Christopher Howse has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Norman Balon, who has died at the age of 99, missed the point when he defined himself as ‘London’s rudest landlord’. There, I think, he mingled self-publicity and self-defence. People didn’t go to the Coach and Horses, Soho, to be shouted at by him; they shouted at each other quite enough. Really he was the actor-manager of a twice-daily claustrophobic, drunken extemporisation in his pub which embodied bohemianism and self-destruction in the last two decades of the 20th century.

Remember that 40 years ago the Coach was thick with cigarette smoke, that many customers were drunk daily, at lunchtime, and that no one was fearful of what they said. Things were not then as they are now.

Twenty ways to fix Doctor Who

Starmer has left Europe in quiet despair

Did fears about homophobia prevent Preston Davey from being saved?

The Spectator contributed a lot to Norman’s decades of celebrity. Through the thousand Low Life columns that Jeffrey Bernard wrote, starting in 1975, he had some claim to inventing Norman. For his part, Norman believed he had made Jeffrey famous by giving him a stage, which came literally true when Peter O’Toole starred in the West End play Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, from 1989.

Richard Ingrams, as editor of Private Eye, was guilty of bringing together Norman and Jeffrey. The Private Eye staff had lunch daily at the Coach, at the table near the gas fire and the........

© The Spectator