The Suicide Journalist

Three Months ago , The Observer began a new column, Second Class Male, by Richard Geefe. After an aborted suicide attempt, Geefe resumed his column - at the Editor's insistence - and it was renamed Time to Go, his account of his last few months on earth before killing himself in November. The columns, which provoked fierce controversy and a vast postbag, were written by Chris Morris, one of Britain's most innovative broadcasters, and the man behind such ground-breaking programmes as On the Hour, The Day Today, Brass Eye and Radio 1's Blue Jam. Many readers came late to Geefe's columns, including some of those most incensed as well as those most entertained, so we are reprinting all of Second Class Male and Time To Go in this special 4-page section. It includes, for the first time, the final column which features accounts of Geefe's last moments.

- The Observer Review, 4 July 1999

	`I would light up Gitanes. She would beg for horizontal Baudrillard in a sand dune'
	`The door of my flat is opened by a bird in a T-shirt and pants. I'd forgotten about her'
	`We agree that we would one day end up sharing breakfasts of hate'
	`Love of truth = death of love...'
	`She is my best friend, my only friend, and I have screwed her every which way. I am sewage'
	`I've started following sad foreign women. I'm not a stalker - I just love their exquisite erotolachrymalia'
	Last week, I decided to end it all. No one understood me. No one liked me. And here's why...
	Suicide is no picnic
	A week of firsts
	`There was a touching card from Harold Pinter, and Julie Burchill had sent me next year's diary (ho ho)'
	`The publisher needs all copy by August, so I am having to write about the end of my life now'
	`I am at best a Brian Wilson but a Brian Wilson before making Pet Sounds'

BOOKS & BOOKMEN

In all of the fulminations about TV hoaxer Chris Morris's latest venture - the Observer's "Time to Go" column and the ensuing Fourth Estate book - no one has mentioned that when the articles, ostensibly by suicidal columnist Richard Geefe, first began in May, Morris, claiming to be an outraged media type called Rory Gent, rang various book-trade hacks. He asked them if any of them had heard of "Geefe" and the obscene notion that he had landed an enormous book deal on the strength of a handful of angsty scribblings in the Absurder.

When the hacks replied, naturally, that they had not noticed "Geefe" or his work, Morris/Gent threw in the suggestion that either Hodder Headline or Fourth Estate was the publisher in question. When pressed, Fourth Estate's perennially cagey editorial director, Clive Priddle, told one of the trade hacks that he was "very excited" by "Geefe", but that "nothing has been agreed". "We hope that when he does write a book," Priddle continued, "it will be with us." In fact, Priddle was in on the joke from the start, and it will be interesting to see what happensto the book plans now that "Geefe" has been killed off four months early, with all of the columns having been reprinted by the Obs in a four-page pullout.

- Private Eye 980, Friday 9 July 1999
 

 Email to richard.geefe@observer.co.uk (probably not valid anymore)