The Fake Funeral of Sir William Ormerod

[dpth...@gmail.com]

Watching a 2010 episode of HIGNFY tonight, I was reminded of Victoria Coren's prank on funeral moochers. This is one of my all-time favorite stories.

(For those who don't know, Victoria is a TV presenter and champion poker player, wife of actor and comedian David Mitchell, daughter of the author Alan Coren, and sister of the writer Giles Coren (who himself is brother-in-law of the presenter Alexander Armstrong.)

When her father died, the funeral was attended by an organized group of funeral-crashers who hadn't really known her father, but just went to these things for the free drinks. So she orchestrated a hoax, creating a fictional person named Sir William Ormerod, and indeed the usual funeral-crashers wrote in for invitations to the funeral, claiming they had known Sir William.

Full details can be found in the original article she wrote about it at:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/dec/21/celebrity-victoria-coren


However, even after being exposed, they continued to crash funerals and other events. One of them, Alan MacDonald, died in 2010 after choking on a canapé at an event celebrating Kuwait's national day. He had crashed the event, having no connection or interest in Kuwait. Victoria Coren wrote about this here:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/mar/21/victoria-coren-jolley-gang