Alan Coren (1938 - 2007)
"Television is more interesting than people. If it were not we should have people standing in the corner of our room." One of thousands of great lines authored by the writer and broadcaster Alan Coren, who's death has just been announced. A former editor of Punch and The Listener, he is probably best known these days for Call My Bluff, The News Quiz, or his Times column. Alan Coren was one of the great British satirists of the past four decades; not least because his wit was undergirded by an extremely sharp intelligence (he was a graduate of Oxford, Yale and Berkeley).
The story goes that Coren once complained to his agent about his books not selling very well. His agent informed him that there were only three subjects currently selling well: golf, cats and Nazis. Coren dutifully entitled his next book "Golfing for Cats" -- and had a swastika put on the cover.
In January, he joined the cultural battle over religious symbolism in his Times Notebook:
No transport is easy, these days. In Tuesday’s Times we learnt of a poor sap who is suing Qantas for chucking him off its London plane because he was wearing an anti-Bush T-shirt. And had it been a cross? A Rastafarian wristband? An Old Etonian tie? A white yarmulke open to doubt as to whether he was the Pope, and thus likely to offend atheist passengers, or merely an Adelaide rabbi supporting a Plymouth Brother’s right not to appear on CCTV because God had forbidden his image to be graven? Do I believe in Donald Rumsfeld? I do not know, and if I did, I wouldn’t dare say. I know only that every day brings more things we do not know we do not know.
Comments
Hadn't heard this. I'm so sorry. I remember enjoying his work in Punch when I was a teenager, and I always enjoyed hearing him on Radio 4.
This was a real blow - much more so to me than other recent losses. Coren was my humourist of choice since student days, through books, Punch and radio. Nothing drives comedy like a fierce intelligence and he had that in spadefulls. It was a delight to hear him pricking the bubbles of the over-inflated and, of course in the lovely English way, to prick his won as well. Who is going to delight me as I get older? "Year after year, their numbers get fewer". So sadly missed!