One night at this year's Edinburgh Festival, Steve Coogan joined a table that included cheeky Dublin comic Ed Byrne. Introducing Coogan to a young woman at the table, Byrne said "this is my friend Steve, he can do a really good Alan Partridge impersonation". The woman looked at Coogan, not knowing who he was and said "really?" Coogan protested that his impersonation wasn't really that good before launching into the voice. "That's brilliant," said the woman. "It's not really," replied Coogan.
Then there was the photo-shoot: at the behest of a national newspaper, Coogan was sprawled all over a taxi cab for the photographer when the cabbie, who also didn't recognise Coogan, returned shouting "Get off my car, who do you think you are?" The deadpan reply was "I'm Steve Coogan, the BAFTA-award winning comedian."
You could get your head in a spin treating the two incidents as manifest examples of an ironic distancing of the person from the performer and other such nonsense, but as the man himself says: "Articles that deconstruct comedy are environmentally unfriendly to South American rainforests." Quite.
Forgive the 32-year-old Manchester-Irish performer then for shouting "timber" this week as he enters the Guinness Book of Records for having the longest running one-man comedy show ever staged in British theatre. This weekend, Coogan overtakes Eddie Izzard's previous record, as his run in London's Lyceum theatre goes into its fifth month with ticket sales up to the 400,000 mark. Called The Man Who Thinks He's It (another example of that ironic distancing, if you like) the show is a greatest hits run through his career to date with all his alter-egos getting up to do a turn: Paul Calf, Pauline Calf, Duncan Thickett, Tony Ferrino and Alan Partridge. Back in the days when he used to share a stage with Frank Skinner (the early 1990s), Coogan was dubbed the "new Peter Sellers", but proof positive that he's shaken off all comparisons and become one of the most critically acclaimed performers at work today came when he met one of his idols, John Cleese, at a party and to his astonishment Cleese was able to quote whole sketches from the Alan Partridge show at him. What astonished Coogan most about the incident was that as a child he used to learn off all the Monthy Python sketches and practise them until he had all the voices down pat.
The son of Irish parents who had moved to Manchester, Coogan had five brothers and a sister, but his parents regularly fostered other children through the local Catholic Rescue Service. With an impressive ability from an early age to imitate other people's voices - "I don't want to sound arrogant but I didn't have to study it or practise it, it was just there" - he applied to RADA but was turned down, settling instead for Manchester Polytechnic. In almost classic showbiz fashion, he found himself pushed onto stage there when someone else didn't turn up for a lecture talk and he found himself doing a series of off-beat impressions: Ronnie Corbett in Vietnam, Sylvester Stallone as a social worker.
He was then picked up to do voice-over work ("Now there's even more value for your money - at Asda" was one of his) before being hired by Spitting Image where he did the voices for Margaret Thatcher, Neil Kinnock, Mick Jagger and many more. Not wanting to become "a bargain basement Rory Bremner", he swiftly developed a series of original comic characters including the beer-swilling student-hating Paul Calf, the Lily Savage meets soap actress Pauline Calf and the stand-up manque Duncan Thickett (catchphrase: "are you all right, or what?") and the pedantic safety inspector Ernest Moss who, when edited together into a stage show won him a Perrier award (1993) and a BAFTA.
He later teamed up with Patrick Marber, Armando Ianucci and Chris Morris to create the Radio 4 spoof news programme, On The Hour, in which Alan Partridge first took to the airwaves as a sports presenter. Coogan writes the Partridge character with Henry Normal - the writer of the Mrs Merton Show.
Casual sports jumper met naked prejudice in the form of Partridge. The man from Norwich who drove a maroon Ford Scorpio (with a charcoal grey interior) and whose favourite band were Abba, naturally didn't know anything about sport. Alan's commentary on the boat race was: "Once again Oxford and Cambridge, the undisputed masters of racing boats on the Thames are in the lead as they come under the bridge." He says that there's something of him in all of his characters but seems ambivalent about Partridge - "He's not me, I'm not like that at all, but of course I am quite like that. It's just that I'm not so pompous to say that there's not a lot of me in him" is his confused and enigmatic analysis - "he's someone that comes very easily to me, he's the unexpurgated, unrefined version of me". Alan Partridge transferred effortlessly to television as a chat show host in Knowing Me, Knowing You. The follow-up series, I'm Alan Partridge saw him back on the night-time shift on Radio Norwich after he has been sacked from his show for the mere detail of shooting one of his guests dead.
Just to prove he was fallible though, he then created Tony Ferrino, the loved-up Portugese international cabaret singing star. Very different from what he had done before and relying almost in total on a string of single entendres for effect, Ferrino had none of the depth, or the popularity of his other characters - despite his tribute to "working women everywhere" which was called Lap Dancing Lady.
By his own admission he is very awkward with fame, and considerably less than enamoured of how the tabloid press have intruded into his private life with headlines like "My cocaine hell" and "Love Rat" - the later referring to how his pregnant girlfriend left him after discovering he was having a string of affairs. He now lives in Brighton to be close to his two-year-old daughter Clare. "I see my daughter a lot. I remember reading articles about successful actors who said in their 50s: `I wish I had spent more time with my children', and I'm determined not to let that happen to me."
If ever he extricates himself from his current theatre run, he promises to bring Alan back onto the screens. "If I can find something to do with him." He was particularly pleased to find out that the last television series is now part of the British A-Level Media Studies course.
Just as that other great Irish-Mancunian, Morrissey, managed to write the most quintessentially English pop songs of his generation, similarly the Steve Coogan whose family are not that long out of Galway has managed to create an English comedy institution as enduring and resonant as Basil Fawlty. Throw in other famous Irish sons and daughters of Manchester like Caroline Ahearne and Noel and Liam Gallagher and you're looking at a sociological thesis.
For Coogan though, such analysis is superfluous, although he does accept that the very nature of his job - inhabiting a series of different characters - does lead to a surfeit of "Who is the real Steve Coogan?" type headlines. For somebody who's been analysed in print by everyone from Anthony Clare to kiss-and-tell ex-girlfriends, there's something richly amusing in the fact that he has been known to sign autographs not with his name but with the legend: "Ignore everything you read about me in the papers."
The Man Who Thinks He's It, a video of Steve Coogan's current record-breaking theatre run, is available now. Tonight's British Comedy Awards, for which Coogan is a nominee, are on ITV at 9 p.m.