Our 24-hour news channels love a good celebrity death. They probably prefer wars and natural disasters, in many ways, but those are dangerous and expensive to film. When someone with a decent back-catalogue of showable clips cops it, preferably after lingering at death's door for a couple of days then snuffing it in time for the 6 o'clock bulletins, making television becomes very cheap and very easy.
So it was last week with George Best, who was buried on Saturday. The UK news channels in particular rolled out dozens of hours of programming, coverage, reports from outside hospitals and inside funerals. I just don't get it.
Why do they think I would want to watch all this? Who are the (presumably) hundreds of thousands of people who are tuning in to watch Best's funeral? Manchester United fans?
As background for any foreigners who, quite understandably, are wondering who this important statesman on religious leader was, George Best was a very good footballer in the late 60's and early 70's. Very good indeed: not as good as Pele or Maradona, but certainly up there with the best of the best. He was also a notorious drunkard who squandered his talent by retreating at the height of his career to drink himself stupid and ply his trade at a vast array of 3rd-rate dead-end clubs.
If you're American, imagine that Joe Montana or Dan Marino had decided to chuck it in at 28, devoting themselves to alcohol and occasionally turning out for a string of Japanese and German football clubs. Dalliances with models, the odd bankruptcy and a string of failed relationships and marriages: you know the deal. All culminating in a replacement liver, more drink, and a lingering, pneumonic death.
It didn't help that he was Irish and working class. That meant that his drunken fecklessness was positively glorified by society, who love nothing so much as a good Irish genius gone-to-the-bottle, be they Behan or MacGowan.
But I just don't get why endless hours of newspaper and television coverage were devoted to the man. He wasn't the Pope, for all that I loathed the "live from the queue outside St Peter's" excuse for television I had to avoid then, too. He was just a pissed-up footballer who'd lost interest in everything that gave him a purpose.
He would often - very often - tell a joke, recounting an occasion when, having room service deliver champagne, the waiter, despite the presence on and in Best's bed of 20 grand in cash and the current Miss Universe, asked him "where did it all go wrong?" Best would laugh at that, but the point is that the waiter - a man who would never enjoy the talent, the money or the women that Best was blessed with - saw which of these had real value. That Best told this story as frequently and mockingly perhaps showed a desperate knowledge of the truth of the waiter's comment, and a desire to hear everyone laugh at it.
George squandered it all, though others gave him endless chances: his last wife, Sky Sports, the liver donor. And that's what bites. Two people, somewhere in Britain, died to give him another chance. One was the donor. The other was the person who'd have got that liver had Best not done so. And Best's gratitude for such a chance extended to drinking himself to death.
From he to whom much has been given, much will be expected. And Best had so very, very much. I have no desire to watch endless tributes to a man who, ultimately, failed himself and those around him.