I'm Alan Partridge

After the chat-show parody Knowing Me, Knowing You, I'm Alan Partridge gave the character a proper home: the Linton Travel Tavern, a beige limbo on a roundabout somewhere near Norwich. The premise is simple — a man whose ego outstrips his talent is forced to wait out his professional exile — and the result is one of the most perfectly sustained comic performances in British television.

Steve Coogan plays Alan without a trace of sentiment. He is petty, vain, bigoted in the small, unexamined ways of the terminally suburban, and yet so precisely observed that the character becomes almost lovable by accident. The scripts, written with Armando Iannucci and Peter Baynham, find endless comedy in tiny humiliations: a failed flirtation with a receptionist, a battle with a nearby farmer, a desperate attempt to impress a second-rate motivational speaker.

The second series, set in a suburban detached house with Sonja the Ukrainian girlfriend and a desperate commute to a local radio station, is darker and even more pitiless. By the end, Alan has not learned a thing — and that is the whole point. He is a man incapable of growth, and British comedy is richer for it.