WILLIAM ORBIT (1956 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

William Orbit has left the building, or rather the studio, at the age of 69, departing this world with the same unhurried elegance he once applied to a drum machine. Born William Mark Wainwright in 1956, the son of teachers who had clawed their way into the middle class only to watch their boy reverse the process by leaving school at sixteen to squat and consume Mars bars with acid, he spent the rest of his life proving that the right sort of noise could elevate almost anything.

He began, as so many English experimentalists do, in a disused school with a synthesiser and a pair of like-minded dreamers, forming Torch Song. The results were interesting in the way that early experiments with electricity were interesting: occasional sparks, intermittent power cuts, and the faint smell of something overheating. Then came the Strange Cargo series, ambient records that drifted past like expensive fog, and Bassomatic, which briefly persuaded the charts that house music could be both fascinating and rhythmic.

The real trick arrived when Madonna, seeking reinvention after a period of professional turbulence, hired him to produce Ray of Light. Suddenly the Queen of Pop sounded as if she had been left overnight in a particularly stylish planetarium. The album collected Grammys the way other people collect parking tickets. Orbit had performed the producer’s highest service: he made a superstar sound as though she had discovered depth, while ensuring the beats remained sufficiently propulsive that nobody actually fell asleep during the discovery.

He repeated variations of the miracle for Blur’s 13, All Saints’ “Pure Shores,” and assorted other clients who arrived seeking transcendence and left with something that would play nicely in both clubs and elevators. His own classical-electronic album Pieces in a Modern Style climbed the charts, proving that Barber’s Adagio could survive a night on the tiles and still look presentable at breakfast.

Orbit was the rare producer who made the technology sound human and the humans sound slightly more expensive. He never shouted. He merely adjusted the atmosphere until everyone else sounded better for having breathed it. In an industry devoted to the loud and the temporary, he specialised in the luminous and the lingering. The silence he leaves behind is, characteristically, rather well produced.

JIMMY CRICKET (1945 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Jimmy Cricket, not to be confused with Pinocchio's insect sidekick, has cracked his final gag at the venerable age of 80, surrounded by family, laughter, and presumably a spare pair of wellington boots. Born James Mulgrew in 1945 in the County Tyrone town of Cookstown, Cricket – real name suggesting either entomological destiny or a clerical error in the Book of Life – left school at 16, dallied briefly with the precarious mathematics of a betting shop, then discovered his true vocation as a Redcoat at Butlin’s. There, among the knobbly knees and forced singalongs, he honed the persona that would sustain him through five decades of light entertainment: cut-off trousers, bow tie, floppy hat, and those trademark wellies marked “L” and “R” heroically worn on the wrong feet. 

It was comedy of the gentlest, most Catholic variety – wholesome enough to make even a Bishop blush with approval, which, in 2015, one did when Pope Francis conferred upon him a Knighthood of the Order of St Gregory the Great for services to charity and not frightening the horses. Television beckoned in the 1980s after a talent show victory. And There’s More! gave the nation its nightly dose of affectionate daftness, launched Rory Bremner on an unsuspecting public, and allowed Cricket to tour the nation’s stages like a benevolent virus of good cheer. 

He appeared in Royal Variety Performances, pantomimes, radio series (Jimmy’s Cricket Team, naturally), and enough summer seasons to make Blackpool’s illuminations seem fleeting by comparison. His humour never punched down; it patted the audience on the head and offered them a cup of tea. In an age when comedians increasingly resembled angry sociologists with better agents, Cricket remained defiantly pre-ironic, a living rebuke to the notion that laughter requires a PhD in deconstruction. 

He raised four children, one of whom became a priest (proof, perhaps, that divine comedy runs in the family), supported hospices, and maintained the quiet decency of a man who understood that entertainment and edification need not be enemies. Death, that final curtain call, has now claimed him after a short illness. The world of British comedy, already short on unselfconscious warmth, is a size smaller without him. Alas, from Jimmy - now there's no more.

ROD LIDDLE (1960 - 2025): AN OBITUARY

Rod Liddle, who has set off to argue with the saints at the age of 66, was the sort of journalist who made one wonder whether the Fourth Estate had been wise to abandon its feudal origins. Born on April Fool’s Day 1960 – a date that, in his case, suggested either cosmic jest or impeccable career planning – he rose from Teesside roots to edit BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, only to resign in 2002 when the Corporation discovered, to its exquisite dismay, that impartiality and Rod Liddle were not natural bedfellows. 

In the years that followed, Liddle colonised the opinion pages of The Spectator, The Sunday Times and The Sun with a vigour that suggested he viewed the English language less as a vehicle for nuance than as a blunt instrument for poking sacred cows until they filed complaints. Where others saw complex social phenomena, Liddle detected pattern and folly: immigration as a time bomb, identity politics as a collective nervous breakdown, and the liberal consensus as a form of institutional self-harm conducted with the serene confidence of the well-pensioned. His critics called him a provocateur; his readers, when not writing letters demanding his head on a pike, found in him the relief of a man willing to say the unsayable, often before breakfast. 

He wrote books too – Selfish Whining Monkeys among them – in which he surveyed modern Britain with the affectionate exasperation of a man watching his favourite pub slide into gastro-pub irrelevance. There were marriages, divorces, children (Wilder, Tyler and Emmy, who spoke of him with touching filial loyalty), and a late tilt at parliamentary candidacy that confirmed politics had not lost its capacity to disappoint. Through it all, he maintained the air of a man who had wandered into the culture wars by accident and decided to enjoy the artillery.

Death, that ultimate sub-editor, has now blue-pencilled the lot. One suspects Liddle would have greeted it with a raised eyebrow and a column about how even mortality had been captured by the metropolitan elite. He was, in his irascible, indefatigable way, a reminder that journalism at its best is not a polite seminar but a bar brawl with footnotes. Britain’s public discourse is quieter for his absence, and perhaps a little duller. Which, one fancies, would have pleased him no end.