Enough doom and gloom, says Billy Connolly, quoted in the London Evening Standard: he thinks the news needs cheering up.
“Move obituaries from the back to the front page,” he suggests. “They are the best thing in the paper … great things people have done.”
I’m heartened (as the Daily Telegraph’s obituaries editor) that a legendary comic writer and performer is a fan of obits. But not all obits are about “great things” – and we had such a one the other day in the Islamist terrorist and leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It is one of the questions we are most often asked: how do we justify giving an obituary to a vile person?
