Reflections on birthdays and obituaries.

This morning a friend of mine posted this on Facebook: 

"Shouldn't the Queen's birthday celebrations be curtailed? Victoria Wood has died, show some respect!" 

Most of last night's ten o'clock news was full of those two things: the queen's 90th birthday - all sorts of sentimental stuff with other members of the royal family - and tributes to the comedienne Victoria Wood - someone I have never really appreciated although lots of people I know rate her very highly. 

Maybe I need to take another look at both of these ladies, because the trend has continued today, more for the royal personage than for the comedienne, it has to be said. 

Masses of people turned out to sing happy birthday to Her Majesty on the streets of Windsor this morning. Whatever your feelings about how much easier it is to live to a ripe old age if you live a life of privilege, you have to admit that it must be just a little annoying not to be able to celebrate your birthday quietly with your family but to have to go walkabout and carry out public duties. 

And then in this evening's news came the announcement that the performer Prince has died at 57 years old. Another one I've never truly followed but, all the same, 57 is no age to shuffle off this mortal coil. 

There have been radio programmes about the huge number of famous people who have disappeared so far in 2016. Obituaries right, left and centre! And it's still only April! The general consensus is not so much that more people are dying than ever did in the past but that there are just more famous people than there used to be. And they don't just mean those who are famous for being famous. Although there are rather too many of those. (I recently heard Sandi Toksvig and Roy Hudd discussing the fact that in their youth they just wanted to earn a living as performers, not necessarily become famous. Fame came as a bit of a by-product.) 

The theory about the disappearing famous folk is that before the advent of television, the only "celebrities" most people heard of were film stars. Relatively smaller numbers. Then along came television and, in particular, soaps and regular series, providing a whole host of household names. Add to that the arrival of pop music on a grand scale and suddenly the world was full of names to remember and people to admire. All of this started to happen in the 1950s and 1960s and inevitably those famous folk, like the rest of us, have been getting older. And many of them lived wilder lives than the rest of us. 

So it goes!