Linda Smith has died

Hold up! Before you read on, please read this...
This post was published more than 12 years ago
I keep old posts on the site because I often enjoy reading old content on other people's sites. It can be interesting to see how views have changed over time: for example, how my strident teenage views have, to put it mildly, mellowed.
I'm not a believer in brushing the past under the carpet. I've written some offensive rubbish on here in the past: deleting it and pretending it never happened doesn't change that. I hope that stumbling across something that's 12 years old won't offend anyone anew, because I hope that people can understand that what I thought and felt and wrote about then is probably very different to what I think and feel and wrote about now. It's a relic of an (albeit recent) bygone era.
So, given the age of this post, please bear in mind:
- My views may well have changed in the last 12 years. I have written some very silly things over the years, many of which I find utterly cringeworthy today.
- This post might use words or language in ways which I would now consider highly inappropriate, offensive, embarrassing, or all three.
- Factual information might be outdated.
- Links might be broken, and embedded material might not appear properly.
Okay. Consider yourself duly warned. Read on...
Comedian Linda Smith has died from ovarian cancer, aged 48.
Linda was somebody I, along with many others, liked a lot. She was one of that rare breed of comedian that can always make you smile, regardless of what mood you’re in, or however much you don’t want to. I loved listening to her on The News Quiz, Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, Just a Minute, and watching her appearances on the excellent QI, as well has her not infrequent appearances on Question Time, where she always had interesting points to make – as always, deadly serious but delivered in a comic way.
In his tribute, Jeremy Hardy tells how Linda chose not to tell many people about her cancer, not wanting to be seen as ‘that comedian with cancer’, but rather just ‘that great comedian’. And she truly was great.
There are formal obituaries on the BBC website, and also at MediaGuardian.
She will be sadly missed.
This 833rd post was filed under: Media, News and Comment.