Maybe it's just my viewing pattern. I tend to watch history programmes and documentaries with a smattering of science shows and movies thrown in for balance. Over the holidays I started to get a creepy feeling. Finally it dawned on me that I was watching hour after hour of dead people.
When I was a kid you tended to see only live people on the tube. In the subsequent decades a lot of those folks died... but their shows lived on. At first it wasn't a big deal. It was sort of nice watching someone you remembered fondly from the past. But back then you didn't see all that much of them, not nearly as much as you see today.
Today when you flick on the set you're apt to see someone who now dwells on the other side, from John Wayne to Jacque Cousteau to John Ritter, Cary Grant, Steve Allen, George Burns - you name it. Whatever happened to "life is for the living"?
My guess is that we're going to be saddled with a lot more necro-entertainment as the years go on. Some of these folks were very talented while they drew breath and, let's face it, their old shows are pretty cheap to run.
Imagine what our descendants will be thinking about us when they watch these same shows a century from now? Everything will seem so antiquated to them: our technology, our mores, our innocence, villainy, greed and waste. Imagine if we were able to sit back and watch film from our ancestors in the 18th and 19th centuries? The mind boggles.
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