Cigarettes and Cricklewood - these were the two enduring passions of writer and broadcaster Alan Coren, who died from lung cancer at his home on Thursday night, aged 69.

The former may have been his undoing, but the latter helped to turn him into one of the funniest writers of his generation.

Known by readers as the Sage of Cricklewood, Coren almost did for his childhood home what the Brontes did for Haworth, publishing six collected works about the area over the past 20 years.

But this lesser-known pocket of north London was not a broad enough canvass to contain the full brunt of Coren's wit, familiar to millions from his weekly column in The Times and regular appearances on BBC Radio Four's The News Quiz and the BBC's Call My Bluff.

From pregnant goldfish to necrotising fascilitis, toenail clippers to imaginary rantings of Idi Amin, no topic was too mundane, sensitive or silly to escape Coren's tongue unscathed.

"He has a mind like a loom," the Telegraph's radio critic Gillian Reynolds once declared.

"It shuttles along making tapestry from the dusty wall of life, weaving in a patch of blue here, a thread of red there."

The only son of a jobbing builder and plumber, Coren attributed his literary prowess to an English teacher at East Barnet School, who apparently persuaded him to try for a place at Oxford.

Here, he achieved a First and went on to gain a PhD in English literature from the University of California, before casting aside academia - to the retrospective relief of his fans - to pursue his literary ambitions.

Coren joined Punch magazine aged 24 as the youngest assistant editor in Punch history. He made his mark churning out 5,000 words a week while engaging in ridiculous escapades to try to revive a falling circulation - such as dressing up as an Arab sheikh during an oil crisis in 1974 and visiting Downing Street in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce.

He was on the brink of being ushered into Number 10 when he explained that he had only come to take a souvenir photograph.

"But nobody stopped me and asked who I was at all," he said.

Coren became the 11th editor of Punch in 1978, introducing more cartoons and more cultural writing, before leaving the dying magazine nine years later to become a full-time writer - pausing en route to be editor of The Listener for a year.

After that, Coren has been a columnist for The Times, The Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday and The Sunday Express, and the author of more than 20 books, including Golfing For Cats (adorned with a Swastika after Coren discovered that the best-selling books were about cats, golfing and the Nazis), The Bulletins Of Idi Amin and six collections of comic essays about Cricklewood.

He has also contributed regularly to The Observer, Atlantic Monthly and the Spectator, and managed to father a small journalistic dynasty in the meantime: his son Giles is the restaurant critic of The Times, while his daughter Victoria is a journalist, author and championship-winning poker player.

Coren's column for The Times ran for almost two decades from 1988 until 2007, and became renowned for conferring on both Mrs Coren' and Cricklewood a level of celebrity hitherto unknown by a columnist spouse and Barnet borough subsect.

The Times editor Robert Thomson, paying tribute to Coren last week, said: "Alan Coren has been a witty and thoughtful tour guide through life.

"Times readers found great inspiration in his irreverence and insight that will be cherished and rediscovered in decades to come."

But Coren is perhaps best known for his incredible 32-year stint on Radio Four, where he was known as the 'heartbeat' of The News Quiz. Trampling over taboos with a charm that defied political correctness, in one episode he quipped: "I don't know anything about land mines or Princess Di, but I do know you'd be mad to poke either of them."

Coren died at his home on Thursday, October 18, surrounded by his family: his wife, Anne, and his children Giles and Victoria. His funeral will take place at Hampstead Cemetery next week.

His son Giles said: "It's called Hampstead Cemetery, but it's in what my dad always called Cricklewood, and that's what counts."

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