A brief history of Linda Smith

I think I first heard Linda Smith on the News Quiz umpty tum years ago, where she claimed to be the YTS girl filling in. She was really in a field of her own, a female comic with a quick wit combined with a dead pan turn of phrase, and a eye for the absurd irritations of everyday life.

Her Radio 4 series ‘A brief history of timewasting’ was a surreal masterpiece, with many highlights including having her gas supplied by the English National Opera after a series of takeovers, Chris her live-in builder with his inability to commit to finishing a job, Betty the crumbling neighbour and Worra the psychotic taxi driver (“Set the controls for the heart of the sun!”).  One particularly memorable sequence had Linda dozing through a morning with Radio 4 droning in the background and waking up to random bits of Dr Raj Persaud, You and Yours and Woman’s Hour Jenny Murray with her “misery of infertility”.

I only realised on reading her obituary today that she was president of the British Humanist Society, but it doesn’t surprise me. She didn’t wear her politics on her sleeve in the same way as Jeremy Hardy or Mark Steel, but she was a passionate opponent of the lunacy of the war in Iraq as you could tell from her contributions on the subject on the News Quiz.

I will miss her.