When somebody in the public
eye dies these days it is customary to post a brief tribute on social media,
nothing in depth but a line about how much you enjoyed the person’s work, the
death of a popular musician will usually prompt me to post a video of one of
their songs, even if you didn’t personally know the person it is interesting to
read about the impression they made on the person’s life. Nobody means any harm
of course and I suppose we feel a little bit better for having written
something nice about someone on the television. The Internet is to blame for
this of course, in the old days we just accepted it and talked about it at
school the next day. Kurt Cobain’s death took a long time to filter through as
we had to put our faith in the news agencies because we didn’t find out things
the instant they happened. Weirdly, I was listening to some old records last
week and I tweeted that I was listening to Blind Melon for the first time in
years and how I had seen them supporting Guns ‘n’ Roses in 1993. Someone
tweeted me back to say how amazing the album still sounded and I replied with a
comment about Shannon Hoon’s lovely voice. As soon as I pressed send I was
overcome with the worry that I had got the name wrong and I would look like a
prize twat who knew nothing about music. I was about 95% sure that I was right
but I had to Google his name to make doubly sure, luckily I was right to think
that the late Shannon Hoon was indeed the lead singer of Blind Melon.
Interestingly, my Google search took me to the newspaper report of his death on
the online version of The Independent. This was 1995 and the Internet as we
know it was still in its infancy but The Independent had a website. It was
strange to think that only a year earlier we weren’t even sure what the
Internet was, but at least people took their time in finding out all of the
facts before acting on a flimsy piece of information.
Yesterday evening I was on
Facebook and in the sidebar of news items (‘trending’) was the news that former
television presenter and artist Tony Hart had passed away. For some reason I didn’t
cotton on to the fact that Tony Hart was in fact already dead, he passed away
in 2009. As is customary, Twitter and Facebook started carrying tributes to
people who remembered his television programmes and I posted what I thought was
a slightly satirical tweet regarding the way we view television entertainers
from our childhood:
It's a sad fact that I don't want to pay tribute to Tony Hart 'just in case'. I loved his shows but, oh you know what I mean.
— Steve Oliver (@SteveOliver76) February 15, 2015
I didn’t mean any ill feeling
towards the late Tony Hart; it was a reaction to the way people jump aboard the
grief bandwagon. All the people who tweeted their respectful memories of Jim’ll Fix It when Jimmy Savile died no doubt felt a bit
silly later on.
Of course by this morning it
had been revealed as a slightly odd story and had hastily been added to Tony Hart’s Wikipedia entry. How this happened is still a bit of a mystery and will
no doubt lead to proper fact checking in future. I was working in my office all
day so I had the opportunity to fire off a few other belated tributes to try
and start something.
Over on Facebook I posted a death notice to a fictional person and invited ‘made up memories’. This passed some time for other people but I didn’t participate in the comments as I wanted no questions about his death, as I hadn’t bothered to create a back story.
I showed this to Mandi at lunchtime and she simply asked, “And this is working is it?” She had a point.
Just heard the sad news that Tommy Cooper has died, a comedy legend. #RIP #justlikethat
— Steve Oliver (@SteveOliver76) February 16, 2015
Over on Facebook I posted a death notice to a fictional person and invited ‘made up memories’. This passed some time for other people but I didn’t participate in the comments as I wanted no questions about his death, as I hadn’t bothered to create a back story.
I showed this to Mandi at lunchtime and she simply asked, “And this is working is it?” She had a point.
Going back to Tony Hart, I was
extremely proud of this joke and a little disappointed in the lack of response.
I laughed though, so everyone else is wrong.
When I saw the Tony Hart news yesterday I should have looked at the bigger picture. It was sent in by 8 year old Sally from Clacton.
— Steve Oliver (@SteveOliver76) February 16, 2015
Listen to this week's edition of The Sunday Alternative here.
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