And you can’t see the join

And you can’t see the join.The actor reckons that taking his first serious part was “a gamble, because I could have ended up looking like a complete prat. But it’s not Oscar material, I wasn’t doing a Dustin Hoffman, just a believable, unshowy part that was consistent with the other performers. Far removed from the laugh-a-minute humour of Paul Calf or Partridge, Coogan’s performance in The Fix is designed to alienate. Obsessive, thick-spectacled, wiry-haired, his Gabbert doesn’t crack a smile once in the whole piece. After Partridge, Paul and Pauline Calf and Gareth Cheeseman, it’s another example of Coogan’s rare ability completely to merge with a character Before your very eyes, he becomes someone else.

“What he’s uncovering deserves to be uncovered, but it’s also damaging to people. It’s corruption, but Gabbert is only motivated by the fact that it’d make a good story. It’s a grey area of morality – which I liked.”Coogan certainly doesn’t attempt to ingratiate himself with audiences as Gabbert. It’s not as if he’s turning someone over for sexual indiscretion,” he adds with feeling. “If you go into a part because you’ve got a score to settle, then it’s not going to be a particularly good performance.” It would have been simple for Coogan to have portrayed Gabbert with a metaphorical tail, horns and cloven hooves, but his reading is more plausibly ambiguous than that. “Gabbert is not a very nice person, but the challenge was to make him something more than an oily, two-dimensional caricature.

It’s not as if he’s turning someone over without justification. He is waiting to shoot a key scene in which one of Gabbert’s cohorts attempts the first known example of entrapment with a hidden tape-recorder.Initially Coogan seems wary of me before gradually opening up about the role. Once into his stride, he is as articulate as his famous alter-ego, Alan Partridge, isn’t. He claims to have brought no personal animus to the role of Ur-Tabloid Man. The irony is that this man who doorsteps celebs is played by a celeb who has himself been the victim of just such doorstepping.

Steve Coogan has in his personal life fallen foul of the sort of reporters who, like Gabbert, relish telling their editors: “There’s filth there, and I want it badly.”Done up in the 1960s standard-issue tabloid hack’s gear of shabby raincoat, shiny black suit and winkle-pickers, Coogan is pacing around between takes at the Lea Valley playing-fields in the East End of London. Gabbert’s efforts resulted in jail sentences and life bans for four players, notably England’s then most expensive signing, Tony Kay.
His exploits are charted in their full glory in The Fix, a film to be screened on BBC1 tomorrow. Many of them are mentally deficient and, undoubtedly for racial reasons, are presumed to be guilty They can hardly be said to have had a fair trial. In this country asylum seekers are held in detention centres, some of them for two years, and are suffering in prison with no charge.”`Look, Europe!’ at the Almeida Theatre, London N1 (0171-359 4404), 7.30pm, Sunday 5 October.