Kind Heart And Alan Corenet

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Though it's been a while since I've chatted about Alan Coren in this blog regular readers will know I'm a fan so you won't be surprised that I enjoyed reading this.

Unlike wine an affordable and longer lasting vintage

Published in 1989 it is basically a years worth collection of columns he wrote for The Times newspaper. I've said before that one of his great gifts as a writer and broadcaster was to make you feel as if you were a friend even though you've never met. These columns are like casual chats with the wittiest person in the pub (if I drank).

If you're a young person some of the references may make you instantly grab your phone and consult with google (Kenneth Baker and  Patrick Litchfield spring to mind) but hey, you're young, there will be far greater hurdles in your life.

Other than those references it's a book that hasn't dated unlike say a contemporary like Miles Kington.

Being a Londoner but now living in Wales a lot of it might also seem to London centric. But you know that's where he was born. It's not as if he came down from the North of England and pretended his past life didn't exist. He is a Londoner and is proud of it.

Indeed his love of London is not media London but all of it. Though not in this collection there was a column I recall which he regaled the history of Smiths Crisps which was around where he lived. I too remember Smiths Crisps (now revived and selling at Poundland though no longer in Cricklewood) and regret the passing not of the little blue salt bag but their bovril flavoured option.

There was also I recall a radio series where he and a friend (Christopher Matthew) took a bus journey around London and they reminisced and chatted about what they saw. It was improvised gentle humour tinged with nostalgia. I must remember to see if the BBC can provide it online.

Alan Coren had a dry sense of humour. This book will not make you laugh out loud. It will make you smile......and possibly wistful.

Because as I was reading the thought began to occur to me. I'm not going to say I've thought it through with any great detail but I'm going to bore you with it anyway.

Was Alan Coren one of the last of Britain's contented writers?

I'm not saying that there were no problems in his life (I've no idea). But here is a man who acheived his ambition of becoming a writer, and a loved one at that. He had a happy marriage/family life and a wide circle of friends and (I'm obviously one) fans. He had a career not just on the printed page but also on TV and I suspect from one of his other essays his first love radio. He also edited Punch magazine (young people go on Google again). The words "much loved" are thrown about like confetti nowadays but with Alan Coren it was true.

And (it needs to be said) he worked to be the success he became. Alan Coren had no advantages other than his talent

But could such a writer survive in the Disunited Kingdom today? After all in this land of austerity and Brexit could someone write about Wimbledon and make you grin, or gently mock politicians and still have a wide following? Remember that I used the word contented and not rich or successful.  Britain is obviously not a country at ease with itself.

I don't know what Alan Coren's politics were. But I would guess unless he would try to keep them to himself most of the time unless some politico did something so obviously stupid as to ire him. And in the Britain of the eighties to show  no obvious allegence to a political party was a perfectly acceptable position. No longer in Bi-Polar Brexit Britain.

To me the closest writer today in terms of humorously being able to discuss a wide variety of interests and issues is Caitlin Moran (who as regular readers will know I'm also a fan of). But her style is different. Confrontational is not the word I'm looking for but is the closest to what I'm trying to suggest. She too seems to now have a contented family life but that was not always the case.
No matter how rich/successful she is Ms Moran can see the hazards of Britain today and she is not afraid to make her views known.

So I would suggest that the Alan Coren revival begins here. To remind people of a writer who I think we have lost in more than just a physical sense.

Until the next time.