What is a life worth? 500 words? 1,000? Almost as significant in the world of the newspaper obituary department is where and when these words will appear. Death may be all around us, but good deaths-that is, of people whose lives chime with the readerships of a particular newspaper-share with London buses a tendency to come either at the same time or not at all.
Consider the misfortune of dying in the same week as the Princess of Wales or Mother Teresa. The big set-piece obituaries are state occasions in their own right, in which newspapers marshal public emotion, and nothing is left to chance. There is not a paper in the land that doesn't have its Queen Mother ready to roll at a minute's notice. George Harrison's death was an obituarist's dream, not only because he was famous and glamorous, but because everyone knew it was coming. The most appropriate writers had been signed up, with plenty of time to produce their best work. Harrison knocked everyone else off the page, so obits editors could lay out beautiful-looking pages, roll out their finest red carpets of writing and go home early, knowing that their pages would be the best-read in the paper the next morning.
But pre-prepared encomia are not simply the prerogative of first-rank celebrities. The obituary-desk computer banks are one of journalism's most secret sanctums, a sort of virtual mortuary stacked with cadavers-in-waiting. Dead people cannot sue for libel; nor can they beg, bully or barter themselves into a more flattering profile for posterity. Suspended halfway between hard news and the feature profile, the obituary holds a unique place in the culture of journalism. Because it is the direct result of a death it is, ironically, live news; yet like a feature, it is essentially interpretative. If you want to analyse how the press spins the culture; how newspapers perceive their readerships and, by extension, how the population represented by that readership sees itself, then this is the first place to look.
Take a day this month selected at random: 5th December. There are no "big" deaths to report, so this is not one of those cherished days when the obituary pages chime with the news agenda. On the other hand, it means that the pages are at their most varied and revealing. The Independent leads with John Mitchum, younger brother of Robert. This gives them a chance to use a touching archive picture of the two brothers, while exploring a forgotten corner of cinema history. It is a classic "soft" obituary-as, in a slightly different way, is lead obituary in The Times, on Commander Ronnie Hay, a second world war pilot whose life gives his obituarist a chance to tell a cracking yarn, while honouring a thoroughly good chap. The Telegraph, in contrast, leads with Gerhart Riegner, in an obituary subtitled: "head of the world Jewish congress, whose warnings of the holocaust were ignored." This looks worthy but is, in fact, smart work-his death, we learn from a Guardian news brief, was only announced the previous day, so an eagle-eye on the news wires and a fortuitous bit of advance planning gave the Telegraph the only lead obituary of the day that was right up to date. Even though all three of these are lead items only one of them, Riegner, receives obituaries in any other paper.
The only point of consensus on 5th December is down page, where both the Independent and The Times run obituaries of a German avant-garde musician, Michael Karoli. It's a strange coincidence, since Karoli actually died more than a fortnight earlier, so both papers were presumably doing the same bit of cupboard-clearing.
The time lags between death and obituary contain intrigues of their own. Middle-ranking deaths are not obituarised by chance: there has to be someone, somewhere, keen for them to appear. It may be down to relatives with a knowledge of who to lobby, or just a question of editorial taste-the Telegraph, for instance, loves its war heroes.
The Guardian, which prides itself on its artistic bent, leads its 5th December page with an appreciation of Danilo Donati, an Oscar-winning costume designer, by John Francis Lane who specialises in arty Italians of a certain vintage. If you look back, you will find that the Guardian memorialises more than its share of these. It helps that, as in Donati's case, they often come with fabulous picture archives. This sort of skewing of the obituary agenda happens as much, only more invisibly, in The Times and the Telegraph, which stick doggedly to their traditional policy of anonymity for their writers. The idea is that anonymous writers can be more candid and mischievous; the practice also usefully camouflages where a particular writer is coming from, so it can obscure the particular agenda that may lie behind a piece. The Telegraph practises yet another form of concealment by avoiding the date of death altogether. All deaths, this implies, have a similar urgency, a similar currency. It is not being entirely cynical to suggest this might be quietly comforting to a readership of which such an inordinately high proportion will shortly become eligible for the page.
