I never knew Tom Stoppard
By Brian Clegg
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Recently, demonstrating the highbrow people that I’m friends with, my social media feeds have been full of tributes to the late playwright, Tom Stoppard. I never knew him. My wife did a little (as well as Miriam) as he used to bank at the branch where she worked, but I didn’t.
Perhaps more damningly, I never went to any of his plays. It’s not that we don’t go to the theatre. In fact, for a number of years we had a kind of season ticket to our local theatre (at the time, the Theatre Royal, Windsor), which meant we went to the vast majority of their productions. But I never caught anything by Tom.
What did strike me, as I read the effusive comments was that, bearing in mind I have been to the theatre many times and still haven’t seen one of his plays, it’s probably the case that the vast majority of the public have never seen one. And that made me think about the nature of published obituaries, whether they be in newspapers or via the socials.
If I’ve never met a person, nor been exposed to his work, should I really be expected to be interested in reading about him? It’s inevitable that I will be more invested in the death of someone I know, or at the very least have either seen on TV and film, or have experienced the output he or she has produced. Why do we publish obituaries of ‘famous’ people who most people don’t know? (Think of all those newspaper obituaries of retired generals and the like.)
Does it matter? No, not really. But when our attention is bombarded with possible things to read and watch, I do wonder whether a genre that perhaps had its place when our only news input was from a daily paper has had its day.
Image by Gorup de Besanez from Wikipedia
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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.
Source: http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2025/12/i-never-knew-tom-stoppard.html
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