I was driving down the M1 the other day when I fell asleep at the wheel. It was only for a second, but it was enough to make me pull into the next services, order a strong coffee and resolve to live every day henceforth as though my hair was on fire. Tiredness kills, but when my life flashed before me, I wasn’t tired. I had been listening to Radio 4.

Linda Smith was the antidote to Radio 4 dreariness. In the few short years between her debut on the station and her death at 48 from ovarian cancer, she sparkled as the female lead in Radio 4’s three flagship comedies: The News Quiz, I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue and Just a Minute.

The militant wing of the Radio 4 audience fell in love with her, which was a surprise, because she was a lefty and they all live in Tunbridge Wells and have handlebar moustaches. It was because her brand of humour managed to be razor-sharp and cuddly at the same time.

She could be pithy (“I had absolutely no expectations of Tony Blair, and even I have been disappointed”). She could be deadpan (“People knock Asbos, but you have to bear in mind they’re the only qualification some of these kids are ever going to get”). And she could sneak in the leftiness in a long joke about teapots. She was brilliantly funny and entertaining, which, sadly, this biography is not. Warren Lakin, Smith’s devoted companion and gig-to-gig chauffeur, simply doesn’t have the charm in his writing that she had in her stand-up comedy.

Related Internet Links

• Buy the book here

Times obituary: Linda Smith

Linda Smith, comedian and president of the British Humanist Association, was born in June, 1960. She died of cancer on February 28, 2006, aged 45

Background

• Driving Miss Smith by Warren Lakin

• Radio comedian Linda Smith dies, aged 48

• Laughing to the end

• Celebrating Linda Smith

After Smith’s fractured childhood in Erith, Kent (a town of which she said, “It’s not twinned with anywhere but it does have a suicide pact with Dagenham”), Lakin takes us to the Sheffield years and the point in the 1980s at which they met as student radicals (Smith had gone to Sheffield university in 1978 to study English and drama). They started working with Sheffield Popular Theatre in 1983 – a political cabaret that toured the picket lines during the miners’ strike. (It sounds miserable, but Lakin clearly loved it – he is at his most nostalgic and verbose in this part of the book.)

Then came Smith’s trio, The Chuffinnelles, which cracked the Edinburgh festival and “became the most talked about women’s comedy group of late1980s Britain”. I bet they were funny, but Lakin’s radicalism sort of kills it. Describing a Women at Work sketch by the trio, he says: “There was nothing nostalgic about it. It was very hard-hitting, striking a blow for health and safety and conditions for women in the workplace.”

It’s a blessed relief to reach the Radio 4 years, where Smith clearly softens, even if Lakin doesn’t (he’s even snootier about Radio 4 audiences than I was earlier). But he doesn’t include enough of her jokes – they are all in I Think the Nurses Are Stealing My Clothes: The Very Best of Linda Smith (the other, much better book published since her death). Instead, Lakin divides his book into sections that are meant to cast an amusing light on her life: a chapter on her addiction to American cable television, another describing the couple’s favourite bits of coastline, another on what constituted the perfect weekend in London. In her hands, we would have been crying with laughter. In those of her vegetarian other half, it’s as tedious as tofu.

In the final chapters, Lakin lets Smith do more of the talking, quoting extensively from her interviews with Bel Mooney and Libby Purves about her humanism. In 2004, less than two years before she died, Smith was made president of the British Humanist Association, and was recognised by many as much for her philosophical intellect as for her humour. Already a name in Radio 4 households, she was also becoming a television personality. She was the next Victoria Wood, and this biography, while full of Lakin’s love for her, doesn’t really capture that at all.

DRIVING MISS SMITH

by Warren Lakin (Hodder £18.99 pp352)

Available at the Books First price of £17.09 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585 and timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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