Remembering Freud
08:48, Friday, 17 April 2009
Some British cultural figures - entertainers, intellectuals, writers - have special meaning for Radio 4 listeners. We believe they're in some way ours. was one. Clement Freud is another. And this makes us miss them more when they go. So how do you mark the passing of an authentic Radio 4 legend? Yesterday we published Mark Damazer's tribute to the man here on the blog while others were putting together their own.
The Guardian's brilliant '' soaked up way too much of my time yesterday afternoon. Pure gold - and a lovely use of the medium. Ö÷²¥´óÐã news put some creative effort in and produced a nice from library pictures and sound: it's very moving. My own small tribute was to run off to the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's picture library (which, for some reason, is called 'Elvis') and gather some pictures from Freud's career. I've put them (you can also view them as a ). The Today Programme interviewed Stephen Fry - one of those Radio 4 legends in his own right, if you ask me. Here's the interview:
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All the papers have printed formal obits in today's editions: , , and The , for example. But only The NME (in its ) concentrated on Sir Clement's 1973 contribution to . The Racing Post, of course, ran with in the Seventies and there's a lovely pic of Freud in his racing silk (he won, by the way).
The newspapers' web sites made use of their one-day lead on the prints to put up some really interesting material about Sir Clement during Thursday. The Telegraph ran a recording of during the taping of a 2006 podcast. I'm linking to it because the paper asserts that it might be the funniest joke ever told (it is quite rude, though, so click with caution). The same paper ran a nice . Jemima Kiss in The Guardian to Freud's death, quoting Mark Damazer's blog post.
The Times made really good use of its clever archive system to reproduce stories about Freud from , , and : fascinating glimpses of what suddenly seems like a very distant past. Also in The Times, Libby Purves provides a of the man: "By chance I spoke to him on the phone this week: he seemed mellow and we laughed. I'm glad to have known him". And there's a from last year by Freud himself - about making a will.
Perhaps the most moving response to Sir Clement's death, though, came from the massed voices of Twitter. A will yield thousands of tweets from Freud fans like these:
- Sad about the loss of Clement Freud - always one of the most erudite, laconic and deeply amusing voices on Radio 4. RIP. ().
- Very sad to hear about Clement Freud. He was sharp as a tack & always had me laughing on Just A Minute. So soon after Humph too... ().
- Maybe we should have a Twitter game of Just A Minute in honour of Clement Freud? ().
- Saddened by the news of Sir Clement Freud's passing. Filling the iPod with episodes of Just A Minute in remembrance. Godspeed Sir Clement. ().
There's no evidence that Clement Freud meant any less to the wired generation that tweets its feelings for the world to read than it did to his own. As Mark Damazer said yesterday, he will be missed.
Comment number 1.
At 18th Apr 2009, dennisjunior1 wrote:My heartfelt condolences to Clement Freud friends and family (others that knew of his good work)....
~Dennis Junior~
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