Media Grotesqueries and a Drawn-out Death

A man has died after a long illness. Meanwhile a salacious media has been camped outside his hospital, desperate for hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute health details, and quotes from visiting friends and family.

No-one needed this coverage: there was no public clamour for constant updates, no major developments, save the release of harrowing photographs intended to show the world the effects of his long-term alcoholism. All the frenzy has achieved is to remove what little dignity remained in a life which had sadly lacked that quality.

To my generation while growing up, George Best was not a world-class footballer. He wasn't even a world-class womanizer. All the name Best represented was that sad old drunk who turned up worse for wear on chat shows, a demonstration of a talent thrown away, squandered for the lure of addiction (there were two such figures at the time: the world of acting was represented by Oliver Reed). Even though he was still relatively young at this point, you wouldn't have known it to look at him - years of boozing aren't kind on appearance.

Such was the level of his addiction, even a new liver couldn't make him turn his back on the bottle for long. And all the time, the press were delighted to report on failed marriages, family troubles, health problems, and unfortunate booze-related embarrassments. After all, a decline and fall is far more juicy than glittering success. There's more sleaze for one thing.

Maybe it's the 24 hour nature of modern media coverage that creates a need amongst journalists for the levels of intrusion witnessed in the past week. Maybe hourly bulletins make it easy to forget that at the centre of a story there is a real human being, with a real family, and a right to some degree of privacy. Or maybe we all demand too much of our celebrity culture these days: limits are forgotten, with our right to information taking precedence over basic decency.

Whatever the cause, it has been unseemly, and an unpleasant atmosphere in which to mark the passing of someone who once had the world at his feet. He deserved better.