Satirist Alan Coren dies aged 69

Mr Coren, who had been suffering from cancer, died at home in Regent's Park surrounded by his wife Anne and children Giles and Victoria.

A former editor of Punch magazine - arguably the last successful holder of that post - Mr Coren was also a prolific broadcaster, appearing regularly as a team captain on both BBC TV's Call My Bluff and Radio 4's The News Quiz.

As a writer he contributed to a wide range of publications, including the Evening Standard, the Daily Mail and a Times column which ran for almost two decades from 1988 until his final illness, and which was memorable for conferring on Cricklewood a level of celebrity hitherto unprecedented for an undistinguished north London suburb.

He took a break from his Times column for eight months in 2006 after he was struck with necrotising fascitis - also known as the flesh-eating disease - while on holiday in the south of France. In July this year he was diagnosed as suffering from lung cancer.

Victoria said: "It was all very gentle and peaceful. It is exactly how we would have wanted it to be - we just would have wanted it to be 30 years from now. We are all heartbroken because we loved him very much."

The only son of a jobbing builder and plumber, he was educated at East Barnet Grammar School and Wadham College, Oxford, where he got a first in English. After a brief period as an academic in America, he joined Punch aged 24 as assistant editor - the youngest in Punch history.

Nothing if not industrious - he would turn out 5,000 words a week, regarding it as "no sweat" - his writings of the time included a regular spoof monologue of the thoughts of Idi Amin. Amin once wrote to him inviting him to stay at his palace in Kampala: he did not go.

In 1974 he pulled off a famous stunt when, in the middle of the oil crisis, he dressed up as an Arab sheikh and visited the Stock Exchange and Downing Street in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, accompanied by a personal photographer. At the Stock Exchange he was booed and interviewed by an unsuspecting reporter from the Press Association; at Downing Street he was on the brink of being ushered in through the front door of No10 when he said he had only come to take a souvenir photograph. "But nobody stopped me and asked who I was at all." At this time Mr Coren was also rector of St Andrews University, a post he inherited from fellow comic John Cleese.

In 1978 he became the 11th editor of Punch, introducing more cartoons and more cultural writing, and fending off criticism that it was not as funny as it used to be.

He left Punch in 1987 to become a full-time writer, pausing on his way to be editor of The Listener for a year.

Mr Coren was the author of more than 20 books, including Golfing For Cats, The Bulletins Of Idi Amin, The Cricklewood Diet, A Year in Cricklewood, Toujours Cricklewood? and The Cricklewood Tapestry.

He also fathered a journalistic dynasty: his son Giles is the restaurant critic of The Times, while his daughter Victoria is a journalist, author and championship-winning poker player.

When the writer Basil Boothroyd died, Mr Coren quoted the words of Robert Benchley: "When a humorist dies, you should go somewhere that has a piano, and drink until they throw you out."

That was nearly 20 years ago, however, and as Mr Coren wrote: "Basil and I discussed it once, and he reckoned that it would be a good thing to do, especially as it was a hell of a job to find a place with a piano any more."