The week 'Punch' really had kick

I was listening to the highly entertaining Postcard from Gotham on Radio 4 on Saturday and heard Christopher Hitchens launch into a funny story about Alan Coren and first of all, as a precaution, ask Joe Queenan, the (highly entertaining) host, if he had ever heard of Alan Coren.

"No," said Joe Queenan.

This, naturally, did not prevent Hitchens from telling the story, but it made me reflect that having been editor of Punch does not lead to automatic fame.

For instance, Abraham Lincoln was shot dead during a performance of a play written by an editor of Punch, but I would wager a few quid that you couldn't remember the author's name. In the case of Malcolm Muggeridge, his resignation over a cartoon about Churchill was the only famous moment in his tenure. In the case of his successor, Bernard Hollowood, it led to an obscurity that he already occupied. In the case of William Davis, it led to the odd fate of establishing a little empire of travel magazines such as British Airway's very own High Life, or rather, William Davis's very own High Life. In the case of Alan Coren, it led to lots of people trying to ring him up last week to ask his advice on what Punch should be all about ...

This was because it was announced that a new buyer intends to revive the magazine. Yes, the corpse of the old humorous gent with the hooked nose is to be revived, given an injection of young men's blood and set walking at night to haunt the news-stands of this country again. So, of course, people rang up ex-editor Alan Coren, to ask him what a humorous magazine should be about; and, if Auberon Waugh in the Spectator is to be believed, Alan said that it should be funny from cover to cover.

True as far as it goes, but it is a bit like a football manager saying that a side should ideally score lots of goals or a general saying that every soldier in his army should be armed. In any case, as Waugh pointed out, there is something vaguely dispiriting about a magazine that sets out to be nothing but funny. That must be one of the reasons that you never see anyone laughing while reading Viz (the other reason is that nobody over the age of about 15 has eyesight good enough to read the print size in Viz).

You may have detected a certain bitterness creeping in here. Bitterness that nobody ever rang me up to ask me how Punch should be run. And you are right. For I, too, edited Punch. Yes, I did. Not for long. Only for a week. But I did. And I may say that during my week's tenure of the magazine I made no effort to make the magazine funny from cover to cover. No, sir.

The only reason that I was editing the magazine in the first place was that William Davis, the editor, was away and so was the then deputy editor, Alan Coren, and my guiding light in their absence was not to be funny from cover to cover but to get in as much stuff as I could that Davis would not allow in the magazine.

My prime concern was to publish a piece written for me by Paul Desmond, the witty saxophonist with the Dave Brubeck Quartet, who had recently come to a Punch Lunch and, in an unsober moment, promised to write the first instalment of his autobiography.

"I've promised to do it for Playboy," he told me, "and I've promised to do it for Esquire and I think, though I'm not sure, that I've promised to do it for Downbeat, so I don't see why I shouldn't promise to do it for you, too."

By dint of persistent badgering and cajoling and love letters, I finally got a piece out of him (he rang me up at midnight to read it to me over the phone, audibly swaying) and very funny it was, too, being an account of a day in the life of the Brubeck Quartet in the hick back regions of Orange County, New Jersey. The only problem was how to get it in Punch, and that was solved by Davis's and Coren's miraculous absence.

"What is all this rubbish about jazz and New Jersey doing in Punch?" stormed Davis on his return, angrily waving what I and many people still think is the funniest piece ever written by a practising jazz musician. "Right, Kington - that's the last time I ever leave you in charge!"

Tomorrow - why I think Richard Ingrams should be editor of 'Punch'.