Quick answer: The most quoted Alan Partridge lines are "A-ha!", "Back of the net!", "Smell my cheese, you mother!", "Lynn, I've pierced my foot on a spike!" and "Dan! Dan! Dan!". Most come from Knowing Me Knowing You and I'm Alan Partridge, and they endure because they are the things a genuinely awkward man says when he is trying very hard to seem relaxed.
The Best Alan Partridge Quotes
Steve Coogan has been playing Alan since 1991, and in that time Partridge has produced more usable phrases than most sitcoms manage in their entire run. The reason is that Alan does not speak in jokes. He speaks in the slightly-too-long, slightly-too-specific sentences of a man who has rehearsed the conversation beforehand and is now watching it go wrong.
"A-ha!"
Two syllables that somehow contain the whole character. It is triumph, it is bluster, and it is deployed almost exclusively at moments when Alan has achieved nothing. The definitive Partridge noise.
"Back of the net!"
Football commentary applied to daily life, usually alone, usually about something extremely small. It has escaped the show completely — people who have never seen an episode say it, which is the truest measure of a catchphrase.
"Smell my cheese, you mother!"
Alan at full meltdown, brandishing dairy at a man he is furious with. It should not be funny. It is enormously funny, largely because of the pause before "you mother" — an insult he clearly invented mid-sentence and immediately regretted.
"Lynn, I've pierced my foot on a spike!"
Delivered to his long-suffering personal assistant with the urgency of a man reporting a national emergency. Perfect Alan: catastrophic tone, trivial injury, and the absolute certainty that Lynn will sort it out.
"Dan! Dan! Dan! Dan! Daaan!"
Alan shouting after a neighbour who has shown him the mildest possible friendliness, which Alan has taken as the beginning of a great male friendship. The escalating desperation of the repetitions is funny on its own — but the payoff is better. Dan and his wife are not after a friend at all.
"Lynn, these are sex people."
Alan's dawning realisation, reported to his assistant with the flat horror of a man filing an incident report. The entire Dan storyline turns on it: all that eager blokey enthusiasm, and the invitation was for something else entirely.
The Mug
Alan Partridge Quotes Mug
Most of the above printed the whole way round, along with the Castrol GTX jacket, the Linton Travel Tavern, the Rover left reading COOK PASS BABTRIDGE after a badly cleaned-off piece of graffiti, and a mug of beans captioned "it's like a savoury 99". Available in 11oz and 15oz. Best filled with something Alan would approve of, which is to say a lot of things and also nothing.
View the mug"It's like a savoury 99."
Michael hands Alan a mug of beans with a sausage stood in it. Alan, entirely bewildered, reaches for the only comparison available to him. It is not a boast and it is not a joke he is making — it is a man trying to process breakfast in real time, and landing on something accidentally perfect.
"You feed beef burgers to swans."
An accusation of such specificity that it can only be true. Partridge's insults are never generic; they are always the exact wrong detail, remembered and produced at the worst moment.
"Would it be terribly rude to stop listening to you and go and speak to somebody else?"
Said aloud, to a person, by a man who believes he is being charmingly candid. The politeness of the phrasing against the brutality of the content is the whole Partridge sentence structure in one line.
"Go to London. I guarantee you'll either be mugged or not appreciated."
Small-town contempt dressed as worldly advice. It is also, quietly, one of the saddest lines he has — the two outcomes he can imagine are being robbed or being overlooked, and he genuinely cannot decide which is worse.
"Not my words, Michael. The words of Shakin' Stevens."
Alan attributing something to an authority nobody asked about, to a man who did not query it. He does this constantly — Top Gear magazine gets the same treatment — because a borrowed opinion cannot be argued with.
"Needless to say, I had the last laugh."
He did not have the last laugh. He has never once had the last laugh. The line is followed by a two-word instruction that we will leave on the mug rather than print here.
Why Partridge Is So Quotable
Most sitcom catchphrases work by repetition — say it enough and it sticks. Partridge quotes work differently. They are quotable because they are usable: real sentences you can deploy in real life, which arrive pre-loaded with the exact social discomfort you are trying to describe.
"Back of the net" is what you say when a small thing goes right and nobody is watching. "Is that included? It's not a deal-breaker but I would like to know" is the question everyone wants to ask a builder and cannot. The show gave English a set of phrases for the specific misery of trying to seem more relaxed than you are.
The other reason is Coogan's precision. Alan's sentences have a particular rhythm — a clause too many, a qualifier nobody needed, a recovery that makes it worse. You can hear the delivery in the text, which is why the lines survive being written down at all.
Lynn, Michael and the Supporting Cast
A lot of the best material is Alan talking at someone rather than to them.
- Lynn — his personal assistant, absorber of every crisis, recipient of the spike announcement. The relationship is the closest thing Alan has to a friendship and he treats it as an administrative arrangement.
- Michael — the Geordie handyman at the Travel Tavern, and the only person who reliably listens. Alan mistakes this for rapport.
- Dan — the neighbour Alan pursues as a potential best friend, before discovering that Dan and his wife had a rather different arrangement in mind.
- Carol — the recipient of the Top Gear magazine defence, which tells you roughly how those conversations went.
The Linton Travel Tavern Years
The richest seam of quotes comes from Alan's residency at the Linton Travel Tavern — a roadside hotel he lived in after his career and marriage collapsed simultaneously. Marooned "equidistant between London and Norwich", he had nothing to do but talk, and the show is essentially a study of a man filling silence.
That period gave us the cheese, the spike, Dan, and the Rover that Michael part-cleaned into COOK PASS BABTRIDGE. It is the funniest Alan and also the most uncomfortable, because the jokes are all built from loneliness and he never once acknowledges it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Alan Partridge's most famous quote?
Who says "smell my cheese"?
What does "Cook Pass Babtridge" mean?
Who is Lynn?
Is there an Alan Partridge quotes mug?
If Partridge is your register, the rest of the British comedy range runs the same way: the Peep Show Quotes Mug, the Red Dwarf Quotes Mug, and the League of Gentlemen Quotes Mug for anyone who prefers their comedy with a bit more menace.