Man ist vielleicht ein wenig erleichtert, Graham Mason nicht gekannt zu haben, vielleicht aber auch enttäuscht. Der Nachruf auf ihn im Telegraph ist, in a way, mit einer Feder geschrieben, die in die Tinte reiner und inniger Liebe getaucht wurde. [via Slate, das diesen Text zu Unrecht für witzig hält.]

With BBC Television News he reported from the Northern Ireland troubles, and in 1975 took another year out to run a bar in Nicosia. It happened to coincide with civil war, and he and Marsh Dunbar were lucky to be evacuated by the RAF. From then until 1980 he worked for ITN. One day he was found asleep under his desk, drunk. It was something of a low point.

He was living with Marsh Dunbar in a flat in Berwick Street, Soho. A fire there sent them, fleeing bills, to a run-down council tower-block on the Isle of Dogs. The compensation was a view of a sweep of the Thames towards Greenwich. He worked while he still could managing Bobby Hunt's photographic library.

Graham Mason cooked Mediterranean food well, liked Piero della Francesca and Fidelio, choral evensong on the Third Programme and fireworks. After Marsh Dunbar's death in 2001, with almost all his friends dead, he sat imprisoned by emphysema in his flat, with a cylinder of oxygen by his armchair and bottles of white wine by his elbow, looking out over the Thames, still very angry.