Broadcaster Levin dies at age 75

Levin wrote a column for The Times for 26 years

Broadcaster Bernard Levin, one of the UK's most respected journalists and columnists, has died at the age of 75.

He died on Saturday, after fighting a long battle with Alzheimer's.

Levin was famous for his Times column between 1971 and 1997, and also wrote for the Spectator, Daily Mail and the Daily Express.

In the 1960s he was a regular on the satirical BBC TV show That Was the Week That Was, where his prickly style often drew criticism.

Click here to tell us what you thought of Bernard Levin

That Was the Week That Was broke new ground for the world of TV comedy. It featured David Frost, who has gone on to become an established face on BBC TV.

On one occasion on the show a lady astrologer squirted Levin in the face with a lemon, while the literary critic Wolf Mankowitz hoped that Levin would "drop dead" in front of TV viewers.

During another edition of the programme, he gave a savage review of a play starring actress Agnes Bernelle.

'Savage and clever'

The following week Ms Bernelle's husband, Desmond Leslie, arrived at the studio and punched Mr Levin in the face in front of a TV audience of 11 million people.

Robert Thomson, editor of The Times, said: "Bernard Levin was one of the most gifted and influential columnists to write for The Times.

"The beauty of his language and originality of his thought ensured that he had an enthusiastic audience far beyond the borders of Britain."

During the 1980s, Levin coined the widely-used phrase "the Nanny State" to express his increasing frustration at what he felt was the erosion of our human rights disguised as benevolent government.

He also controversially questioned putting ageing Nazi war criminals on trial.

That Was the Week That Was was groundbreaking

In 1995, he wrote in The Times: "When your own time to die comes, will death be more easy because your last days were filled with hate? Oh, yes, fully justified hate, but whoever found hate a satisfactory meal?

"Better far to forget, or at least forgive. Easily said, by me, but not by the survivors. So the only words left must be these: Be merciful."

Levin was born Herbert Bernard Levin in August 1928, the son of a north London tailor.

His first journalistic experience was with the magazine Truth.

I am a journalist because I have no other talent for any other job Bernard Levin

He later went on to write a political column for the Spectator, before he also wrote for the Daily Mail and as theatre critic for the Daily Express.

In 1971 he began a regular column for The Times, and said he was looking forward to his left-wing views going "against the grain" of the paper. The Times called him "savage, clever, cunning, witty and brilliant".

Painfully shy

He was once thrown out of a hotel in Blackpool after likening the town to an "elephant's anus", while he was also blackballed from London's bohemian Garrick Club for criticising Lord Chief Justice Lord Goddard nine days after his death.

Levin was described as a painfully shy individual, and he was often modest about his own talents.

"I am a journalist because I have no other talent for any other job. I am not exaggerating.

"I couldn't teach, I couldn't paint, I couldn't compose, I couldn't be a businessman. The only possible exception was the bar. Otherwise I am totally useless."

Levin was the author of several books, including The Pendulum Years, Taking Sides, Speaking Up and The Way We Live Now.

He lived alone with a collection of stuffed cats in his inner-London flat. Ill-health forced him to give up his Times column in 1997.

He was made a CBE in 1990.

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Your tributes

He was the best columnist of his time - a wonderfully imaginative phrasemaker ("Tony Benn and Enoch Powell: the tassels dangling at each end of the lunatic fringe"), very funny (his mother versus British Gas was a classic of deadpan humour) and brave and perceptive: he foresaw that the rise of the violent wing of the animals rights movement and other 'single issue' fanaticism would be one of the major problems facing society in the coming century - and unlike many people in the public eye he wasn't afraid to say so.
Thomas Lessup, Huntingdon, Huntingdonshire

Levin made That Was the Week required viewing. Never dull always controversial.
Stewart Winton, Bonita Springs Florida USA

It was his book Enthusiasms which totally fired me up at a time when I needed it most - good food and wine, opera, Shakespeare, music, friendship. It gave me a zest for life again.
Ruth Greene, London, England

My favourite memory of Levin is a fascinating television interview he conducted with Sir Ralph Richardson. The actor was characteristically mischievous and evasive in answering questions about himself, preferring instead to turn the tables on Levin. Finally he succeeded, drawing from Levin a moving anecdote in which he described a conversation with Field Marshall Montgomery about the responsibility and morality of committing troops to battle. I hope the BBC will rebroadcast the Richardson interview as a tribute to both men.
Andrew McGregor, Harrow on the Hill, London

I will never forget his classic one liners such as when he wrote "the question we should be asking about Lord Longford is not is he bonkers? But is he right?"
Paul Burnell, Salford

The comments about his shyness are interesting. I remember him as a frequent sight on the London concert scene. He would scurry - at lightning speed - out of the concert hall to a waiting taxi - as soon as the performance was over. Whether it was to commit his thoughts to posterity or avoid having to engage with other departing audience goers, I was never sure.
Peter Tompkins, London

The greatest tribute one could pay Levin is that it is doubtful The Times would survived the suspension in the late 70's without him as a columnist. On the paper's return he was the principal reason to but the paper once again.
Howard, Australia

Bernard Levin was the reason I started reading The Times at an impressionable age... his writing was intelligent, thought provoking and yet kind; not to mention he could write the longest sentences in the world, just like the one I'm writing now in his memory!
Gail Renard, London

Print journalism aside, I think many people will remember his appearances alongside Richard Baker, Robin Ray and Joyce Grenfell as a regular panellist on 'Face the Music'. He was always popping up on TV during my childhood in the 60s and 70s but then seemed to disappear from view. Perhaps the 'leaving of Levin' was the first casualty in the dumbing down of television?
Nick Scahill, Hove, UK

I only knew Mr Levin through his writings and only last week whilst visiting Manhattan and walking up and down 5th avenue was I put in mind of his book about the avenue a number of years ago. I thoroughly enjoyed his writings for that great combination of his style and the subjects I enjoyed reading about especially Erasmus.
David Dix, Ottawa Canada

Levin may have claimed he could not teach, but I learnt from him how to exercise patience and mercy. He taught me to enjoy opera, even the Ring and to be unafraid to state what I believed in. In these and so many other ways he civilised me which my teachers in school and university had never achieved. And yet I never met him; just read his thoughts as expressed in his columns.
Jim Johnson, Thetford, Norfolk

I have great memories of Bernard Levin's column in The Times, particularly the one he wrote during one of the many strikes at British Leyland, memorably entitled "Absence makes the plant grow Honda"! We shouldn't forget his ascorbic, incisive appearances on TW3. But it was his writing above all.
Klaus, Somerset, UK

I remember a piece he wrote in the 70s analysing the huge popularity of Star Wars: he attributed this partly to the film's clear distinction between 'goodies' and 'baddies', at a time when the public - as I recall him writing - were finding it more and more difficult to decide what was right and what was wrong.
Mark Lee, London UK

The quality of Levin's matchless prose, his limpid and accurate ability to tell a story, his intellect and his moral fervour are perhaps best exemplified by his fine article in the International Herald Tribune of 8 August 1967 about the Aberfan disaster and its outcomes.
Jonathan Hulme, Tonbridge, England