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Topic: Linda

Message 1 / 3
Dean BedfordNov 10, 2007
 

 
This from today's Sunday Times

Laughing to the end
Linda Smith’s lover tells how the popular comedienne kept joking right
up till her untimely death
Ann McFerran
Only days before Linda Smith died from ovarian cancer, a gang of her
best friends and family surrounded her bed, wanting to spend every last
second with the woman Radio 4 listeners voted the wittiest living person.
And witty she was, to her very last breath. As Linda drifted in and out
of consciousness, her fellow comedian Mark Steel noticed Joan Collins on
the television. “I was on a chat show with Joan Collins,” he told fellow
comedian Andy Hamilton. “How old is she?” Hamilton asked. “I think she
must be close to 75,” replied Steel. From beneath the pile of bedclothes
a little voice piped up: “How much is that in human years?”
Linda Smith was days from death but her wit shone through to the end.
And it’s these bruising one-liners that her partner of 23 years, Warren
Lakin says, he misses more than anything else. “She’d come out with
these scorchingly funny things several times a day.”
Veteran of Radio 4 programmes such as The News Quiz and I’m Sorry I
Haven’t a Clue, Linda Smith had become a national treasure when she died
in February 2006. The satirist of everything which was pretentious or
sentimental, Linda Smith was, Lakin says “an intensely private person
who chose not to make a show of her illness. She didn’t want her cancer
to get the upper hand”.
Her friend and co-panellist of The News Quiz Jeremy Hardy adds, “Had she
decided to write about her cancer she’d have set an unattainable
standard for the genre. But she hated her cancer and didn’t want to give
it the publicity.”
On the day Linda died all her old comedian friends came to visit and
toasted her with her favourite whiskey. She died at 10pm, with Warren
and her sister Barbara by her side, with her three wishes intact: “She
died at home; she died without pain; and she died with her hair.” She
was 48 years old.
In his tender memoir of their times together, Driving Miss Smith,
published by Hodder and Stoughton, Lakin recalls Linda’s long blonde
hair when they first met in 1983, in the early days of the stand-up
comedy circuit. “She was several inches taller than me – she was 5ft 10;
I was 5ft 6. We talked long into the night about everything, jazz,
theatre, comedy. She was very funny and a great storyteller but she
never wanted to upstage people. She was also a very good listener, and I
could probably go on about myself. I thought she was completely perfect.
Within a very short time, we were in love. Perhaps we looked like the
odd couple but all I know is she was gorgeous and she was fantastic
company.”
If Warren Lakin makes Linda sound ideal, he was also acutely aware that
her early life was far from idyllic. “She was born in a maisonette with
an outside toilet in Erith in Kent, a town, she’d said, ‘which isn’t
twinned with anywhere but it does have a suicide pact with Dagenham’.”
Her mum was a factory worker; her father worked on the railways. Lakin
says: “Linda was a daddy’s girl. He was very intelligent, clever and
witty; he liked comedy; he liked Pete and Dud. But her father was a
Jekyll and Hyde character.” He was also an abusive alcoholic and her
mother was on the receiving end. On the day of Linda’s parents’ 25th
wedding anniversary, her father left for work and never returned. Lakin
recalls: “When I met Linda she was very traumatised by the dreadful rows
which had gone on for years. I’m quite proud of the fact that in our 23
years together we never rowed once.”
Not long afterwards Lakin went with Linda to track her father down to
south London. “A woman opened the door and it was obvious Linda’s father
was doing more than just lodge there. From that moment on, if anyone
asked about her father, Linda would reply that he was dead. And to her,
I suppose he was.”
Like so many kings and queens of comedy Linda’s comic artistry may have
provided an escape from her unhappy past. The roots of her comedy also
surely owe something to her background, and how, like Victoria Wood, she
found humour in the prosaic. As Lakin says: “Linda never had to work at
anything; she was like one of those posh well-educated performers like
Stephen Fry. She had a natural panache. She used to say that her family
came from that bit of London known as ‘Greater’ but which should, more
accurately, be known as ‘Lesser’ London. Where she came from was not the
kind of place which inspired you to write poetry.”
Throughout the 1980s Linda Smith served her time on the comedy circuit,
performing a memorable impersonation of Margaret Thatcher, complete with
twinset and pearls, for miners’ strike audiences. She broke into radio
in the late 1990s, holding her own alongside established wits such as
Alan Coren. For Lakin the new breed of comedians such as Paul Merton and
Jeremy Hardy made Linda’s radio popularity possible.
Audiences and fellow panellists adored her brilliant comic riffs. Lakin
says one of his great favourites was Linda on the subject of weapons of
mass destruction. “I do sympathise with Bush and Blair trying to find
WMDs,” she said. “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.”
Linda Smith and Warren Lakin’s days together were often taken up with
eccentric expeditions, whether it was driving to some gig, frantically
late, because they’d failed to include the time it took to drive from
east to west London in their journey’s timing; they lived in Stratford
East before it became fashionable. Or their quest to find the perfect
crab sandwich which took them on the miniature Romney, Hythe and
Dymchurch railway, to Dungeness, where Linda’s ashes were finally
scattered.
Lakin also remembers the hundreds of times he’d bring her a cup of tea
after she’d been gardening for hours. “Where’s the time gone?” she’d
say. But how would she know? She always refused to wear a watch. For
many years, Linda Smith escaped time. Then it caught her, cruelly, with
cancer. It is Lakin’s huge loss – and ours, too. “She was just the
funniest woman I know,” he says. “I miss everything about her.”

 
<<<<   1452   >>>>

Topic: Re: Linda

Message 2 / 3
Emile JumeanNov 11, 2007
 

 
What a wonderful article that was. I miss Linda's humour so much. What
a waste to be taken by cancer at such an early age.

Emile

 
<<<<   1466   >>>>

Topic: Re: Linda

Message 3 / 3
Dean BedfordNov 14, 2007
 

 
On Monday, November 12, 2007, at 08:17 AM, Emile Jumean wrote:

> What a wonderful article that was. I miss Linda's humour so much. What
> a waste to be taken by cancer at such an early age.
>
> Emile

it's terribly sad isn't. I'm looking forward to the book Warren Lakin is
writing.