Tuesday

The deaths, in fairly short succession, of Rick Mayall, Robin Williams and Richard Attenborough, all of whom were remembered incredibly fondly by both those who knew them and those who only knew them through their work, hangs over the world of entertainment still.

For no reason in particular, it brought to mind the inevitable “year in review” television specials that’ll be on our screens sometime between Christmas and New Year. And despite none of those people being linked to scandals, we all know that those type of programmes rely upon the following four things to happen to be any ‘good’:

* deaths of celebrities * wars * natural disasters * scandals

The first three live on in the collective memories; partly because of the twenty-four hour news cycle and the availability of footage, their broadcastable nature means we see them time and time again.

But the last of those is the only one that, in time, the precise memories fade. And I wonder which scandals, political and personal, will still be remembered a dozen years hence, or a few dozen.

The 1960s are, for some reason, held up as the time in history that, well, ‘lingers’ I guess is the word.

Whether it’s The Great Train Robbery, or The Moors Murders, or The Profumo Affair, I sometimes wonder what events that have taken place within the United Kingdom, say within the past dozen or so years, say since 1st January 2000, will still be remembered as landmark events, in forty years or so.

The obvious examples - good and bad - are the London Olympics of 2012 and the London bombings of July 2005. Will they still be remembered and talked about in forty years? The former will most definitely be remembered in years to come, but the latter? Horrible to say, but no, I don’t think so. Had there been more, (in which case they’d be remembered as merely ‘the first’) quite possibly, but now I think they’ll be a footnote, remembered by those who were in London at the time, something to bore the grandchildren with.

So what will be remembered?

I don’t know. But seeing as it’s disasters and scandals that are in general remembered rather than triumphs and successes, I’m not sure I want much to happen that will be remembered in detail by everyone decades later.