Tuesday, October 20, 2009

ludo: game over

Today's notable death of someone I didn't even know was still alive: broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy, who was 89 (actually, about a fortnight short of his 90th birthday).

I'm too young, fresh-faced and cherubically innocent to remember Kennedy's heyday as a broadcaster (which was in the late 1950s and early 1960s on news and current affairs programmes like This Week and Panorama); my only recollections of seeing him on television are of the rather gentler TV review and discussion show Did You See..? in the 1980s.

But he was also a long-standing campaigner against miscarriages of justice, one of the prime movers in getting the UK death penalty abolished in the 1960s, in later years a campaigner for a sensible policy on voluntary euthanasia, and a vocal humanist and atheist and author of All In The Mind: A Farewell To God in 1999, thereby scooping Dawkins, Harris and the like by about 7 years. All of which makes him a Good Bloke in my book.

From a family of sport and games enthusiasts, he is survived by his brothers Cluedovic and Judovic Kennedy, and his sister Jengavic Kennedy.

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