Media
There has never been a better time to die
Published 30 April 2007
The maharajah who permitted garlic, the bouncing diva and the teenage groupie who kissed John Gielgud's knob - all signs that we live in the golden age of the newspaper obituary
The Independent's obituary of Dick Vosburgh, who in a career of more than 40 years wrote jokes for such comedians as Bob Hope, Frankie Howerd and Ronnie Corbett, included a curious, self-referential passage. Vosburgh, it was pointed out, had been a contributor to those same pages himself, having written no fewer than 200 obituaries for the paper, many of them telling sad stories of forgotten movie actresses.
So, for a few paragraphs, we had an obituary of an obituarist, written, as it happens, by another of the Independent's more prolific obituarists, Tom Vallance. It was a rare acknowledgement of the status the form enjoys these days.
When Polly Toynbee complained in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago that the British press was "the worst in the west", it was an invitation to count our blessings. Certainly, there is a lot wrong with the press; but there is also plenty that is right, and, though it is true that the obit pages rarely set the agenda for Newsnight or the Today programme, they are a part of what is right.
Literate, entertaining, surprising, diverse, thoughtful and often beautifully illustrated, they provide a daily challenge to the view that the upmarket papers have dumbed down. Instead, the newspaper obituary is experiencing a golden age, so that if you are distinguished or interesting in any way, there has never been a better time to die.
Thus, for example, readers of several papers were recently treated to lengthy accounts of the life of Kitty Carlisle Hart, a singer and actress born in New Orleans who played the love interest in A Night at the Opera and who, at the age of 66, was appointed a member of the New York State Council on the Arts, where among other things she defended the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. When, at the age of 86, she was dropped from the council, the Times recorded, "she began to sing again in nightclubs".
The Independent told the tale of the calypso singer George Browne, who once belonged to a trio called Three Just Men. The title, Browne had explained, was a reference to the Edgar Wallace novel The Four Just Men, "but we couldn't find a fourth man". The Guardian, meanwhile, marked the passing of Jez Feakes, the organiser of a par-72 golf tournament around the streets of central London, who adopted the pseudonym Warren Ptera in protest against George Bush.
Then there was the opera director Colin Graham, who was backstage on a night when Tosca refused to jump to her death from the battlements, as the plot demands. Instead, as Graham told the story, she had to be pushed by a fellow performer. "She immediately stood up on the other side," he remembered, "and it looked as though she had bounced."
And the Telegraph had Manvendra Shah, the maharajah of Tehri Garhwal who, as the 61st guardian of the temple of Badrinath, was revered as the reincarnation of Vishnu. "On succeeding to the throne," we read, "he relaxed the family ban on eating onions and garlic . . ." (No mention of chewing gum, alas.) The same paper's obituary of Joan Wyndham recounted how, as a teenager, she used to follow the young John Gielgud home "so that I could kiss his doorknob".
Does all this historical stuff, engaging as it may be, really belong in a newspaper? It has a news "peg" to hang on, in the death itself (though the obituaries often appear weeks later), but it conspicuously lacks the relevance and the forward-looking character normally sought after in the press.
One of my old editors sometimes used to ask, when there was an argument about whether a story deserved space in the paper: "Is it interesting?" Good obituaries pass that test, which is why modern editors, eager - on the smallest pretext - to give readers things they will actually want to read, are finding more and more room for them.
Look, they're human too
Peter Hitchens has been to Iran and, as the Mail on Sunday put it, "what he discovered surprised him - and should make everyone think again". Iranians drink milkshakes, like football, tell Ayatollah jokes, flout the official dress codes and worry about unemployment. And though they are patriotic and (with some reason) suspicious of Britain and the US, they are not anti-western and don't want a war.
Hitchens concludes: "Iran is not a serious threat to us, and if we treat it as one we will be tumbling into yet another foolish trap, devised by silly, ignorant politicians, from which it will take decades to escape."
It would be churlish to do anything other than applaud. Can we now hope that his employers, Associated Newspapers, will send out more of their columnists, starting with Melanie Phillips, who is already caught in that "foolish trap", believing that Iran is even now at war with us and that the government's failure to fight back amounts to appeasement?
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
