So 2016 will forever be remembered as the year that has seen George Michael, Rick Parfitt, Zsa Zsa Gabor, AA Gill, Greg Lake, Peter Vaughan, Andrew Sachs, Ron Glass, Florence Henderson, Robert Vaughn, Leonard Cohen, Pete Burns, Jean Alexander, Alexis Arquette, Gene Wilder, Kenny Baker, Caroline Aherne, Anton Yelchin, Muhammad Ali, Carla Lane, Prince, Victoria Wood, David Gest, Denise Robertson, Ronnie Corbett, Paul Daniels, Tony Warren, Frank Kelly, Terry Wogan, Alan Rickman and David Bowie all pass on. Is that any more than normal? Is it unusual? Probably not.
Many of these were born between 1946 and 1964, the so called baby boomer generation. Many of those people are now 50-70 and make up a much larger percentage of the population than ever before, and so it seems that more of that generation are famous.
They were alive at a time when television boomed in this country with the expansion from three to hundreds of readily available channels. Many of them worked incredibly hard which will always take a toll on health. The other thing is that, with the internet and rolling news, there is a never ending stream of information about people. The internet now allows millions of people to react within seconds to the announcement of someone’s death with other celebrities fuelling that news with their outpourings of grief. This need and hunger for instant notifications of any event will, if anything, only make coincidences like this appear to continue, I believe. Brace yourself for more of the same in years to come.
