Recognising the death of celebrities

When Davy Jones, the most fanciable member of the Monkees, caught the last train to Clarksville recently, I switched my morning shower ballad to Daydream Believer by way of a tribute. To my surprise, by the time I had reached the ‘repeat to fade’ portion of the song I was weeping into my loofah, mourning the loss of someone I’d never met.

Goodbye Davy Jones, we hardly knew ye. Actually, we didn’t know ye at all, but why let that get in the way of a good old-fashioned mourning session? The ubiquity of social networking and 24-hour news has enabled us to participate in rather embarrassing mass mourning like never before, and from Whitney Houston to Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor to Amy Winehouse, we are grieving for celebrities with gusto as if they were our own.

The death of Paul Newman in 2008 saw me tucking into a salad saturated in Newman’s Own Ranch Dressing in front of Cool Hand Luke. When I learned of Houston's untimely passing, I took to my bed for the morning, glued to grainy clips of old performances on YouTube, all the while refreshing my Twitter feed to watch the world sharing in my ‘grief’.

When it came to this particular celebrity death, Twitter was my black armband, Facebook my veil, YouTube my kitschy shrine to a complete stranger. Suddenly the outpourings of hammy grief in North Korea following the death of Kim Jong Il didn’t look quite so absurd.

Psychologists call this bizarre mourning of intimate strangers ‘recreational grieving’. It's an apt term for something that allows us to indulge in the ceremony of grief without feeling particularly upset. We mope, wallow and wail en masse, but we needn’t lose any sleep over our ‘loss’.

The internet may be an enabler when it comes to recreational grieving, but it’s not a new phenomenon. When Rudolph Valentino died in 1926, 80,000 people queued up in the streets of New York to file past the actor’s body. Today when a musician dies, the behaviour contributes to rocketing record sales, but again this is nothing new; Elvis proved more lucrative after his death than when he was alive.

What was it about Jones’s death, from a heart attack at the age of 66, that saw me getting a bit sniffly during my morning ablutions? That, through the power of television, he played a small role in my childhood? That he seemed like such a Nice Chap? That it was a selfish excuse for a spot of grieving, free from the acute pain of true grief? Perhaps it was a combination of the three.

One friend considers his most embarrassing secret to be the fact that he joined the crowds of mourners, handkerchief in hand, for the funeral of Princess Diana. Neither a monarchist nor someone who showed any interest in her before her premature death, he “just got caught up in it all”, he says.

At best, such a response is mindless mass hysteria. At worst, it’s in pretty bad taste. More tasteless yet, perhaps, I have a small list of famous faces whose deaths I find myself actively dreading.

After all, if the untimely passing of one of the Monkees saw me sobbing in the shower of a Thursday morning, what depths of snot-caked indignity will I plumb come the loss of a grade-A-listed national treasure? I shudder to think. In the meantime, the Monkees’ back catalogue and Whitney Houston’s greatest hits are on rotation.