National Express West Midlands have revealed that as part of an update of its next-stop announcements on board its buses, comedy actor Steve Coogan will be providing the voice of his popular BBC character Alan Partridge in order to ‘cheer up passenger spirits’ during their journey.
Avril Scherz, Passenger Experience Lead at NX Bus, tweeted yesterday evening that many passengers felt that the current announcements were too “dull and tedious”, and while they served as ‘functional’, she felt that a bit of humour ‘wouldn’t go amiss’.
“After a while, passengers switch off from listening to the same dull and functional announcements, and while they are useful and helpful for those travelling on an unfamiliar route, it soon begins to grate on the regular passengers. So we thought it would be a great idea to inject a bit of warmth and humour, especially as we needed to do an update since so many stop names have been changed by TfWM (Transport for West Midlands).”
Over on Instagram, actor Steve Coogan addressed concerns about his Alan Partridge character being more synonymous with the Norfolk region, rather than the West Midlands:
“It’s entirely typical that Alan was not approached to be the ‘voice’ of First buses in the Norwich area, and that he ended up recording long lists of bus stop names in the West Midlands area instead, but only because the likes of Adrian Chiles or Lenny Henry were unavailable!”
Coogan also revealed that Alan would add his usual banter “twist” to certain stop announcements, which he hoped would ‘give passengers a chuckle’.
Get your air-sax at the ready, the next stop is “Baker Street”, make Gerry Rafferty proud!
While Alan Partridge is a fictional radio DJ, this isn’t the first time that NX Bus have employed the services of a DJ to voice their next-stop announcements, Phil Upton previously was the ‘voice’ of the 22 and 23 services operating through Harborne.
Passengers can look forward to hearing the warm dulcet tones of Alan Partridge humourously narrating their bus journey over the next couple of weeks as updates are rolled out onto vehicles equipped with next-stop announcement hardware.
Editor’s note: This is of course an April Fool’s joke article!
