I saw the brilliant new Alan Partridge movie last night. Sorry, I mean I saw the OK new Steve Coogan film The Look of Love. It's an easy mistake to make though. The Look of Love is another example of Steve Coogan playing a character who is eerily like the iconic Norwich DJ.

I was a bit late seeing The Look of Love, but I nearly didn't see it at all. I'm a big fan of Coogan's work with director Michael Winterbottom – 24 Hour Party People, Cock & Bull Story, The Trip – but I had seen plenty of bad reviews of this and thought I would give this one a wide berth until I read this review yesterday by Andrew Collins which struck a chord. Collins had gone in with low expectations because of the reviews and as a result had been pleasantly surprised, so I aimed to do the same.

Unfortunately Collins' infectious enthusiasm made me raise my expectations. It was great to see London on film and it was fun to see Dara O'Briain playing a kind of stroppy Alexei Sayle character during a scene set in the Comic Strip club which was in one of the rooms in the Raymond Revuebar for a while (Sayle used to have a great gag about tourists wandering in expecting to see strippers and seeing alternative comedy instead).

But the film had a couple of problems for me. Firstly there were the wigs – Chris Addison plays one of Raymond's publishing sidekicks in a curly mop and beard so ludicrous it looks as if he is in the Witness Protection Scheme. And this being the Seventies most of the women have big bushy pubic hair for period authenticity (both Alan Davies and Micky Flanagan have addressed this hirsute phenomenon in their stand up shows). This resulted in a heated argument with my friend afterwards – he was convinced the shrubbery was genuine and that the cast had been told not to shave in the run-up to shooting, I was convinced it was fake. I'll try to get back to you with a definitive answer about this. I can sense you deep concern.

But the main problem is Steve Coogan. When he first broke through in the Nineties, Coogan was acclaimed as a veritable comedy chameleon, a latterday Peter Sellers. And he did play some strikingly different un-Partridge-like characters in the early days. Paul and Pauline Calf, for example. But comparisons with the most versatile comedy greats are wearing increasingly thin. Sellers totally reinvented himself in different roles. Think of the different creations Leonard Rossiter or Ronnie Barker played on television. All Coogan seems to be able to do, particularly when he is working with Winterbottom, is variations on Alan Partridge and himself.

When he played Factory Records supremo Tony Wilson in 24 Hour Party People there was an idea that Wilson – a bit of a joke figure in some Manchester music circles – had something of Partridge about him, so the overlap was understandable. With Paul Raymond however, there are the same Partridgesque bad jokes and moments of unreconstructed sexism that would not be out of place in a Travel Tavern. But somehow the idea of Paul Raymond as a Partridge-like figure does not ring true.

This just seems to be Coogan's way of taking on a character. Some actors utterly reinvent themselves every time the camera comes on, Coogan seems to channel his inner North Norfolk DJ. I remember a few years ago hearing that he was in line to play Uzbekistan envoy Craig Murray in a film version of the book Murder in Samarkand, which was to have been directed by Winterbottom. Quite how Coogan would have done that without Partridge getting in the way is both intriguing and faintly terrifying.