It wasn’t that Alan Coren – who died a year ago on October 18 – was funny, but that he was so funny for more than 40 years. Off the top of my head, I can think of only one British print humorist with the same consistency – Miles Kington, who also wrote for The Times, and also died far too soon, and Kington didn’t have the same breadth of humour. He was funny mainly on the printed page; Coren was funny on radio, too, stream-of-consciousness funny, as decades of listeners to The News Quiz knew and relished.

When he went off on one, charging away in a million directions but always coming back to his original point, the nation held its breath until, blue in the face, it exploded in mirth, sobbing, “Stop, please stop, I can’t take it any more,” wiping eyes and clutching aching sides.

This week those unaware of Coren’s work or keen to be reminded of it are in for a double treat. The Book of the Week (Radio 4, 9.45am) is Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks: The Essential Alan Coren, a best-of from Coren’s enormous written output compiled by his children, Giles and Victoria. The tele-friendly couple have set themselves an enormous task. How do you distil a lifetime of wit into a single volume? You can’t, of course, and many a fan is likely to find a particularly cherished excerpt missing as the Coren offspring, in the words of Paul Simon’s The Dangling Conversations, “note our place with bookmarkers that measure what we’ve lost”.

Then, on Tuesday, Coren’s friend and fellow broadcaster Christopher Matthew presents a wider picture of the man in Remembering Alan (Radio 4, 11.30am). He goes back to Coren’s school days (memories here from the journalist Jeffrey Cloves), then on through Oxford University (Jon Rayman, lawyer and fellow graduate), his time as a visiting Harkness Fellow in the US (Bob Folkenflik, Professor of English at the University of California at Irvine) and into the real world of earning a living as a remarkably successful editor of Punch (Michael Bywater and Susan Jeffreys), newspaper columnist (the former Fleet Street editor Eve Pollard) and, let us not forget, TV face for many years (Linda Agran, producer and, by a happy coincidence, Coren’s cousin).

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