Have you ever watched
someone die? Almost everybody has. Ok, so not in real life but on TV or in a
film? Deaths are used by writers to make us laugh or cry, but
I've watched two this week which, well, irritated me. Instead of being sucked
into the emotional tragedy unfolding before me, I sat muttering ”well that
wasn't very realistic”. Now, I am the queen of suspending disbelief- I've
watched Neighbours for over 25 years, my Freeview recorder has 169 episodes of
Murder, She Wrote on it (Angela Lansbury makes me want to be old) and I believe
that Jack Bauer really could do all that AND MORE in 24hrs. But even my
imagination couldn’t keep me in TV land when faced with Queen Eva's death in Once Upon a Time this week. I
was sucked out of the story and spat out onto the sofa by the absurdity of it.
An immaculately beautiful woman imparted an eloquent, heartfelt message before
dying in a neat, quick and quiet way. You could almost feel her holding her
breath. No death rattle for Queen Eva.
But that was a fairy-tale,
she was poisoned, maybe magically cursed people do die just like that. (The
Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine was no help in this matter). But Queen Eva
wasn't the only irksome death of the week- I felt just as bothered by the
departure of Raj from 90210.
Yes, my name is Catherine and I watch 90210…it’s like the crack of TV,
so bad, yet you just can’t stop it, and your husband doesn't understand why you
keep going back to it. Anyways, there I was, enjoying my fix of emotional highs
and lows delivered by the beautiful people. Raj was in hospital looking a little
hungover. We know he’s close to death, purely because we've been told so, but
he's chatting away, being witty, romantic and thoughtful. Then his girl pops
out for a second and returns to find him dead. We know he's dead because his eyes are shut and she drops a glass of water. Again it’s neat, quick and
quiet. Bothersomely so.
You
see people in TV land, like Raj and Eva, die without dying. In the real world,
death is an event, but dying is a process. Noisy, irregular breathing, semi-consciousness,
confusion, a dry mouth, restlessness- these are often very normal parts of dying.
Yet we
don’t often see this on TV, despite the fact that a LOT of people die in soaps.
A study of soap characters in the BMJ found
that “standardised mortality ratios for characters were among the highest for
any occupation yet described”. The authors noted that “Their lives are more
dangerous even than those of Formula One racing drivers or bomb disposal
experts”. But despite this obsession with death, TV hates people dying. Perhaps
because it’s too upsetting? Yet, think of a soap wedding- we expect it to be
upsetting, we KNOW there are very few happily ever afters in soap land. TV
expends a huge amount of effort in creating drama and wringing every ounce of emotion
from an audience. So it seems strange that dying a soap death is as simple and
sanitized as you could hope for. Does this suggest dying, more than death, is a
taboo too shocking for TV?
I know that reality isn't
what these programmes are made for, but they are based firmly in our world.
Music we know plays in the pub, there are frequent references to Facebook and everyone in Ramsay Street has an ill-disguised mac book. These shows tell stories about people
and they're watched by millions. That means they have incredible potential to
influence our expectations of what normal is. Is TV making us think it’s normal
to die without dying? If so, a lot of us are ill prepared for when death forces
its way from our screens and into our lives.
Think back to the last time
you watched someone die in TV or film land. Did you really watch them die, or
just see a death?
