Miles Beresford Kington was a British journalist, musician and broadcaster. He is also credited with the invention of Franglais, a fictional language, made up of French and English.
Inspired particularly by the American humourist S. J. Perelman, Kington began his writing career at the satirical magazine Punch, where he spent some 15 years. It was during this time, in the late 1970s, that he began writing his Franglais columns, written in a comical mixture of English and French. These short sketches purported to be a study course taking as their raison d'être that "les Français ne parlent pas le O-level français". They were later published as a series of books. During the 1980s he presented Steam Days, an informative programme about Britain's railways. He also presented one episode, "Three Miles High", in the first series of the BBC's Great Railway Journeys, travelling through parts of Peru and Bolivia. Taught the piano from the age of seven, Kington discovered when he fell in love with jazz during adolescence that being able to read music meant he felt unable to improvise; he therefore took up the trombone. At Oxford he found that several fellow undergraduates played better, so he switched to the double bass when someone pointed out the shortage of bass players at the University. Kington was for many years a member of the cabaret quartet Instant Sunshine. To his regret, he only played in a jazz group for a brief period in 1962 during a summer job in Spain, where he ran into the British politicianEnoch Powell, apparently looking somewhat displeased. Meeting Powell years later at a Punch meal and reminding him of their previous meeting, he was amused by Powell's comment: "I never forgot a face". Kington moved away from London in the 1980s, remarried, and worked from his home in the village of Limpley Stoke, near Bath. He wrote a humorous column for The Independent, which he joined in 1987 after six years at The Times. He also wrote a similar column for The Oldie. Regular topics for his columns included:
Answers to a Christmas quiz that was never printed
"Albanian Proverbs" which appear profound at first glance, but are actually meaningless
Letters concerning a recently deceased celebrity's supposed love of cricket
He also satirised Bertrand Russell à la Punch in "Bertrand's Mind Wins over Mater", in Welcome to Kington: Includes All the Pieces You Cut Out From The Independent and Lost. In addition, Kington wrote two stage plays. Waiting for Stoppard, a good-natured pastiche of early Tom Stoppard plays and simultaneously a convoluted farce involving the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, was seen at the Bristol New Vic, Southwark Playhouse and other venues in 1995. The following year came The Death of Tchaikovsky – a Sherlock Holmes Mystery, in which Kington appeared in person at the Edinburgh Festival.
Death and legacy
Kington died at his home in Limpley Stoke, near Bath, after a short illness, having just filed his final copy for the Independent. He had suffered from pancreatic cancer. In October 2008, "How Shall I tell the Dog?", written by him about events after receiving his terminal diagnosis, was serialised by BBC Radio Four, featuring Michael Palin as Kington. A quotation frequently attributed to him is: "Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad." A number of Kington’s out-of-print books were republished in 2015 and 2016 by the digital-only publisher Canelo. He is commemorated by a memorial bench, located alongside the Kennet and Avon Canal, near Blackberry Lane, Conkwell. It bears a plaque, with the inscription:
