Can someone please ask the Grim Reaper to
take a break? Go and lie down somewhere, go on holiday, anything -- just stop
scything away at much-loved artists who have brought joy to millions.
Yesterday the shocking news was the death
of Prince, the day before it was Victoria Wood, and before them went Ronnie
Corbett, Terry Wogan, Alan Rickman, and David Bowie -- all gone, most of them
too young, and that's just in the first four months of this year.
So what's going on? Is it just me, or are
the deaths of some of our most popular public figures coming much faster than
they used to?
Here's a partial list from last year:
actors Anne Kirkbride, Geraldine McEwan and Anita Ekberg; Demis Roussos,
Leonard Nimoy, Terry Pratchett, Ben E King, Ruth Rendell, BB King, Christopher
Lee, Ron Moody, Patrick Macnee, James Last, Omar Sharif, Val Doonican, Cilla
Black, George Cole, Jackie Collins, Henning Mankell, Maureen O'Hara, Warren
Mitchell and Colin Welland. I make that 22, and of course I could have added many
more.
What about 2014? Phil Everly, Roger Lloyd
Pack, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Claudio Abbado, Pete Seeger, Philip Seymour
Hoffman, Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney, Bob Hoskins, Sue Townsend, Maya
Angelou, Rik Mayall, Dora Bryan, Nadine Gordimer, Robin Williams, Lauren
Bacall, Richard Attenborough, Joan Rivers, Lynda Bellingham, Lynsey de Paul,
Acker Bilk, PD James, Joe Cocker, and Billie Whitelaw. That's 24, and again,
there were, of course, many more.
So, with six gone so far this year, at the
current rate, we might expect to end up with 18-20 celebrity deaths by the end
of 2016. And that, surprisingly, would be fewer than in each of the past two
years. So, accepting that there is something distasteful about reducing death
to a statistical exercise, perhaps the Grim Reaper isn't any busier than usual
after all.
On the other hand, the BBC is reported to
have broadcast twice as many obituaries in the first three months of this year
as it did in the same period last year. One possible explanation is that celebritisation
really took off in the 1950s and 60s as television came of age, and as the
people who rose to fame then are now in their 70s and 80s, their lives are
inevitably coming to their natural ends.
Death comes to us all, celebrities and
non-celebrities alike. Some of those listed above lived to a ripe old age;
others died far earlier than seemed right or proper. Perhaps one reason why we
are so shocked when we hear of celebrities' deaths is that we tend to regard
them as somehow different from us, not better necessarily, but made of slightly
different DNA components. That's why they are celebrities and we are not.
But then they die, and we are reminded that
they are made of exactly the same stuff as the rest of us. Their bodies are as
frail as ours, and as susceptible to disease as ours are. They die, and we will
die. It shouldn't come as a shock, but it always does.
Once you reach a certain age (the Daily Mail called me 'venerable' this
week, which I thought was pushing it a bit), the deaths of contemporaries and
near contemporaries come far more freqently than they used to. So perhaps it's
only us oldies who see death all around us -- and as it's us oldies who buy most
of the newspapers, celebrity deaths are splashed all over the front pages.
Phil Sayer was never a celebrity in the way
that Prince or Bowie were celebrities, yet his voice was far more familiar to
me -- and to millions of other travellers in London and south-east England --
than any rock star's. Sayer was the 'mind the gap' man who recorded the
announcements at some of the country's busiest commuter stations, and at all
London Underground stations.
As The Economist wrote in a delightful elegy after the announcement of his
untimely death last week: 'Travellers entrusted their lives to him. All across
the London Underground, at his behest, they took care to Mind the Gap between
the train and the platform -- or sometimes, more subtly, between the platform
and the train. Thanks to him, they stood clear of the closing doors and did not
leave cases or parcels unattended anywhere on the station.'
Sayer's family announced his death in
exquisitely fitting style: 'Phil Sayer - voice of reason, radio, and railways.
A dearly loved husband, father, grandfather, brother, uncle and friend. We are
sorry to announce that this service terminates here.'
By the way, I have made a series of short
programmes for the BBC World Service about Shakespeare's legacy to the English
language. They are available online here.