Miles Kington

Miles Beresford Kington (13 May 1941 – 30 January 2008) was a British journalist, musician (a double bass player for Instant Sunshine and other groups) and broadcaster. He is also credited with the invention of Franglais, a fictional language, made up of French and English.

He was born in Downpatrick, County Down, Northern Ireland, where his father Bill, a soldier, was then posted. Subsequently, his father ran the Border Brewery in Wrexham. His mother was American. Kington was educated at Bilton Grange, a prep school in Rugby, then Trinity College, Glenalmond, a boys' independent boarding school in Glenalmond, Scotland (now Glenalmond College). Among his contemporaries was the future journalist Alexander Cockburn. During a gap year, then rare, Kington worked as a translator in New York City, and lived in Greenwich Village. He then studied Modern Languages (French and German) at Trinity College, Oxford. After graduation he spent some time writing with Terry Jones, an Oxford contemporary but the teaming did not click, and Jones was in reality waiting for his friend Michael Palin to graduate.

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" ("the French do not speak O-level French"). They were later published as a series of books (Let's Parler Franglais!, Let's Parler Franglais Again, Let's Parler Franglais One More Temps, and so on). 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.

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