ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

identities. 108 Throughout the film, there are references to Coogan’s character, “Alan
Partridge,” from his 1994-1995 BBC radio and television series Knowing Me, Knowing
You, which annoys him immensely. Coogan also plays up the “unflattering caricature [of
himself] taken from the British tabloids: a self-absorbed, arrogant, insecure womanizer”
(Foley-Dawson 149). As in, we see him cheat on his partner, we watch him have anxiety
over Brydon’s (ultimately larger) role in the film, and we see him stand in front of the
mirror wondering if he should get a nose job. 109 But it is not just Coogan who imitates the
spirit of Sterne; “no personality” in the movie, Gow writes, “has just one handle” (11). 110
Gillian Anderson, who is called upon to fill the role of Widow Wadman, also plays a
desperate-actress who is more than eager to do the film. Stephen Fry appears as both
Patrick Wildgust and as Yorick in the closing scene of the “heritage film.” “Jennie” and
“Jenny,” likewise. 111 In the DVD liner notes, Patrick Wildgust writes that we recognize
these actors and comedians as themselves, even though they are “employed to
impersonate themselves impersonating people impersonating characters in a book” (Gow
11). Under the guise of all of the film conventions at work in A Cock and Bull Story, the
notion of ‘reality’ under which the film operates is confused by attributions and
assumptions that the characters/actors take or make. And, also, what the audience
perceives. In the spirit of Sterne, who spent a decade self-fashioning his many identities,
the film interprets these intertextual and contextual elements and transfers them to film.
The result is a remediation of the novel that presents adaptation as an intermedial and
multimodal practice.
While the concepts of intermediality and remediation are tied to the qualities of
the medium itself, these terms can be widened to account for the ways in which the
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