Witty and imaginative newspaper columnist who taught his readers ‘Franglais’

Miles Kington, who died on 30 January, 2008, aged 66, was a prolific comic writer who not only constructed his own comic language, but also his own world in which the boundaries between fact and pure invention were never clear.

His last book, Someone Like Me (2005), contained so many events that were either borrowed from other people’s lives or simply made up that it was described as "perhaps the most unreliable memoir of childhood ever written".

In this, his daily columns for The Times and Independent and the Let’s Parler Franglais! series – a satire of the French taught in English schools first conceived for Punch magazine – he exhibited his trademark style, mixing day-to-day observation with an imaginative surreality and never-failing eloquence.

Miles Beresford Kington was born on 13 May, 1941, in Northern Ireland, where his father was serving with the British Army. After the war he was raised in Wrexham, where his father had returned to run a brewery, before being educated at Trinity College in Glenalmond, Perthshire, and the college of the same name at Oxford.

After graduating he combined his two main passions, writing and jazz, by producing freelance reviews for The Times. In 1967 he joined the satirical magazine Punch where he formed a long-running rivalry with fellow-homourist and future editor Alan Coren.

As well as serving as literary editor, he began writing Let's Parler Franglais!, a spoof language course which mangled together the two languages because "Les Français ne parlent pas le O-Level Français" ("The French do not speak O-Level French").

The columns, which promised "Teach yourself dans dix minutes – c’est un walk-over", were published in a series of books in the 1980s and inspired a television series. Kington also demonstrated his skill as a comic linguist in 1977 when he translated the Alphonse Allais’ holorime poems in which every word in each line rhymes, a form he delighted in dabbling with himself.

In 1980 he was offered a presenting job on the BBC series Great Railway Journeys of the World. When he asked Mr Coren for time off to make the journey along the world’s highest railway in Peru, he was persuaded instead to go freelance. "I think that was a very elegant way of firing me," said Mr Kington.

Without a permanent income, he set his sights on a regular humour column in The Times. Despite his proposal being initially rejected, he sent in an unsolicited piece every single day for two weeks until the paper’s editor Harold Evans relented and granted his wish.

During his five years with The Times and then The Independent, which he joined in 1987 and continued to write for until his death, he was noted for the volume of work he produced. Only the various Beachcomber’s in the Daily Express have matched his feat of producing a daily comic piece for such a continuous period of time.

Miles Kington columns would generally begin with some everyday occurrence or observation and veer off with a wanton freeform. Fictional trials and meetings between deities would be frequently reported on and useless facts and advice would be disseminated. His love of language was evident in poems, neoglisms, palindromes and ‘translations’ of made-up foreign proverbs and idioms.

In many ways his writing style reflected his life’s hobbies, bearing the freestyle hallmarks of jazz and the rambling, revealing nature of a train journey. He feigned bafflement when it came to sport or indeed any form of exercise, but was in fact a keen cyclist and cricketer, and poured scorn on the corrupt and vacuous celebrities and politicians of the day with great wit.

His columns were published in book form several times and he edited a book on jazz and a Punch anthology, presented on the radio and television, wrote regularly in The Oldie, put together shows for the Edinburgh Fringe and penned two stage plays. He also played double bass with cabaret group Instant Sunshine for 26 years.

He was married twice, to Sarah Paine (between 1964 and 1987) with whom he had a son and a daughter, and Caroline Maynard (1987 until his death) with whom he had a son. Despite suffering from pancreatic cancer, he continued to write for The Independent, filing his last column two days before his death, discussing his confusion about international sporting schedules.

© Photo courtesy of JLA speaker bureau (www.jla.co.uk)