Alan Partridge is back, and this time he’s restoring a lighthouse. The third volume of the Norfolk microstar’s faux autobiography is a meticulous parody of the celebrity-in-search-of-a-televisable gimmick genre, blending fan-friendly, behind-the-scenes tales of his more recent public adventures (This Time, Scissored Isle, From the Oasthouse) with a classic midlife lurch for purpose, part Griff Rhys-Jones rescuing threatened buildings, part Clarkson’s Farm.

Though Steve Coogan’s id-slaying monster started out as a media satire, Alan Partridge has become a vital national mirror in which middle-aged, middle English, middleweight, middlebrow man (let us call him Homo Partridgensis) can watch himself weather and crumble. The act of restoring a suitably phallic landmark on the Kent coast is linked, using heavily underlined prose, to yet another Partridge-from-the-ashes resurgence. But the character’s attempts to shore up his own career alongside ‘the Abbot’s Cliff Lighthouse in association with Alan Partridge’ aren’t just a good joke; they point to one of the most remarkable things about the ever-more-fully-realised Partridge Extended Universe: that Alan endures because he himself is regularly restored.

Alan Partridge has become a mirror in which middle English man can watch himself weather and crumble

Partridge has been with us for more than 30 years, in more versions than Barbie, whether sports-casual Motson minion, blazer-clad Travelodge mini-Madeley or bootcut-jeaned post-Top Gear social crusader. For Big Beacon, he’s a weatherbeaten Coast-style nostalgist, with a Kevin McCloud property-makeover-show hardhat (and megaphone for ordering his builders about).

British comic characters don’t usually change at all. If they last decades, like Del Boy or Captain Mainwaring, they are trapped within the format of their sitcom. If they burn brightly and briefly, like Basil Fawlty or Tom Good, they are fixed in their time by the habitual short runs of British television. Uniquely, Partridge has lasted, uninterrupted, because, it turns out, Alan contains multitudes.

Maybe it’s because the character is observed and shaped by various inquisitive comic minds. When Neil and Rob Gibbons (who write the bulk of these Partridge books, and now steer HMS Partridge in all its forms) took over from Coogan’s previous collaborators, Peter Baynham and Armando Iannucci (for 2011’s I, Partridge memoir), their act of deep-dive fan fiction reinvigorated the character for a new age, shifting him away from reactionary bufferdom and towards a more sellable Cameron-era lip-service liberalism.

The Partridge of Big Beacon is a new beast again. He is no longer in thrall to the BBC, and the adventure begins when he vengefully outbids his former employers after discovering they are planning a lighthouse makeover segment for This Time. You can sense him eagerly eyeing the new Partridgesque safe havens for ‘plain-speaking’, while taking care to remain critical of his assistant Lynn’s conservative Christian certainties. Positioning his career-sensitive politics is a subtle balancing act, achieved with effortless skill.

Partridge loudly and repeatedly reminds us how clever his lighthouse metaphor is – but the masterstroke is that it actually is. The reinforcing and replastering of the Partridge character does restore him to a central pillar of our culture, comic light beaming brightly. I found myself stopping, thumb in the pages, to read aloud favourite chunks.

Reading is mainly a solitary pursuit, while laughter is communal. Despite lists of the nation’s best-loved books being regularly dominated by great comic writing (Wodehouse, Jerome, Grossmith, Townsend, Pratchett, Milne), funny books are often treated as once-a-year pile-’em-high stocking-fillers. But if you value that glorious feeling of sharing a favourite passage with a loved one, gasping, tears rolling down your cheeks, do yourself a favour and pick up another masterpiece of the art, delivered by the ever-ingenious Partridge team.