Comment Central: Alan Coren in his own words

Times Obituary | Libby Purves's appreciation

The Times, and the world at large, has lost a flawed but brilliant diamond.

Alan Coren, the columnist and broadcaster whose wit graced this newspaper regularly for nearly 20 years, died at his home on Thursday night, aged 69, his family said yesterday.

A lifelong smoker, he succumbed to lung cancer after making a remarkable recovery from an unrelated illness. On holiday in France last year, Coren developed septicaemia. He spent four weeks in intensive care in a French hospital as doctors feared for his life but he rallied enough to return briefly to servicing the two principal outlets for his humour, The Times and BBC Radio 4’s The News Quiz.

This year he had a scan and cancer was diagnosed. His condition deteriorated quickly and he never wrote again.

The son of a plumber, Coren did for the unprepossessing North London suburb of Cricklewood what Hardy did for Wessex – if rather less reverently – although, in truth, the family home was perilously close to the neighbouring and infinitely classier district of Hampstead.

Giles Coren, his son and another Times columnist, said yesterday that his father would be buried in Cricklewood next week. “It’s called Hampstead Cemetery, but it’s in what my dad always called Cricklewood, and that’s what counts.”

Coren senior, a humorous writer from an early age, was a distorted prism. Shine a fact, the more trivial the better, at one side and out of the other would come a refracted rainbow of lateral thinking that would take wing on an updraught of preposterous imagination.

Yet his seemingly effortless prose was constructed with the skill of a watchmaker.

Robert Thomson, the Editor of The Times, paid tribute to Coren last night: “Alan Coren has been a witty and thoughtful tour guide through life. Times readers found great inspiration in his irreverence and insight that will be cherished and rediscovered in decades to come.”

Libby Purves, Coren’s fellow columnist and broadcaster, said: “I got to know Alan when I won the Punch student journalist competition in 1971. He was absolutely wonderful and he made me, he built me.

“He was such a good editor, but he would never let you off with anything sloppy. He was a master of words, parody and style. He loved people and the absolute absurdity of life, and was one of the good, good guys.”

Many witty writers are hopeless in the flesh but Coren was equally at home on unscripted radio as a pillar of The News Quizfor more than 30 years. Mark Damazer, Controller of BBC Radio 4, 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 attributed his literary panache to an inspirational English teacher at his secondary school in East Barnet, London, who persuaded him to try for a place at Oxford. He took a first at Wadham College and, to the eternal benefit of the rest of the world, banished for ever brief thoughts of an academic career.

Coren joined the late and now not-so-lamented Punch magazine, where he was ever a more brilliant writer than editor. His imaginary rantings of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin were a highlight of his watch there; he sent Amin a copy and was rewarded with an invitation to Kampala. Wisely, he refused.

During his last weeks he would occasionally rouse from the drowsiness of morphine and ask his wife and two children: “Do you think they’ll write about me in The Times?”

Alan, how could we not?

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