When famous people die

The trouble with the famous is that they must be replaced and yet they can never quite be replaced - Charles Bukowski

My friend and I have a long-running game played sporadically over text that we call Dead or Alive. Though the rules are simple, i.e you receive the name of a celebrity and must identify their status from the two available options, winning requires participants to tap into deep reservoirs of intuition and knowledge of the arcane. Think: Michael Barrymore, Bill Oddie, Uri Geller, Frederick Forsyth, Pam St Clement, Esther Rantzen, Jim Davidson, Michael Fish, Jim Bowen, Ian Lavender, Matthew Kelly, Robert Kilroy Silk, Des O’Connor, Paul Gadd, Patricia Routledge, Dale Winton, Michael Burke, Liza Minelli &c. Maybe you're feeling a little twitch at some of these names, your internal DoA weathervane rotating in one direction or another. Maybe, you feel, some of these people died in some quiet, unexamined way at some point in the last dozen or so years. But consider, would you really be surprised if, say, Uri Geller has a small but not entirely insubstantial YouTube home broadcast channel? Picture the beady-eyed intensity of his glare, the astonished face emojis popping up on the chat as cutlery drawers are interfered with on a psychokinetic level. These are the thoughts you must entertain in order to become seasoned in DoA, to thread the needle between those who are dead and those who, in merely belonging to the deep vaults of history, feel like they ought to be dead. 

Mohammad Al-Fayed would have been a great DoA if he didn't go ahead and actually fucking die. Text received from friend, September 2023.

Sometimes, I feel troubled that I no longer recognise the world. I do not understand why the Tawk Tuah podcast is number three on Spotify’s charts. I do not know how I can use generative NFTs to dominate my passive income. Last winter, I went to a Boiler Room and didn’t like either the music or how bright the lights were. Some years ago, I had a saddening realisation that I could no longer use classic-era Simpsons references with my students to explicate certain concepts or ideas. I imagine this carries on as you age, a slow process of derealisation until you can no longer interpret a single icon on your phone's homescreen and are utterly paralysed by the hot drink selection in Cafe Nero. I would go to my grandparents’ house as a child and be confused by the clean-cut, Brylcreemed faces of crooners staring back at me from the back covers of their LPs. To whose world did they belong? Where are they now? The world used to be arranged in such a way that Peter Stringfellow was elevated to a household name. Peter Stringfellow feels dead; is dead.

My mum often sends me telegrammatic texts when it happens: John McCririck dead, Terry Wogan RIP, oh no Michael Mosley. I do not know why it feels important for us to mark these passings in our small and localised way. Perhaps we share a sense that famous people act like furniture in our lives: they are the street lamps and road signs and the old buildings we walk past on the way to work. We accept them because we are used to them, and when they disappear the landscape is somehow altered. There will be new game show hosts and weather presenters, new television chefs and news anchors, but things will not be the same as they were before. Anthony Worrall Thompson was arrested for stealing cheese in 2012. He feels alive, I think, but you are not allowed to Google such things.

Overweight, heavy drinker, lifelong smoker, loves junk food, fry ups and steaks, had bad pneumonia couple of years ago, worth keeping an eye on, heart attack candidate 100% - DeathList.net forum user on Jeremy Clarkson, October 2024

In December 1986, following the demise of Carey Grant, a group of students in a Warwick University Bar drew up a list of 31 famous people whose lives they predicted would come to an end the following year. The list for 1987 included names like Clive Dunn, The Queen Mother, Alec Guinness and (incredibly) Ozzy Osbourne. The website that followed, DeathList.net, is a curious Web 1.0 oddity where thousands of forum users converge to speculate on who is unlikely to enjoy another lap around the sun. Some years are famed for having a particularly high yield, 2020 being the current record holder (twenty deaths) whilst other years are spoken about in terms you might expect from a farmer whose livelihood is threatened by periods of ongoing drought: ‘A barren spell’, ‘a lean period’, ‘a fruitless Spring’. Amongst the half million forum posts there's a section devoted to discussing the year's candidates: the thread for Jimmy Carter runs to 129 pages. Over 200,000 people have viewed the thread for Dick Van Dyke. Elsewhere, someone posits Huw Edwards as an ‘outside bet’ and there's an undercurrent of murmurings re: Jeremy Clarkson after he estimated in a broadsheet interview that he's smoked over six hundred thousand cigarettes. 

That Deathlist should be one of the Internet's most enduring websites is, I think, extremely funny in a Nietzschean sense. Imagine, for example, being Noam Chomsky as you approach centenarian status. Admittedly I’ve never seen him smile, but think: you have been the world’s most cited scholar since the 1970s, you have completely reshaped the parameters of linguistic study and many bookshops have entire sections devoted to your political work. But did you know, Noam, that you’re also a recurrent top 10 Deathlist favourite and that one forum user thought ‘Noam Chomsky’ was the legal name of The Very Hungry Caterpillar? Come on now, this is amor fati in the purest sense: no fondness, no nostalgia, no disdain, no platitudes, no tributes flooding in from world leaders, no honorary re-titling of University libraries or plans for a scholarship in your name - merely a clip-art Grim Reaper and the smallest imaginable dopamine hit for anyone with your name on their bingo list. To ridicule something is to diminish it, to deflate it, to remove its potency. Maybe that’s why Deathlist endures, a crude reminder that there is only one certainty in life, whether you have starred in television soaps or held the reins of Empire in your hands. Chomsky dead. The world goes on.