Death of an Obit Writer (3)

I took to monitoring the back-end of the website regularly, to get an idea of the obits I wasn't being asked to write. The American presidential candidates were next, the new Israeli cabinet, their fourth election in a year. Meanwhile I was asked to write obituaries for the cast of a new sitcom, which was tipped to be the big hit comedy of the year. The sitcom died, but it didn't merit an obit, only three of the six recorded programmes were ever broadcast and my obits were deleted from the website not long afterwards.

 

The next job was the cast of a new West End musical 'Eels', then the presenters of a new bake-off-inspired show, then the new Blue Peter hamster. 'Get this in by Monday', Nancy said. 'You never know with hamsters'.

 

Meanwhile, on the back end of the site, which I was almost certainly not supposed to have access to, things were getting strange.

 

I was surprised to find in the list of latest updates the obituary for Margaret Thatcher. 'Surely they know she's already dead', I thought. But they did. This obit had been made live.

 

Intrigued, I tracked the changes to compare the current entry with Neville's original. They hadn't changed a great deal, but even so the overall tone of the piece was changed completely, and in doing so history itself had been distorted. The entire section on the poll tax had been removed. Instead of her career ending with a plummet in popularity, disastrous local election results and a stab in the back from her closest allies, the entire history had been rewritten as a well-deserved retirement from a politician who had already achieved so much. 

 

I was highly uncomfortable with this development. Yes, The Times was full of shit, everyone knew that, but so was every other newspaper and news channel in the country. If you read the Times for news you were an idiot, you'd be more likely to stumble upon the truth pulling words randomly from a hat. Of course, the obits of the current cabinet were equally ficticious in nature, the Prime Minister's glorious seventeen page obituary somehow managed to miss out five high profile sackings, at least thirty of his affairs, six of his marriages, and all of his scandals. But fair enough, it was current politics, if he was wise enough to die at his peak then he'd rightly reap the beneifts of a glowing obit.

 

But doing the same gloss-over to Thatcher was a travesty. For one thing it was one of Neville's finest, I'd quoted from it in my obit of him. I checked my obit of Neville, and sure enough the quotes had been taken out.

 

"I'm worried about the changes to Thatcher's obituary," I confessed to Spider, a friend of mine from the Guardian. "It's like they're re-writing history."

 

"I wouldn't worry," he said. "It's only the obits. It's not like they matter. You're probably the only person who's noticed. How did you notice?"

 

I was careful not to mention my unauthorised access to the obit site. After all, I was only an obit writer, not The obit writer. "I noticed that my quote from it had been removed from Neville's obituary. Terrible of me to read my own work," I added hastily, "but I was hoping they'd added something about how he died."

 

"Well, that's just journalism, you can't complain about what's in the papers, or even what they make you write. It's like being a concentration camp guard, some bad stuff comes with the job. A 'rewrite Thatcher's obituary' here, a 'shoot a few Jews for no reason' there. At least the pay's better in journalism."

 

"You're with the Guardian," I said. "Do you really think that's like being a concentration camp guard?"

 

"Have you read the Guardian recently?"

 

"Not really," I admitted. "I don't read any of the British papers now, I get everything from the Irish Times, Washington Post and Der Spiegel."

 

"Exactly."

 

"I thought the Guardian was independent, don't you get your money from readers, over a million voluntary contributors."

 

"Yeah, a million voluntary contributors, 900,000 of whom share the same Russian bank account."

 

I hung up, despondent.  Then I read the new obituary for Enoch Powell and was even more despondent. When did Enoch Powell become such a nice man?

 

I kept getting work, all of it trivial, and the real obituary writing and re-writing continued without me.