R.I.P. MILES KINGTON

Miles Kington
Humorist, columnist and jazz musician best known for his Let's Parler Franglais! books

Story by Stanley Reynolds in The Guardian Friday February 1, 2008

Miles Kington, the humorist, jazz musician and broadcaster, has died from pancreatic cancer, aged 66, after a short illness. He was perhaps the last of the fairly sizeable line of recognised Punch comic writers, following the recent deaths of Alan Coren, Sheridan Morley and ES Turner.
Miles left Punch 28 years ago and made a name writing a column, first for the Times and then for the Independent. He also wrote a regular column for the Oldie magazine. What was most remarkable about him was that he wrote the newspaper columns every day. No one apart from JB Morton - the Daily Express's Beachcomber - was able to do that. Michael Frayn's three a week for the Guardian 40 years ago and Michael Wharton's Peter Simple column in the Daily Telegraph were thought the limit the humorous could be pushed to.

Kington was a very busy, energetic figure. He played a number of musical instruments and
particularly the double bass. For years he played with a jazz group called
Instant Sunshine and attracted a large following. It was friendly, undifficult
jazz with none of the noise of Dixieland or the subtlety of the progressive
version.

He was often on BBC Radio and was one of the original panellists on BBC TV's Call My Bluff when it was broadcast at prime time. Miles was pleased that Alan Coren, his arch-rival,
did not get on Call My Bluff until it was on its last legs.
He did various television films. Three Miles High, a train trip over the Andes and running into a South American revolution, in the BBC's Great Railway Journeys in 1980, was very
much praised. This was followed by Steam Days in 1986 and The Burma Road in
1989. He wrote one stage play, Waiting for Stoppard, a comedy for the Bristol
New Vic in 1995, and a number of stage shows, with Simon Gilman, for the
Edinburgh festival, and, for the radio, Death of Tchaikovsky - a Sherlock
Holmes mystery, in 1996. That year he also became co-presenter, with Edward
Enfield, of Double Vision.

Kington was born in Northern Ireland, where his father was a wartime serving soldier. He went to school at Trinity college, now Glenalmond college, in Perthshire and took a degree in
modern languages from Trinity College, Oxford.
He then "plunged into freelance writing", including jazz reviews for the Times, and joined
Punch in 1965. Eight years later, he became literary editor, but was mainly
known as the author of Let's Parler Franglais! This was a comic mixture of
English and French, short pieces pretending to be a study course - for
example, "Les Français ne parlent pas le O-Level Français"
("The French do not speak O-Level French"). These were so successful
that they were published from 1979 to 1982 in a series of books: Let's Parler
Franglais! was followed by Let's Parler Franglais Again and Let's Parler Franglais
One More Temps.

He also published collections of his Times columns: Moreover, and Miles and Miles, both in 1982.
He rediscovered Alphonse Allais for English readers in 1977; and edited Jazz:
an Anthology in 1992. His collections from the Independent, for which he wrote
his last column just before he died, included The Franglais Lieutenant's Woman
(1986) and Welcome to Kington (1989). He perhaps won the prize for longest
silly title with Welcome to Kington: Includes All the Pieces You Cut Out from
the Independent and Lost. He also got in the last word on Punch in 1998 when
he edited The Pick of Punch after the magazine's demise.

He demonstrated a command of Latin as well as French when, in response to the Vatican's support for Latin, he produced a Latin Tourist Phrase Book, which included quid pro quo: the
sterling exchange rate; ad hoc: wine not included; infra dig: terrible
accommodation; curriculum: Indian restaurant; sub rosa: rather unattractive
Italian girl; ex cathedra: ruined church.
He moved to Limpley Stoke, Bath, after a number of years in London, where he was a familiar figure cycling through heavy traffic down Fleet Street to the Punch offices, first in
Bouverie Street and then in Tudor Street.

Because of cycling, he had exceptionally strong legs. His party piece at the magazine was jumping from a standing position to the top of a table about four and a half feet high. He
also started cricket matches in the long hallway at Punch, where the ball
often did damage. He liked practical jokes and once loosened all the screws on
the editor Bill Davis's desk, so that it fell apart when Bill sat down to use
it.
He listed his hobbies as mending punctures, rehabilitating Clementi's piano works and falsifying
personal records to mystify potential biographers.
He did not get along with Alan Coren, who took over as Punch editor in 1978. Although he was a most valuable staff member, writing many unsigned pieces and editing the books
pages, Coren got rid of him in 1980. Later Coren admitted that he was never
able to find a replacement, but he never asked him to return and if he had,
Miles was too happy writing his newspaper column to have accepted.

He was married first in 1964 to Sarah Paine, a marriage dissolved in 1987, in which year he married Caroline Maynard. He is survived by his wives, and by a son and daughter from
the first marriage and a son from the second.

Miles Beresford Kington, born May 13 1941; died January 30 2008.

And another obituary notice from The Independent.

Pic above from The Independent.