SAM NEILL (1947 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Sam Neill, that wry New Zealander with the face of a mildly disappointed bloodhound and the voice of a man who had seen too many dinosaurs to be surprised by anything, has finally called 'cut' on his time in this world at the age of 78. He died as he lived: with quiet dignity, a glass of something decent in hand, and probably wondering why the rest of us made such a fuss about it all. 

Born Omagh, Northern Ireland, in 1947, he was whisked to Christchurch, New Zealand, as a boy, where the landscape taught him early that nature was both magnificent and faintly ridiculous. He studied English literature, dabbled in theatre, and eventually drifted into acting with the air of a man who had wandered into the wrong profession but decided to stay for the sandwiches. Success came steadily rather than in vulgar bursts: "My Brilliant Career", "The Piano", and "The Hunt for Red October" bought him to prominence. Yet it was as Dr Alan Grant in "Jurassic Park" that he achieved immortality, running from CGI lizards while maintaining the expression of a palaeontologist who had just remembered he left the oven on. 

Neill always seemed slightly amused by Hollywood’s excesses, as if the entire industry were a slightly overblown school play. In 1986 he even screen-tested for James Bond—a spectacle one suspects he undertook mostly to see if he could keep a straight face. He looked the part, delivered the lines with that dry Kiwi drawl, and then sensibly declined to pursue it. “You really don’t want to be the Bond no one likes,” he later observed with characteristic good sense. One pictures him in the tuxedo, raising a sceptical eyebrow at an exploding helicopter and thinking: "Must I really?" 

Off-screen, Neill was no mere thespian tourist. He founded Two Paddocks, his organic winery in Central Otago, and tended it with the devotion others reserve for religion or football. He planted natives, welcomed back tui and bellbirds, fought dubious mining proposals, and generally behaved like a man who understood that the planet was not, in fact, his personal green room. 

While lesser celebrities preached environmentalism from private jets, Neill got his hands dirty in the schist soils of his beloved South Island, proving that one could be both movie star and responsible steward of the land. It was, in its quiet way, rather heroic. He leaves behind a body of work remarkable for its range and restraint, a clutch of excellent Pinot Noirs, and the sort of gentle satirical intelligence that made him irresistible company. In an age of shouting, Sam Neill whispered truths with a raised eyebrow and a half-smile. The world is a little less civilised without him.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN (1957 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Dermot Murnaghan, who has died at the age of 68 after a bout with prostate cancer that he faced with the sort of stoic understatement one associates with men who once read the news as if it were a mildly disappointing cricket score, was the sort of broadcaster Britain used to produce before everything went shouty and sponsored. Known to a grateful nation of housewives as “Dishy Dermot,” he combined the silver-fox appeal of a man who looked as though he had stepped out of a 1950s advert for pipe tobacco with a delivery so measured you half-expected the autocue to apologise for wasting his time.

In an age when newsreaders increasingly resembled startled meerkats on energy drinks, Murnaghan maintained the old-school belief that the job was to inform, not audition for a part in your own personal drama. He could make a train delay in Kent sound like the fall of the Roman Empire without once raising his voice above the level of a concerned vicar. This gravitas served him well when history came calling uninvited. 

In 1997, as an ITN man, he had the melancholy honour of telling a disbelieving Britain that Diana, Princess of Wales, had died. One moment the nation was being reassured she’d merely broken a collarbone; the next, Dermot was reading the grim confirmation with the expression of a man who had just been handed a telegram from the gods and found it in poor taste. A quarter of a century later, on Sky News, he performed the same sombre service for Queen Elizabeth II. By then he had become the anchorman who announced the end of eras the way other men announce the end of office hours: calmly, professionally, and with the faint air of someone wondering why fate always chose his shift.

Of course, television being television, he also found himself in lighter waters. Viewers of a certain vintage will recall his cameo in Jeremy Clarkson’s Peel P50 adventure, in which the minuscule car—roughly the size of a resentful wheelie bin—made its stately progress through the BBC’s corridors. When Clarkson needed turning round, there was Dermot, obligingly giving the tiny vehicle a shove like a helpful uncle assisting with a particularly stubborn shopping trolley.

He presented Eggheads, anchored for pretty much every major network that would have him, and generally conducted himself with a decency that now feels almost eccentric. In our current era of performative sincerity and algorithmic outrage, Dermot Murnaghan was a reminder that the news could be delivered by someone who looked as though he might, in a crisis, actually know what to do with a fountain pen.

He is survived by his wife, children, and a profession that will miss his unflappable calm more than it realises. The autocue, one suspects, is already weeping quietly into its circuits.

BONNIE TYLER (1951 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Bonnie Tyler, the Welsh songstress whose voice sounded like gravel soaked in whisky and regret, has finally achieved the one thing her career never quite managed: universal silence. She died aged 75 in a Portuguese hospital, after complications that proved more conclusive than any record label’s marketing plan. The woman born Gaynor Hopkins in Skewen had spent decades proving that a name change and a pair of lungs roughened by surgical misfortune could turn a council-house girl into an international curiosity. 

Her breakthrough arrived with “It’s a Heartache,” a tune so cheerfully lachrymose it convinced listeners that love and indigestion were much the same thing. Then came the big one. “Total Eclipse of the Heart” - that overblown, bat-winged power ballad written by Jim Steinman - turned her into the high priestess of melodramatic darkness. Millions bought it, billions streamed it, and Tyler herself, with characteristic dry wit, admitted she earned “just about nothing” from the whole celestial circus. In the music business, even total eclipses leave the artist in the shade. 

Tyler’s great gift was sincerity wrapped in foghorn sincerity. With that magnificent rasp - the result of nodules removed and character left in - she could make the most bombastic sentiment feel like it had been dragged across a pub carpet at closing time. “Holding Out for a Hero” became the anthem for every generation that realised the cavalry was late and probably on minimum wage. She never pretended to be subtle. Subtlety was for people who hadn’t survived the 1980s with big hair and bigger shoulder pads.

Her career had its gentle descents. In 2013 the BBC, in one of those fits of patriotic optimism that usually precede sporting disappointment, sent her to Eurovision with “Believe in Me.” At 61, Tyler stood on stage in Malmö looking like a rock veteran who had taken a wrong turn at the M4 services. She came 19th. The continent, it turned out, did not entirely believe. It was a typically British result: noble effort, dignified failure, mild national embarrassment, and the quiet suspicion that nobody abroad had ever really understood us anyway. 

She outlasted most of her contemporaries by the simple expedient of refusing to go away. While lesser talents chased relevance, Tyler kept singing as if relevance were something that happened to other people. In the end, the voice that once promised total eclipse simply faded behind the clouds. The world will miss that unmistakable croak — part Janis Joplin, part colliery brass band, and entirely, defiantly, Bonnie.