It’s always good to see Steve Coogan slip back into the Alan Partridge saddle. The character is so well-formed he works in anything from long-form movies to quick-hit online shorts. This time round we saw him in something between the two, fronting a documentary in which he headed north seeking career redemption having called a teenage guest on his radio show a chav and a sheep shagger.

So having donned his obligatory leather driving gloves Partridge/Coogan hits the road from Norfolk to the north of England and we had great fun watching him put his foot in it over and over again. Not that he necessarily realised that was what he was doing, thanks to the precision-tooled lead performance and deft script co-written by Coogan and regular collaborators Neil and Rob Gibbons.

Highlights included his time on the Tesco checkout where he tapped into his feminine side, because, he thinks, only women work on checkouts: “Could I as a man pass muster, or scan mustard?”. He met up with gangs, who sold him ecstasy at (exorbitant) mates rates and got so wasted he could barely string a word together when he interviewed a local dignitary (Fiona Allen) the next day.

The finest moment, however, was his meeting with a freegan (Karl Theobald) and the subsequent scavenging trip which ended with him locked in a warehouse alone overnight, where he fashioned a rudimentary overcoat from bubblewrap to keep warm. The anxious monologue delivered to his GoPro head-mounted camera was classic Partridge, all anxiety masquerading as SAS-style bravado and depressed reflections on his cold and unloving ex-wife.

Good supporting cast too, also including Miles Jupp as a toff and Coogan’s long-time collaborator John Thomson as loan shark Kevin Ruddock who Partridge sets out to expose – “are you a coin squirrel?” – but then vanity takes over when it transpires that Ruddock listens to him on North Norfolk Digital on his DAB radio. 

The faux-documentary probably works particularly well because a lot of it is set around Coogan’s own childhood stomping ground of Manchester. In fact there are a lot of flashes of old Granada TV presenter Tony Wilson in Partridge’s voiceover. And, lest we forget, Partridge brilliantly played Wilson in 24 Hour Party People. Shame it's a one-off.