David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Harper Lee, Ronnie Corbett, Victoria Wood, Prince, Muhammad Ali, Caroline Aherne – 2016 has already seen so many high-profile deaths that the number has become cause for comment.
It is the job of the Guardian’s obituary desk to respond quickly to those deaths that need to be marked publicly.
Deaths of significant figures are increasingly big events, not least because the internet gives readers a chance to respond to the news, involving us in a rite of passage. Bowie’s death, for instance, sparked not just a global outpouring of grief, but also led to a great appetite for stories about his life and work. In these circumstances the obituary holds together all of our coverage, serving as the record of who the person was and how they got there.
Before the internet, the stories of people such as Lee, Ali, Rickman or Wood would have been told by specialist writers, with the aid of specialist reference books that few others would have. Now that anyone can query anything from their phone, we have to maintain hundreds of obits to an ever-higher standard.
And, while 2016 has certainly not been a kind year, the increased flow of notable departures is not likely to slow. The 1960s saw more people becoming famous, and more television for them to become famous on. Film and TV actors were joined by rock and pop musicians and then sports stars, and many are now reaching their 70s and 80s.
People often imagine that the obits desk have inside information on the health of celebrities that allows us to plan ahead. In fact we hardly ever know more about the health factor than is available to anyone else who uses the internet. Similarly, the widespread assumption that we have stock obits on file for all famous people is very wide of the mark. Of course we have some commissioned in advance on the basis of celebrity, age and what is known about their health. But predicting the future is so difficult that such judgments are very arbitrary.
The unexpected death of a big figure clearly presents the biggest challenge for the obits desk, especially when there is no piece on file and we want to run something in the next morning’s paper. For the RMT trade union leader Bob Crow, we were lucky that the transport expert Christian Wolmar could write immediately for us. The Labour MP Jo Cox is only the most recent of the many political figures covered on the day by the political journalist Julia Langdon.
The news can come at any time, not respecting London office hours or our absence on Saturdays. Then we have to work out how quickly we can update material, and work with night-team colleagues in London, or those in New York or Sydney, to see how soon we can launch it online, while providing the added value and factual accuracy that our large and expectant readership will want to read.
Obits subjects fall into two broad categories: those figures whom most people have heard of, and those they haven’t.
For the better-known ones, a friend and/or colleague can be very good, as recently with Robert McCrum on Matthew Evans (Lord Evans of Temple Guiting) of Faber & Faber, Lisa Markwell on the magazine editor Sally Brampton, or Adam Zeman on his fellow neurologist Oliver Sacks. But, particularly when a death comes unexpectedly, a specialist writer may be best placed to assemble an overview rapidly, as with Adam Sweeting on the musicians Prince and Keith Emerson, or Ryan Gilbey on the film figures Robin Williams and Michael Cimino.
For the less well known, we’re almost bound to be looking for someone who knew the person well, and we may need to support their efforts in celebrating the life without producing a eulogy. It’s not always easy to find the right perspective: writers close to their subjects sometimes need to be reminded of how little – if anything – most readers will already know of them.
Our Other lives pieces, voluntary submissions about people less in the public eye by their family, friends or colleagues, all appear on the website, with about 40% going on to find space in print. They represent true “citizen journalism” and have a considerable following.
Limited space in print not only restricts the number of Other lives pieces we can run, but means that we cannot operate as a medium of record in the way that many who contact us would like to see. These days we have to think carefully about featuring former backbench MPs, and choose few figures from, for instance, the civil service, the military or religious institutions.
A good obituary is aimed towards a general readership rather than those who will probably be familiar with much of a person’s life story. It’s a chance to offer a momentary glimpse of a previously hidden world, in a way that Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time on Radio 4 does much more fully. Through that glimpse, the subject of the obituary will already have become more memorable.
Obituary writers often use terms such as world famous, eminent, distinguished or influential about their subjects – but those can prove counter-productive if readers have little knowledge of their particular discipline.
Far better than asserting that they were a patriot and aesthete is to get straight into telling how they got over the ravages of working with the resistance through dedication to oil painting and playing the saxophone. And describing them as a witty raconteur is far less striking than reporting something they said that was funny. Just saying what the subject did clearly, simply and directly, makes the value of their contribution shine through far more effectively. In obits, less is definitely more.
It should also be able to fill in the early years and other less obvious parts of the story, deploying traditional newspaper values to produce a substantial celebration. For instance, describing the huge paintings created by the architect Zaha Hadid of imaginary buildings with no commission in sight, or the magic shows put on in Hong Kong by Paul Daniels during his national service.
And it needs to be a story rather than a monument. The best way an obituary can respectfully reflect its subject is by presenting an informative account that pulls readers through to the end before they even know it.
It takes a lot to capture and keep readers’ attention. A salutary image for writers and editors to bear in mind is one of television’s more excruciating pleasures, the red chair moment on The Graham Norton Show. If the teller of the tale lets interest flag, then the seat is sent tipping backwards. Or in our case, the page gets turned.
