Wife Judy was the first female reporter on the About Anglia news team and, fittingly, Richard has an honorary degree from Anglia Ruskin University. Richard and Alan both made their way up the broadcasting ladder via local and regional channels. Madeley is an Essex boy, was educated at a state (selective) grammar school and then Harlow College, and has been a journalist his entire life, as was his father, Christopher Holt Madeley.

His mother, Mary, nee MacEwan came from Canada, and his sister, Liz, is a teacher. Madeley’s first job was with the Brentwood Argus, and he went into broadcasting with BBC Radio Carlisle aged 19. They sent him on a course to learn Received Pronunciation and expunge his alien Estuary tones. From there he moved through stints at Border Television, Yorkshire TV (where he worked with fellow future daytime telly star Richard Whiteley on the flagship Calendar show), before the big break with Granada TV, which he joined in 1982.

On his first day there his producers sent a young producer named Judy Finnigan to look after him, and something must have clicked when she introduced herself with “Hello, I’m your mummy” (she is eight years his senior). They were, awkwardly, both married to other people at the time, but got together soon enough and launched This Morning in 1988, live from the Albert Dock in Liverpool.

The “King and Queen of Daytime TV”, inspired by the success of Oprah Winfrey in America, reigned supreme until 2001, during which time they filled their mornings with celeb interviews, cookery tips and phone-ins. They took their show, naturally renamed Richard & Judy, to an afternoon slot on Channel 4 where it prospered less well, with a scandal about a phone scam involving their You Say We Pay competition. However, they did launch the Richard & Judy Book Club and the Richard & Judy Wine Club, again following in Oprah’s footsteps. The book club is still going, in partnership with WH Smith, and, one assumes, earning them some money.

Richard & Judy lasted until 2008, briefly followed by an evening show, Richard & Judy’s New Position, which came to an end in July 2009, after which Judy more or less gave up TV work (Richard maintains that, unlike him, she was never comfortable with the fame). Since then, Madeley has been temping around Radio 2, Channel 4 and, of course, GMB. In 2012 he presented a series, Richard Madeley Meets the Squatters, in which he briefly lived with, and was bewildered by, some “urban Wombles” (Richard and Judy have comfortable homes in London, Cornwall and the south of France).

Meets the Squatters bears more than a passing likeness to 2016’s Scissored Isle documentary, which had Alan Partridge embarking on a similar voyage of social discovery. It revealed a man (Madeley) with limited curiosity, a certain don’t-care directness (“yes, I’m rich”), but very little malice, and it’s probably that quality that has sustained a career that might otherwise have been “cancelled” some while back. As Madeley enjoys pointing out, viewers can easily detect insincerity. When Richard eventually gets the loo flushing for the urban Wombles in their derelict house he does so with all the satisfaction – “she works!” – Partridge showed when he did the same on a houseboat on the Norfolk Broads, having stuffed half a pound of Dundee cake down it to demonstrate its effectiveness: “One flush and it’s gone.”

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It was during the daytime TV decades that Madeley developed his characteristic style, but it was poor old Judy who took the brunt of quite a lot of it, and their relationship reminds one of Alan Partridge’s with his put-upon PA, Lynn Benfield. Introducing a bizarre phone-in asking “Have you ever slept with a pig?”, Madeley volunteered that “I know I certainly have”. Then there was the moment when he casually remarked to his wife, as if in their living room without a couple of million viewers in front of them: “Remember when you had thrush, Judy? You had a terrible time of it.”

Even when Judy was reported to have been taken to hospital two years ago after vomiting blood, Madeley was remarkably matter-of-fact to The Sun: “It was touch and f***ing go. While she was coming round from that, the surgeon said, ‘She’s going to be fine. Did you call the ­ambulance immediately?’

“I said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘Good, because if you’d waited another 20 minutes she ­probably would have bled out.’ Half an hour tops and she would have died.” She’d been taking ibuprofen for sore knees, but the scare was enough to make her give up booze.

She will always be associated with the time she and Richard collected (yet another) TV award and her blouse fell open, revealing her bra and a bit of boob. Mortified she may have been, but Richard cheerfully promised the audience that if they gave them another award next year “she’ll get the other one out”.

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Of course, the accidental humiliations weren’t all on Judy, and it’s hard to tell how much was wit and how much faux pas. Interviewing some dwarves, for example, he asked them if they ever got annoyed about being patronised, adding helpfully: “That’s being talked down to, you know.” The entire studio and, indeed, the viewership didn’t really know what where to look when an innocuous discussion on the rising cost of pet insurance suddenly descended into animal euthanasia as Madeley livened things up, you might say: “What price do you put on pet care? Is there a point where you say ‘too expensive, the dog has to die’?” This is time-stamped at 6.41am, by the way.

All through his life, Madeley has said, and still says, and does, the oddest things. On meeting Dolly Parton: “I smelt her before I saw her.” On the Faustian notion of a deal with the devil: “Yeah, we’ve all tried them.” To Sophie Ellis-Bextor: “Where did you get your face?” He carries a small vial of salt around because restaurants won’t leave any on tables these days and he doesn’t want “under-salted soup”. He celebrated his 30th wedding anniversary and 60th birthday by visiting Disney World. He says Jimmy Savile was a “rubbish presenter”. He dislikes the “braying” types in the Groucho Club. His favourite music is Queen, Elton John, the Eagles and Chris Rea. Pure Partridge.

We also know that, like Alan, Richard owns an air rifle. He was papped by a camera-equipped drone, which photographed him in his Bermuda shorts. “I thought about fetching my .22 air rifle and shooting down the nasty little intruder. It would have been an easy one-shot snipe.” One can almost hear Steve Coogan there.

Madeley’s on-screen partnerships with his younger female co-presenters, such as Susanna Reid, are so reminiscent of Alan’s with Jenny in the current vehicle This Time with Alan Partridge. There’s the same tension on their faces, as if they don’t know what Richard is going to say next (because they don’t), which might be a well-meaning but clumsy compliment about whether they’ve lost weight, or if their “fella” has told them to stop moaning lately.

Even Madeley’s taste in clothes, usually jacket and tie, is Partridgesque, as is the hairstyle and its suspiciously dark colour (Madeley turned 65 last month). He likes to be well-groomed. The extreme Oompa Loompa home tan he wore in the studio one morning, however, was, he claims the result of a Partridgean accident. “3.30am in the kitchen, my face was dry from shaving, I put on some moisturiser, got in the car, drove in.

“Flash forward to 8am and I could hear the director in the gallery whispering to people and there was giggling going on.” It turned out he’d slathered his face with his model daughter Chloe’s fake tan. The hair seems more real, even if Madeley quipped after a weather forecast of an incoming hurricane about whether “the toupee will be safe”, but there is no proof that his luxuriant bouffant is anything but God’s gift to him and breakfast television.

With the hate fest that is GB News spewing its guts up 12 hours a day, the emollient Richard Madeley is just what British television needs right now, and the controllers at ITV should give him Morgan’s old slot. As this writer can attest, having met him a few times, Madeley is indeed just like his TV persona “in real life”, and what you see is what you get, on and off screen. I’d not be surprised if Madeley has a Geordie friend who works in the local BP garage. We can all see in him and Judy something of our own flawed selves – the accusation of shoplifting at Tesco’s (he was cleared) being one of the most famous of their ups and downs. He is open-minded about politics and doesn’t mind being an unfashionable admirer of Tony Blair. He knows about the striking parallels with Partridge, and doesn’t mind them. He’s a bit of a lockdown sceptic, but without any weird “scamdemic” vibes. He’s fun to watch. He will, though, be going commando.