Lunch: 30 fags", claiming this was "guaranteed to take inches off your waistline. Not to mention years off your life."The irony was that Barham herself fought a seven-year battle with full-blown anorexia nervosa, in the end succumbing to it and dying of heart failure caused by her condition. At the time of her death she weighed four and a half stone.Debbie Barham was born in Sheffield in 1976. Her father Peter was a printer, her mother Ann a professional indexer and editor. They split up when Barham was a toddler and she was brought up by her mother. She was educated, briefly, at Sheffield High School for Girls, her few years there later described as "hell on earth the crappiest days of my life".

To offset the awfulness she listened obsessively to the radio in her bedroom and began sending in jokes to comedy programmes. The difference between her and most youthful writers was that her material was immediately accepted. She had excellent general knowledge, a fine grasp of politics and contemporary mores, the priceless ability to scoff creatively, and a cruel streak crucial to the genuine wit. All at the age of 15.Just before her 16th birthday she won a BBC comedy-writing contest which funded her for a year in London. She left school, persuading her parents she could pass her A levels via a correspondence course, but soon abandoned education altogether and, aged 17, settled in Chiswick, west London, as a BBC contract writer, relishing the ferocious banter at script meetings, the after-work drinks, an "honorary bloke" in flowing skirts and "kick-'em-in-the-crotch" Doc Martens.She began writing prolifically for the print medium, with regular articles or columns in The Independent, the London Evening Standard, Daily Express, the late Punch, The Guardian and The Sun, as well as E-magazines.

The TV markets she cracked included some of the best and most glamorous in the business, and she produced material for, among others, Clive Anderson, Russ Abbot, Rory Bremner, Bob Monkhouse (which must have been a hair-raising gig), Angus Deayton and Graham Norton. She had a stint writing for Spitting Image, as well as Radio 5 Live's The Treatment, and Radio 4's The News Quiz and Loose Ends (one of its presenter Ned Sherrin's favourite Barham gags in the "monologue" she regularly wrote for him, was "Neil Hamilton visited his old school yesterday and invited questions – pupils said they couldn't afford them.")But all the time – though on the surface she was enjoying life and making money – Barham's illness was getting depressingly worse. She finally admitted she had a problem when her agent failed to recognise her one day at a BBC recording.No amount of help or treatment seemed to have the slightest effect, and she became increasingly reclusive, spending her waking hours (usually those of darkness) on the internet, peddling jokes and articles to various customers, checking on the news and political gossip and writing poetry: "Sleep away the years, sleep away the pain, wake tomorrow – a girl again."And of course obsessively emailing Radio 5 Live's baffled producer Rhian Roberts on the Fi Glover show: "We hadn't a clue who she was, and never paid her a penny She didn't ask for any fees. She just sent us this incredibly funny stuff which Fi Glover read on air when we had space It was absolutely brilliant I suppose she just liked banging off jokes."Jack Adrian. BOB DUNN was the popular and hard-working Conservative MP for Dartford in Kent from 1979 to 1997, who served five years as a junior minister in the Department of Education and Science.