![]() ![]() ![]() This all started to change in the mid-Eighties, when Hugh Massingberd became obituaries editor at the Telegraph and James Fergusson became his counterpart at the newly launched Independent: arid humour, walloping understatement and a fine new breed of euphemism became the order of the day, the collected books of obits became bestsellers and the 'morgue' became, if not quite the sexiest part of a newspaper, that conceit being a hard one to sustain, certainly the coolest.Īnd now the breed has fully come of age: not one but two recent books, Carl Hiaasen's Basket Case and Who's Who in Hell, the debut novel by the British journalist Robert Chalmers, himself a former contributor to the Telegraph obit pages, feature anti-heroes who work as newspaper obituary writers. Reverent, deferential and absurdly coy regarding what were often highly relevant parts of an individual's life - the Times, for example, managed to obituarise Dylan Thomas at length without once mentioning the fact that he had been known to wander into the occasional pub - they also dealt almost exclusively with establishment figures, many of them criminally dull. ![]() For too many years, 'obits' were seen as the dead arm of the newspaper industry, and that was about as good as the jokes got. ![]()
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