Alan Coren

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Coren

The Times - Oct 20th 2007

Alan Coren

Humorist whose witty observations on life graced print journalism and the airwaves and are enshrined in several books

Alan Coren

Alan Coren was one of Britain’s foremost humorists, finding the comedy of life all around him and rendering it, hilariously and compellingly, in polished and witty prose. He started on Punch, and rose to be Editor, wrote just as effectively for newspapers, not least The Times, and was a masterly broadcaster, above all on The News Quiz on radio.

He was a highly erudite man, meticulous about language, and a very thoughtful comic writer and performer. The man and the amiable persona were one, but he knew precisely what he was doing, and carefully judged the resonance of all of the millions of words he juxtaposed. He was a fine writer because he controlled the tone of his voice, and knew when an abrupt change of tone would tickle or provoke.

Coren thought about language, its oddities and revelations. He honoured it — his ambition was to invent a word that would immortalise him in the Oxford English Dictionary — and with it he defied the ordinary and clichéd. Recalling the vacuity of a media party he wrote: “I found myself shallow in conversation with. . .” Another item began: “These days, I rarely give long shrift to the felicitous misprint.”

He could write about anything or next to nothing, wringing, for instance, 400 words out of his experience of being late for a lunch with the Duchess of York. Although he did not write political commentaries, he often expressed sincere social convictions. On the whole, he did not feel that British life had improved.

“I always enjoyed writing and reading humour more than anything else,” he said. “I respond to a bit of sentimentality or nostalgia, but comedy moves me more than anything.”

Britain’s literary tradition, he thought, was full of humour: “All the immortals are comic, from Chaucer to P. G. Wodehouse. There is this lovely wickedness in England, and this, combined with our class system and our enormous vocabulary, makes us a seedbed of humour.” He was a great admirer of Evelyn Waugh, Richmal Crompton, Keith Waterhouse and Michael Frayn, as well as the Americans H. L. Mencken and James Thurber.

The son of a plumber, he was born in North London in 1938 with, as the New Statesman put it, “a silver spoof in his mouth”. He was evacuated to Blackpool during the war before returning home to be educated in East Barnet. An inspirational English teacher at the grammar school, Annie Brooks, got him to read: newspapers, magazines, novels, humour. She encouraged him to join Boots library, and lent him her own books.

Impressed by his talent for words, she persuaded his reluctant parents that he must try for university. He was interviewed for Worcester College, Oxford, by Christopher Ricks, who turned him down, but was then offered a scholarship by Wadham, where he took a first in English.

He considered but rejected an academic career. He had had some serious short stories published by Faber, and from Oxford he won a Commonwealth Fellowship for 1961-63. He proceeded to Yale and then Berkeley, where he wrote a thesis on punctuation — an art of which he remained a master.

He found Berkeley “the funniest place I had ever been to”, and began to send dispatches to Bernard Hollowood, the Editor of Punch, who summoned him to join the magazine with which he was to be associated for nearly 25 years. He became the youngest assistant editor, at 24, in 1963, and published his first collection, The Dog It Was That Died, two years later. He was promoted to literary editor in 1966, and was deputy editor to William Davis from 1969.

At the same time he was in constant demand from other publications, writing for Tatler, Atlantic Monthly, The Spectator, The Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books. He was a hilarious and very direct television critic for The Times, 1971-78, and a columnist on the Daily Mail, 1972-76, and subsequently The Mail on Sunday.

He wrote a host of humorous books for adults, such as The Sanity Inspector, which was perhaps his comic masterpiece, and edited a dozen or more anthologies. During the 1970s he wrote regularly for comedy sketch shows on television, though a solo effort, The Losers, a situation comedy about wrestling starring Leonard Rossiter, sank with all hands. Not all his projects reached the screen. He once joked that he had been responsible for more dead pilots than Goering.

With something of an appetite for practical jokes, he once made an appearance at the Stock Exchange dressed as an Arab, at the time of the oil crisis. The brokers were incensed.

After his children were born, he found that children’s classics had lost their appeal for the television generation, so he set about writing his own. His series of 10,000-word “Arthur” novels concerned a tough seven-year-old who makes his mark in the Wild West and then returns to London to solve Sherlock Holmes’s leftover cases.

In the early 1970s Coren wrote a series of imaginary monologues by Idi Amin. When these were collected into a popular book, he sent Amin a copy, and received an invitation to visit Kampala and see Uganda for himself. He declined, saying: “I’d probably end up as a sandwich.”

In 1975 he joined The News Quiz on Radio 4, of which he was to be a stalwart for more than 30 years. Because for his own inspiration he read the papers so thoroughly, he could recognise almost every story, however insignificant or well disguised it might be. Asked the most baffling question about the week’s events, he would say without hesitation: “This was the pub soccer side that went on a tour of Czechoslovakia and played against the national team by mistake,” or “This was the potato that had the same profile as Michael Portillo” — and would make much more of the tale than the newspapers had in the first place. His periodic rants about the Germans (“the beach towels are going out all over Europe”) may have been politically incorrect but they were delivered without malice.

Reaching the Punch chair in 1978, Coren was known as a tough editor, turning down even established contributors when he thought their contributions had not worked. He found and fostered new talent, including Miles Kington, Tina Brown and Michael Bywater. In 1987 he left Punch, where the circulation was in decline, and succeeded Russell Twisk as Editor of The Listener. The magazine was thought to have secured its future through joint funding by the BBC and the Independent Television Authority, but neither his appointment nor the magazine lasted long.

In 1988 Coren began leavening the pages of The Times twice a week as a replacement for Kington, who had moved to The Independent. His columns generally began quietly, tangentially. Then after creeping up on his subject, he would pounce, and one could only take flight with his fancy. He was the most reliable of contributors. He always filed early and wrote to the length required.

Famously he lived in the London suburb of Cricklewood, which enabled him to write both as a metropolitan insider and as a suburban everyman. The major character in his columns was himself, and he combined comic reporting — of social occasions or new fashions and fads — with speculations about anything from motes in a sunbeam to the ownership of frogspawn.

Although his imagination drifted or flew from his starting point, there was usually truth in his beginnings. If he wrote that he had phoned London Zoo to enquire about some strange animal behaviour, then he really had. He noticed that the circumference of the M25 was exactly half the distance required for running in his car, and wrote a piece about driving twice round it.

He was Rector of St Andrews University, 1973-76, and was awarded an honorary doctorate at Nottingham University in 1993 for “outstanding services to modern literature”. In 1994 he was voted the wittiest man in Britain by Radio 4 listeners.

Coren married Anne Kasriel, a doctor, in 1963. She survives him, with their son and daughter, the journalists Giles and Victoria Coren.

Alan Coren, writer and broadcaster, was born on June 27, 1938. He died of cancer on October 18, 2007, aged 69