Bringing obituaries to life

I used to be a foreign correspondent. Sometimes I thought it was a pretty glamorous job. At dinner parties I might occasionally drop hints about the dangerous sorts of places I had been to. But the only people who cared were other foreign correspondents, and then only because they were eager to dwarf my boasts with their own tales of derring-do. To my youthful indignation, nobody else gave a hoot.

Now I am the obituaries editor at the Telegraph. Quite a career shift, I’m prepared to admit. These days if people ask what I do I tend to mumble something about being a journalist. But this, I’m afraid to say, is not because I am now wiser and less vain. Rather, it is because I have discovered that the job of obituaries editor, unlike that of foreign correspondent, is something that people are actually fascinated by. These days, if someone learns precisely what I do, the chances are that they will be ravenous for every detail. And while we all like to bore on about ourselves, there are limits.

It took me a while to understand this. I’d once assumed that foreign corresponding was the cool beat, and that obituaries was, well, the dead beat. It turned out the reverse was true. To my astonishment the words ‘I just love obituaries’ would come tumbling out not just from the mouths of aged great aunts, but also from the pouting lips of shapely twentysomethings at parties. Obituaries, it seemed, are sexy. How did this happen?

Put it down to Hugh Massingberd. He was the great man who launched obits in the Telegraph in the late 1980s. Of course, obits had appeared in the paper before then, but only occasionally, and then they were pretty stuffy. Hugh was the man to carve out a regular column, which has grown over the years to the entire page it inhabits these days.