This Time with Alan Partridge release date announced by BBC

Steve Coogan returns to TV screens later this month

The BBC has revealed when Alan Partridge will return to TV screens.

This Time with Alan Partridge has been confirmed to air on the 25 February on BBC One at 9.30pm.

Steve Coogan returns as the eponymous bumbling broadcaster, with Susannah Fielding, Felicity Montagu, Tim Key, Cariad Lloyd, Priyanga Burford, Lolly Adefope, and Liam Williams completing the principle cast.

Partridge will act as the temporary co-host of This Time, a fictional evening weekday magazine show that sounds remarkably like The One Show, marking Partridge’s “first return to live television since his 90s chat show Knowing Me, Knowing You was cancelled after a guest was fatally shot on air.”

Speaking about the series' focus last month, Coogan said: “What we do is we have him trying to jump on the bandwagon and say, you know, he says ‘Hey! I’ve made mistakes, I’ve stood on the side of the sidewalk and slow hand-clapped while I watch a woman try to parallel park, you know, and I feel bad about that. And now if I saw a woman doing it now, I would shout instructions’.

“He’s sometimes ignorant and prejudiced but he tries to do the right thing. Early on we made him too predictably conservative a bit like shooting fish in a barrel – a caricature. Whereas now we do him as someone who realises that he’s got to get on message. He’s struggling to do the thing he’s supposed to.”

This Time With Alan Partridge marks the character’s first major appearance on the BBC since the sitcom I’m Alan Partridge, which ended in 2002. Since then, Coogan has played the controversial broadcaster on various occasions, the most notable being the film Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa.