More About Linda Smith

For those of my millions of readers outside the broadcast range of BBC Radio 4, who therefore won't fully grasp the tragedy of her too early loss, I reproduce here appreciations from some of her friends and colleagues, as published in Thursday's Guardian, hoping you may gain some insight into the extraordinary wit, warmth and genius which was Linda Smith.



'She was the funniest woman I've ever known'

This week the much-loved comedian Linda Smith died, aged 48. Her colleague on Radio 4's News Quiz, Simon Hoggart, recalls her 'gorgeous ambles down comedy lane'

Interviews by Saleem Vaillancourt
Thursday March 2, 2006
The Guardian



Cancer is the most evil of all illnesses, because it constantly offers false hope to the sufferer and to their family. The latest round of chemo has really caught it this time, they say ... She's certainly in remission, and the steroids seem to be helping ... Then there comes a point when everybody finds out that the end is horribly near. Last Friday, Jeremy Hardy, Linda's close friend, who was in the next room when she died, emailed to say that she seemed "to be getting pretty fed up, so I think her tremendous spirit is finally waning". She died three days later.

When someone like Linda leaves, they are never quite gone. It's like being an amputee, still getting pains in a missing leg. Even yesterday I found myself thinking, that's a great story - I hope Linda's on the panel this week. It was the briefest imaginable moment, bringing a short, sharp stab of pain.

Some people have expressed mild surprise at the amount of coverage Radio 4 devoted to her death this Tuesday (and we are doing a special tribute to her in place of the News Quiz tomorrow night, repeated at lunchtime on Saturday). But I think it was right to give her that time. To Radio 4 listeners, she was family. It hurt people at home. It brought people up with a juddering start. It came, as I know from my own phone and emails, as a huge surprise to hundreds of thousands of her fans who had no idea she was even ill. She had tried to keep it a secret, had begged her friends not to mention it, and wanted to carry on as if it were no more than a minor nuisance that could be ignored by the simple force of will.

People constantly asked me why she wasn't on the show. Had she been barred? Bar her? We'd have had her on every week if we could. Had her occupying two places, if she could.

She first came on to the News Quiz in 1998, and was extremely nervous, as comedians often are. For journalists the show is an extra - it might be fun, it might be an embarrassment, but it doesn't really matter. We'll still get paid. But for comedians it's a vital opportunity, the hope for a bigger national audience, and a life distant from the jeering, pissed crowds of the comedy clubs. She had prepared routines about the stories of the week, and that can sound stiff and even dreary, but even in the earliest days it never did in her mouth. Soon she gained in confidence and we knew that every time she opened her mouth, what would emerge would be a wonderful comedy riff, with jokes added to the side like curlicues, stray thoughts sprayed on to the main theme like graffiti. Andy Hamilton, another News Quiz regular, said yesterday that, now and again, he would wonder if she needed help - an extra line to bounce off - but she never did. That pause was always for effect.

Being chairman of the News Quiz, as I am, is like being umpire at a singles final at Wimbledon. You have the best seat in the house, you don't have to hit a ball yourself, and at the end somebody pays you. One of the greatest joys of the job is hearing the material that will never be broadcast, because there is no way the producer can fit an 80-minute recording into a 29-minute slot. Linda was brilliant at these gorgeous, time-wasting ambles down comedy lane. She used to have this fantasy that whoever was sitting next to her was in an old folks' home. "Isn't he marvellous?" she'd say, turning to Alan Coren, or Jeremy, or whoever it was. "All his own teeth! And her daughter, she comes every fortnight, from Stockport. It's two buses, you know." Then louder, "No, I'm sure the nurses aren't stealing your clothes."

She was very leftwing but wore it lightly, and never consulted some ideological rule book in her head. (She claimed never to have joined anything since the Tufty Club.) She had done many benefits for the striking miners back in the mid-80s, and loved the story about the pickets who had built a snowman, only to see a police Land Rover deliberately smash into it. "Next day they built another snowman, and exactly the same thing happened. What the police didn't know was they had built this one round a cast- iron bollard."

So many wonderful lines. "People knock Asbos, but you have to bear in mind they're the only qualification some of these kids are ever going to get." "I had absolutely no expectations of Tony Blair, and even I have been disappointed."

