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.

Kington was born to William Beresford Nairn (also "Nairne", depending on the source) Kington (1909–1982), of Frondeg Hall, Rhostyllen, Denbighshire, Wales, and his first wife Jean Ann (1912–1973; daughter of John Ernest Sanders, of Whitegates, Gresford, Denbighshire) in Downpatrick, County Down, Northern Ireland, where his father, a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, was then posted.

The Kingtons were a branch of a landed gentry family that married into the Scottish Clan Oliphant and produced the line of Kington-Blair-Oliphant Chieftains of Gask.

[1] 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.

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.

Taught the piano from the age of seven, Kington discovered when he fell in love with jazz during adolescence that being able to read music meant he felt unable to improvise; he therefore took up the trombone.

To his regret, he only played in a jazz group for a brief period in 1962 during a summer job in Spain, where he ran into the British politician Enoch Powell, apparently looking somewhat displeased.