Update: read a more detailed report here.

Comedian Jeremy Hardy has been been remembered at a private memorial held in south London. 

Hardy died in February this year, aged 57.

The event was held in the Grand Hall at Battersea Arts Centre a few miles from where Hardy lived for much of his adult life.

Comedy contemporaries Jack Dee and Mark Steel compered the proceedings and the speakers, some in person, some on video, included Jeremy Corbyn, Harry Enfield, Dawn French, Sandi Toksvig, Eddie Izzard, Emma Thompson, Charlotte Church, Rory Bremner, Arnold Brown, John Hegley, Miles Jupp and Richard Hawley. 

Hardy once joked: "I don't get this fashion for happy funerals. This is a very fasionable idea that when you die it's supposed to be a celebration and joyous and everyone laughing, but i want people's lives torn apart when I go. I want to be embalmed and brought out when we have guests."

Radio 4 is to broadcast a separate two-part tribute to Hardy on Thursday 16 & 23 at 6.30pm, produced by his long term producer David Tyler. Not quite a biography, not quite a documentary, these programmes will celebrate Jeremy Hardy’s Radio 4 life. With material from his very first appearances in stand-up shows in the mid-1980s, via his own early sitcom At Home With The Hardys, and right through to his glorious appearances on The News Quiz and I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue – as well as the very best of the ten series of his own ground-breaking series Jeremy Hardy Speaks To the Nation and his final solo series Jeremy Hardy Feels It. 

Narrated by his friend and colleague Sandi Toksvig, the programme also features never before broadcast behind-the-scenes material and shines a light on how and why the man once described as “an incendiary vicar” stayed so funny and so beloved for over thirty years.