'No subject was beyond his wit'

Alan Coren, former editor of Punch and regular on Radio 4’s the News Quiz, has died aged 69.

In July this year he was diagnosed as suffering from lung cancer.

Coran was also known for his time as a team captain TV’s Call My Bluff, appearances on Have I Got News For You and his column in The Times newspaper. He also wrote more than 20 books

His daughter Victoria said: 'It was all very gentle and peaceful. It is exactly how we would have wanted it to be — we just would have wanted it to be 30 years from now. We are all heartbroken because we loved him very much.'

Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer said Coren's death was a ‘terrible loss’.

‘Alan was the heartbeat of The News Quiz - the man around whom so much turned for nearly 30 years.’

‘It was not only that he was consistently brilliantly funny, but above and beyond that, his humour burst with humanity and warmth,’ he said.

‘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.

‘There was no subject which was ever beyond his wit.’

Fellow News Quiz regular Jeremy Hardy added: He never prepared anything. He used get irritable with those of us who were comics who had jokes prepared. He thought that was bad form and that we should just all wing it.

'When I first came on the show he was a bit appalled that I was clearly a comic and clearly had gags, but we became very fond of each other over the years.'

Coren was born in London in 1938, and was educated Wadham College, Oxford, Yale and the University of California.

He joined Punch as an assistant editor in 1963, and edited the now-defuncy magazine from 1978 to 1987. He also edited another defunct magazine, The Listener, from 1988 to 1989.

He has also written for The Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, the Sunday Express, Tatler, The Daily Telegraph, Spectator and Times Literary Supplement.

Coren leaves a wife and two grown-up children, Victoria and Giles, who are both also journalists

Published: 19 Oct 2007