Linda Smith is dead.
I saw her only once, when she was unkown, as the cabaret act at a Socialist Outlook conference in the 1980’s. A small and intimate setting and she was simply one of the funniest people I’d ever seen in my life. I couldn’t believe it when I subsequently saw her on afternoon TV some 10 years later. She was terrific on The News Quiz, especially, for some reason, when Alan Coren was on too. Only, in my opinion, A Brief History of Time Wasting was not so good, but even that I’m pleased to have a bunch of tapes of. A nice tribute by Jeremy Hardy here. Obit here.
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Jasper Milvain 03.01.06 at 12:10 pm
Jeremy Hardy also wrote the Guardian‘s obituary.
bondbloke 03.01.06 at 12:40 pm
A very great and a very sad loss to the world of comedy…
dave heasman 03.01.06 at 1:17 pm
Mark Steel wrote the Indy’s and it’s free
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article348378.ece
for now
nick s 03.01.06 at 3:27 pm
Her apprenticeship for the News Quiz, if you can call it that, was at R5’s ‘The Treatment’, which went under the radar for those who considered the station a bit of a mongrel. She was consistently brilliant.
Kieran Healy 03.01.06 at 4:20 pm
How sad. I listen to reruns of the News Quiz on BBC7, and she was almost always the best thing about it.
Kieran Healy 03.01.06 at 4:25 pm
From the Indo obituary:
When a student yelled, “Show us yer tits”, she retorted sweetly, “Ah, is it time for a breast feed” – resulting in a deservedly humiliated student.
She seemed to have that kind of wit to burn.
aretino 03.01.06 at 6:48 pm
Here I was thinking you meant the former Washington State congresswoman.
Chris Williams 03.02.06 at 6:45 am
If only – I’d kill a former Washington State congresswoman to have the chance of seeing Linda Smith again (“Leicester. It’s all hunting round here, isn’t it? The Quorn Hunt. Those toffs’ll chase anything – they’ll be after the tofu next”).
More here:
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,1721225,00.html
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