Bruce Forsyth Death Mask
Treating life as a good game, good game and always putting his best chin forward (a gesture some found comic, but which struck me as an act of narcissistic self-assertion), enabled Bruce Forsyth to have a career of great longevity in a business which, purportedly, is unlike any other.
For over seventy years he was on our TV screens - longer than any other male entertainer - proving that, if nothing else, the Mighty Atom was a monster of stamina, popular with producers and the public alike.
However, I have to confess to a wicked feeling of glee when I heard the news that he had died. Because Brucie belonged to that golf club of performers whom my parents loved when I was growing up, but I despised. As a child, the words light entertainment, royal variety, and London Palladium were anathema and he was associated with all these things.
But now he's dead. Gone to that great green room in the sky, where angels and demons bid for his eternal soul and the right to decide wherein it shall reside: Higher, higher! Lower, lower!
It seems that one of the few genuine pleasures of getting older is that one starts to outlive those who blighted the airwaves during one's childhood; the sinful pleasure of morose delectation and spitting on graves ...
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