About 20 years ago, the actor and comedian Steve Coogan did a tour called, with typical self-deprecation, Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge and Other Less Successful Characters. I saw the show and it was, as you’d expect from Coogan, amusing and cleverly performed. Yet it ended strangely; Coogan sang a self-lacerating song called ‘Everyone’s a Bit of a Cunt Sometimes’. It was oddly bitter and angry, but clearly Coogan stood by its sentiments, because he attempted to reprise the number in a dream sequence from his restaurant-review comedy The Trip several years later. The song, given full production values, was, perhaps wisely, deleted from the programme’s final cut. (Although you can still find it on YouTube.)

I thought of it when I read that Coogan, his production company Baby Cow and the film studio Pathé Pictures have paid an out-of-court settlement to the University of Leicester academic Richard Taylor. The university registrar had been a character in Coogan’s film The Lost King about the discovery of Richard III’s bones underneath a Leicester car park. That discovery was led by Philippa Langley, an amateur archeologist, and the film........

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