During the 1990s my father, Tom Bussmann, who has died aged 86, wrote the Guardian’s popular Zeitgeist column, which provided a weekly tongue-in-cheek round-up of quirky news stories from around the world.
Tom was not actually a journalist – his day job was in advertising – but he made Zeitgeist his own with his playful turns of phrase and nose for the absurd.
One typical entry in Guardian Weekend, on 27 February 1999 under the headline ‘“Porkies go walkies”, read: “A herd of abandoned Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs was pursued through Essex woodland by RSPCA inspector Chris Bacon. This gift to journalism was greeted with predictable lack of restraint, the Daily Mail thoughtfully speculating that the remaining pigs would be caught ‘when hunger makes them rasher’.”
Tom was born in Berlin, Germany, to Johannes, a journalist, and his wife, Magdalena (nee Anspach), who was of Jewish heritage. In 1938 the family fled to the UK, where Johannes was initially interned on the Isle of Man and Magdalena settled in Cambridge. Tom attended the Perse school in the city and then Downing College, Cambridge University.
After graduation he began working in London as an advertising copywriter for various big agencies, before setting up a production company, Bussmann Llewellyn, with a friend, to make television commercials. He then established his own firm, Tom Bussmann Films, and over the years received many awards for his commercials, although the one he made for Feast ice-creams was the most popular with his children, as we had a freezer full of them afterwards.
Tom kept the company going until gradually winding down into what might be called “flexitirement” in the early 2000s, by which time the plug had also been pulled on Zeitgeist after a 15-year run.
He had been asked to compile Zeitgeist by his friend the Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, who was aware not just of his writing talent but his great sense of humour. Tom did his own research to find the stories, and there were always huge piles of newspapers around our house, which he would scour for items that he could spin into stories. Aside from Zeitgeist he also wrote a number of off-beat articles for the paper over the years, including on travel and books.
His 1965 marriage to Carole (nee Gribben) ended in divorce in the early 90s. He is survived by his second wife, Natascha, whom he married in 1995, four children from his first marriage, Jane, John, Tom and me, and two from his second, Benjamin and Joshua.
