Alan Coren, satirist and broadcaster, dies aged 69

11 April 2012
The Weekender

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Alan Coren, the brilliantly irreverent columnist, broadcaster and editor, has died of lung cancer, his family said yesterday.

His death at the age of 69 deprives the country of one of its wittiest voices, familiar to millions from Radio Four's News Quiz and BBC's Call My Bluff.

In a varied career, Coren also edited the now-defunct Punch magazine and served as the Rector of the University of St Andrews - a post he inherited from John Cleese.

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'The funniest writer in Britain': Alan Coren was prolific, thinking nothing of producing 5,000 words a week

His fellow Times columnist Libby Purves said yesterday: "He was a master of words and parody and style.

"He loved people and the absolute absurdity of life and he was one of the good, good guys. He was extremely kind. I will miss him desperately."

Mark Damazer, controller of Radio 4, described Coren's death as a "terrible loss".

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Hand-over: John Cleese shows Coren around St Andrews University as he becomes rector in 1974

"Alan was the heartbeat of The News Quiz - the man around whom so much turned for nearly 30 years," he said. "It was not only that he was consistently brilliantly funny, but above and beyond that, his humour burst with humanity and warmth.

"He could pick out the foibles of the mighty - and his own - with pinpoint accuracy, and yet at the same time he evoked sympathy for the human condition.

"He was fabulously well-read - and there was no subject which was ever beyond his wit."

Coren's fellow Call My Bluff panellist Rod Liddle paid tribute to the longevity of a career which began with a job on Punch magazine straight from university.

"I first picked up one of his books when I was 13 years old - which I used to rib him about - but it reads as well today as it did back then," he said.

"He sustained that level of humour for 30 years."

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Funny man: Turned up at No.10 dressed as a sheikh

After joining Punch, Coren quickly gained the magazine's editorship and stamped his personality on it by soliciting contributions from his favourite writers.

He juxtaposed articles from Kingsley Amis and Daily Mail columnist Keith Waterhouse with humorous cartoons.

Coren also revived the historic weekly Punch lunches, carving his initials into the magazine's table alongside those of former contributors William Makepeace Thackeray, Mark Twain and James Thurber. His own prolific output ran to more than 20 books and thousands of newspaper articles and columns.

After reading somewhere that the three most marketable subjects for a book were golfing, cats and Hitler, Coren decided to publish a collection of his writing under the title Golfing for Cats.

The cover was adorned with a Swastika.

He also wrote extensively about Cricklewood, the North London suburb where he was born and lived for 28 years.

Taking a potshot at Peter Mayle's bestselling book A Year In Provence, he commented: "A year in Cricklewood is immeasurably more fun. What's more, your nose does not peel!"

He wrote for the Daily Mail and The Times as well as becoming editor of The Listener, the BBC's cultural magazine, which folded after he left. By then, Coren decided to give up going to the office. "When I got to 50, I thought I'd had enough of corporate life," he explained. Instead he decided to develop his career as a freelance columnist and broadcaster.

Throughout his career, he delighted in sailing as close to the wind as possible.

In 1974, he caused a major security scare by turning up at Downing Street in the middle of the oil crisis dressed as a sheikh and asking to see Edward Heath.

He also devised the outrageous spoof Idi Amin Diaries for Punch, which were full of imagined rants by the African dictator.

Many satirists would have stopped there, but Coren took the joke further by sending Amin a copy. For his pains, he received an invitation to Uganda.

Unsurprisingly, he declined. Despite his attachment to Cricklewood, Coren and his anaesthetist wife, Anne, eventually moved to Regent's Park.

But his worst fears about leaving his beloved neighbourhood for a more glamorous address were realised when he spotted Madonna house-hunting nearby.

He fretted that his privacy would be destroyed by "screaming pop fans hanging round the house or big blokes in sunglasses and walkie-talkies asking my business every time I step outside for a Silk Cut".

He added: "I don't want Michael Jackson coming round to borrow sugar when I'm watching the cricket."

Coren is also survived by daughter Victoria, a journalist and professional poker player, and son Giles, a restaurant critic and columnist.

This weekend, his family and friends will surely remember Coren's own favourite epitaph, by U.S. satirist Robert Benchley: "When a humorist dies, you should go somewhere that has a piano and drink until they throw you out."

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