Alan Coren
October 22nd, 2007 by Steve Bowbrick
We couldn’t let Alan Coren’s passing go unmarked could we? The man was Radio 4’s Grumpy Old Man in Residence, a kind of shadow DG. Except he wasn’t all that grumpy. You could hear the twinkle in his eye over the airwaves. Even his famous bigotry was actually nothing of the sort: never crueler than a headmaster from The Beano (about Germans, mainly).
Punch was a fixture in our house back when he was editor and it was still funny (and before it was defunct, obviously). Coren, like the handful of other humourists who survived and thrived in the post-alternative comedy era did so on pure merit. He was just funny.
Coren was modest, humane, literate and invariably funny. His comedy was never shocking or dark (nothing ‘alternative’ about it) but always clever, irreverent and intolerant of pomposity and ignorance. His prose was deceptively simple but always perfectly honed, like that of the earlier American humourists he introduced me to: Thurber, Mencken, Benchley.
In 2005 he made a series of programmes called Freedom Pass, with his old Punch mate Christopher Matthew. It was a gloriously simple thing: two funny, clever old geezers making proper use of their free bus passes and just talking. I really wish I’d saved one or two of those shows.
The series is, of course, another miserable absence from the Radio 4 web site. Maybe they’ll run it again now. Matthew Bannister’s obituary show gave Coren a pretty good send off yesterday (MP3) and next week they’re running a tribute in the News Quiz slot (podcast). And here’s a lovely obit from Michael Bywater in The Times.
Pic from The Times.