This Year's Dead

Remember how all those celebrities died in 2016 and people worked themselves up into a frenzy of grief over it all on social media, declaring that 2016 was the worst year ever as far as celebrity deaths went?  Well, I don't know if you've noticed, but they've been dropping like flies in 2017, as well.  Yet, strangely, they haven't been accompanied by the same constant hand-wringing on Twitter.  Perhaps the celebrities who have died this year aren't 'important' or 'fashionable' enough to warrant the same level of furore as their 2017 equivalents.  But the 2017 death toll is rising.  In the past few weeks we've seen the demises of Robert Hardy, Hywel Bennett, Richard Gordon (author of the Doctor series of books which spawned numerous film, TV, stage and radio adaptations), Bruce Forsyth and Jerry Lewis.  Only Bruce Forsyth, in the UK at least, seems to have triggered anything like the outpourings of public grief we saw last year.  (I'm assuming that Jerry Lewis would have engendered a similar reaction in the US).  Forsyth and Lewis had the advantage of having been working until recently and were therefore both still in the public consciousness.  Hardy and Bennett, by contrast, are likely to have been remembered primarily by older viewers, neither having been seen much on our screens of late, (other than in repeats of All Creatures Great and Small on digital channels like Drama or in the numerous screenings of sixties and seventies British movies on Talking Pictures TV, respectively). 

Obviously, Hardy got more coverage than Bennett due to his relatively recent appearances in various of the Harry Potter films, giving him some name recognition to younger viewers.  As for Richard Gordon, well, I very much doubt that anyone under the age of fifty would recognise his name these days, even though the TV series and films adapted from his books are still shown.  But back in the day he was quite a phenomena and deserved better treatment from the obituary writers than he has received.  His books might not have been high literature, but they did provide a lot of people with a lot of entertainment in their day.  I have to say that, despite all the accolades directed at them in the wake of their deaths, I never liked either Bruce Forsyth or Jerry Lewis.  The latter was simply not funny while the former's ego was far greater than his talents.  Forsyth also had a mean streak I didn't like.  Much has been written as to how he could 'connect' with ordinary members of the audience, but my recollections are of his put downs and snide comments directed at participants in things like The Generation Game.  Humiliating the punters for a cheap laugh seemed to be a big part of his stock in trade, (a perception of him apparently shared by the late Peter Cook - just listen to his unflattering impression of Forsyth on one of the 'Derek and Clive' records). 

There was another 'celebrity' death this week, although I don't think that British science fiction author Brian Aldiss would have appreciated being called a celebrity.  Highly idiosyncratic, Aldiss was, for many years, the UK's undisputed leading writer in the genre.  He also made enormous contributions to the study of science fiction, primarily through his pioneering history of the genre, Billion Year Spree (later revised and expanded as Trillion Year Spree).  Indeed, much as I enjoyed a lot of his fiction, it his reference works that I probably appreciated the most: I can't say that I always agreed with his opinions, but they were well argued and always worth reading, not mention highly thought-provoking.   Of all the well known people who have died of late, his passing is undoubtedly the one I feel most keenly.