We always said that she was without malice, and she was, for people she knew and liked. And, truth be known, even people she knew and didn't like. Politicians were an exception, though I used to get the odd message from cabinet ministers, saying that they loved her "whatever she said about them". Which could be rude. "David Mellor, the thinking woman's fat, ugly bastard. The last woman to run her fingers through his hair was the nit nurse." She could build up slowly: you thought she was in gentle, ameliorative mood: "I do sympathise with Bush and Blair trying to find WMDs. I'm like that with my scissors. I put them down, then I search all over the house, and I never find them. Of course, I do know that my scissors exist."

As I've said for tomorrow's tribute, whenever I told the studio audience that Linda was on the panel, there was a sigh, a ripple of pleasure that wafted up to the stage. They loved her. We loved her. We were nominated for best political comedy some years ago at a Channel 4 bash, and she appeared on screen, and announced that "Simon Hoggart was the best chairman we could possibly have" - nicely timed pause - "in his price range". I cherished that.

We will miss her more than I can say. She was the funniest woman I've ever known, and one of the nicest people I have ever met. She was a humanist, so we can't wish her in a better place. In any case, she could not have imagined a better place than on a stage or with her friends, or at home with her partner, Warren Lakin. But we can say thank you. The missing limb will hurt for a very long time ·

Dear Linda ... fellow comedians pay tribute

Mark Steel
Comedian

She was so good at relating anecdotes about other people. There was one that every time I think about the way she said it, it makes me cry. She said she was at a cafe, and there were two young mums sitting at the next table. They both had kids, young children in pushchairs. One of them was talking to the other, but she stopped and looked at her child, who was slouching, and said: "Oi, sit up, you cunt." And then just carried on.

There's [another anecdote] which I think is very Linda-ish, because it's so English. It explains why she never joined any group on the left, possibly. She was talking about a friend's parents, who were in the communist party. The morning that Russia invaded Czechoslovakia it was all over the news, and there was despair because no one knew how to deal with it.

And Linda remembered that this friend's mum got up and said, "Oh well, why don't we all have a nice cup of tea and see what it says in the Morning Star."

Simon Nicholls
Former News Quiz producer

Linda was very good at being very daft and silly about really serious stuff. She referred to Tony Blair, said to be in cahoots with Bush, "as a girl in a horror film". There was a Blunkett question on the quiz, when he was home secretary, and it was a serious story, but she'd start it with this line that she had caught Blunkett going through her bins that week and having to tell him to sod off.

She was very good at thinking about her performance. I was quite a bit younger than her, and it was almost like hearing your mother telling people off. She wasn't a female comic in the way many female comics went on about boyfriends and girly stuff ... instead she went off on daft tangents.

One time, recording in Southsea at the Theatre Royal, there was a question about Charles and Camilla and whether it would be legal for them to marry. She referred to Charles and Camilla as Rod Hull and Emu. So Armando [Iannucci] asked, which one is which? And she said, "Clearly, the one that looks like Rod Hull is Rod Hull, and the one that looks like Emu is Emu."

Sandy Toksvig
Comedian

Linda was the funniest woman I've met. What was wonderful was that what she said seemed conversational - it didn't seem as though it was a set joke. And along with that, she was immensely modest about her skills. On one occasion we were on the same side, on News Quiz, which was rare because women are never allowed to be funny together ... we were allowed to work together because she transcended being thought of as a funny woman: she was just thought of as a funny person.

Alan Coren
Writer and broadcaster

When stand-up [comedy became popular], women were the butt of jokes of male comics, so women had to have their own stick - the way men smelled in bed, the crap of living with a partner. Linda never did any of that. Linda was as good as any man at jokes that weren't gender based or socio-based. She also had this very special thing which is rare among comics, which was that she could draw out of every single source of culture. She used really crap children's television adverts or Dostoevsky. Her comedy wasn't linear, it was lateral, and this is really very rare.

The important thing to say about her is that she was generous, and she wasn't generous with just me, but generous with [stand-up] professionals, with everyone. She would look across the studio and see that she knew what you were doing, and had punch lines in her head that were better than yours, but she wouldn't use them, she would let you do your own joke. And the few times when the impulse to tell the joke came out first, before she could stop it, she would apologise afterwards. She was a very good woman.