Alan Coren

Alan Coren, the writer and broadcaster who died aged 69, was one of Britain's most prolific humorists, producing newspaper columns and books in astonishing abundance; he was a former editor of Punch, a regular panellist on Radio 4's satirical show The News Quiz, and also appeared as a team captain on television's Call My Bluff.Known to his newspaper readers as the Sage of Cricklewood, Coren turned out millions of words in columns of humour and barbed television criticism, as well as collections of comic essays ranging from Golfing for Cats (1975) to The Cricklewood Diet (1982) and, following the birth of his children, the Arthur series of children's books which he wrote between 1976 and 1983. Even 20 years ago Coren was estimating that he had published six million words, or 10 copies of War And Peace.Fluent and industrious, Coren was a master of drollery: in an early piece about Beethoven spending an evening drinking, a concerned onlooker points out: "That was your Ninth."Coren, who had made his name while still an undergraduate at Oxford, was also possessed of a dazzling intellect which he deployed with equal effect in his writing and in company: he was a brilliant conversationalist, whose machine-gun delivery dominated - and often silenced - the Punch lunches at which he presided as editor.When The Daily Telegraph's Court Circular reported in 1980 that "the Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, was entertained at luncheon today by Mr Alan Coren", readers knew that the paper spoke no less than the truth.Words rattled from him without cease, whether a column for a newspaper, a scorching piece of television criticism, a witty observation on the passing show, or the plot for the novel that he invariably never got round to writing. While colleagues reeled from his spectacular creativeness, Coren suffered from the journalist's gnat-like attention-span and preferred to sprint rather than knuckle down to the long haul.At Punch, Coren - then an ambitious 28-year-old - became the youngest man to carve his name on the magazine's dining table, a long-standing tradition. When he came to preside over the magazine's lunches, they were often riotous affairs; colleagues remembered particularly a stunning double-act with the comedian and director Mel Brooks, with each sparking the other to more and more absurd jokes.Coren's finest hour in editorial terms was as a rookie in charge of production on the night that President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963; his decision to stop the issue and lose it (the magazine contained a cartoon ridiculing Kennedy) was applauded by the management. His worst moment came in 1987 when he ran a cartoon of an upturned glass-bottomed boat with people staring out, above the caption: "And if you look up now you will see the rescue helicopter." To Coren's mortification, the magazine appeared a couple of days after the Zeebrugge ferry disaster.As only the 11th editor in 147 years, Coren, who took up the post aged 39, was nevertheless rated Punch's last successful one, having joined it from university after sending in an unsolicited piece, and inched up the ladder to literary editor in 1966, then deputy editor in 1969 and editor in 1978, a position he held until his acrimonious departure in 1987.As well as his work at Punch, Coren also developed a parallel career as a columnist, contributing television reviews to The Times for much of the 1970s, as well as a humorous column to the Daily Mail. On leaving Punch, he took over as editor of The Listener, the BBC's now-defunct weekly culture magazine, and continued to write for The Times and for The Mail On Sunday, for which he had worked as a television critic since 1984.His arrival at The Listener prompted a sour spat with one of the magazine's star contributors, the cartoonist Barry Fantoni, who declared Coren's appointment to be "one of the greatest follies of all time" and accused Coren of "looking and sounding like a cabbie"; in riposte, Coren labelled Fantoni (who also drew for Private Eye) "Richard Ingrams's lickspittle".Although he traded in words, listing his own favourite humorists as HL Mencken, Evelyn Waugh, Perelman, Wodehouse, Thurber, Richmal Crompton and Michael Frayn, Coren was also genuinely engaged and fascinated by television, and counted himself an enthusiastic viewer.In 1992 Coren joined the Sunday Express as a humorous columnist, complaining that he had become jaded as a reviewer, having watched television for too long. It was as a humorous writer that Coren flourished, constructing a netherworld of the satirical, the lunatic and the surreal, all vaguely anchored in Coren's own domestic purlieus of Cricklewood (in reality his own stamping ground was the frontier between NW2 and NW3, and - in recent years - Regent's Park).Alan Coren was born in north London, the son of a builder-cum-plumber, and educated at East Barnet Grammar School. After taking a First in English at Wadham College, Oxford, he took a Master's degree and later studied in the United States on a Commonwealth Fellowship at Yale and at the University of California at Berkeley, for a doctorate in modern American literature.He was writing on the side about America for the New Yorker and Punch when the then editor of Punch, Bernard Hollowood, suggested Coren could make a living from writing.In between stints for The Observer, Tatler and the Times Literary Supplement, Coren also pursued a career in broadcasting, joining The News Quiz on Radio 4 at its inception in 1977 and becoming one of its most competitive participants. The following year he wrote The Loser, an unsuccessful television sitcom about a boxing promoter, which featured Leonard Rossiter.Coren had been a team captain on the popular BBC2 word game Call My Bluff since 1996. He commanded a loyal following, but once confessed that he regarded broadcasting as a hobby rather than his first area of expertise. Indeed, he listed it among his recreations in Who's Who.He generated nearly 20 of them, mainly collections of his newspaper columns with whimsical titles such as The Sanity Inspector (1974), The Lady From Stalingrad Mansions (1978), A Bit On The Side (1995) and The Cricklewood Dome (1998). In the mid-1970s, when he asked his publisher for ideas, he was told that books about golf always sold well, as did books about cats. Without missing a beat Coren announced that his next book would be called Golfing for Cats.One of his most successful books was The Collected Bulletins of Idi Amin (1974), a miscellany of his Punch articles guying the former Ugandan dictator; this was despite its being rejected for publication in America on grounds of racial sensitivity. Coren's last book, 69 For One (2007), is due to be published later this year.Although he spent much of his professional life as a freelance, he never suffered from the neuroses or paranoia that afflicts the breed, and only took on work that he wanted to do.Coren succeeded John Cleese as rector of St Andrews University from 1973 until 1976 and was awarded an honorary DLitt from Nottingham University in 1993.In May 2006 Coren was bitten by an insect that gave him septicaemia, which led to necrotising fasciitis.Alan Coren married, in 1963, Anne Kasriel, a consultant anaesthetist, who survives him with their two children, Giles and Victoria, both journalists. Show less «