Shhhh!

Michael Hutchence, singer and extreme masturbator

Despite being easy to mock the manner in which Michael Hutchence died, it is overlooked what a truly amazing feat it is to die wanking. One of the easiest skills for a human or monkey to master, it is also impossibly hard to die fromp.

Found dead in a hotel with a belt round his neck, a lot is made of what a great lover Michael was; a fact that - for those of us who were unlucky enough not to have been bedded by the pockmarked lothario - is easy to believe. If he paid that level of attention to his own self-abuse, imagine how elaborate the experience would have been for another human being.

Celebrities through the ages are famous for having people on their payroll whose job it is to make sure that - if they should mistakenly die - any evidence of their seedy life is covered up: wiping the porn off their hard drive, paying off their underage lovers, hiding their illegitimate children. It is likely Hutchence employed one of these shadowy servants, but their once-only role would probably have involved wiping clean and tucking his likely-huge pecker away, and breaking his stiff fingers out of their claw-like grip. A job which they quite royally fucked up.

Comedy is always claimed to be the new rock and roll, and the two disciplines rarely merge so seamlessly. His death echoed hauntingly with masturbation metaphors. Bono kindly wrote Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of about him, which was played on MOTD and Big Brother best bits, so that we - and his mum - would always be reminded that he wanked himself to death. A film of his life, Slide Away, is in pre-production. Surprisingly, it currently has no major male star attached.

Michael Hutchence, 38, died on November 22, 1997.