hinch is dead

Well now I know how Mark Twain once felt. He said that rumours of his death were grossly exaggerated.

A rumour swept Australia last night that I was dead. It started, I think, on radio 4BC in Brisbane. It moved to 2UE in Sydney. Somebody then contacted the Herald Sun in Melbourne.  Somebody called 3AW’s programme director Clark Forbes and somebody called our general manager Shane Healy.  Hinch is dead. What from I do not know. Then Robert Fidgeon, from the Herald Sun, doing his job, called my best mate, Dermot O’Brien, from Channel Ten. Somebody else called the Nightline crew at 3AW. And then my producers started getting calls. And Laurenna was in tears when she put a call through to my girlfriend.

I was actually, blissfully, having dinner at Cosi – one of my favourite cosy places in South Yarra – while all this was going on. But it does make you think. What if it were true?  What if your life was/were cut short? Have or had you achieved all you had hoped? Because we only pass this way once, as they say. In my case I would say YES. If I died today or tomorrow I would be happy with what I had achieved on this planet. And I wonder if you could say the same.

I have absolutely no idea where this rumour started. But, like Topsy, it just grew. Maybe it was wishful thinking. I used to joke that there was a ten thousand dollar contract on my head. Forty thousand people put in 25 cents each. But one thing is sure. Last night my phone was jammed with messages from people who had heard that I wad dead. I’m not sure why you would send a text message to a dead person.  But – as someone once said – That‘s Life.

But it did get me thinking about rumours and Chinese whispers. How do they start? How do they gain momentum? We all know about urban myths and the Internet has become the perfect conduit for such things. The Net is another name for wildfire. And it can be dangerous.

I have a nutter e-mailing me and making the most outrageous claims against some famous people. He claims that John Howard, Peter Costello and Alexander Downer are paedophiles. I ignored the first twenty or thirty. But after he e-mailed Sir Michael Somare at the Pacific leaders conference in Papua New Guinea and made the same reckless claims this week I did answer him and expressed the wish that Howard and Costello and Downer sue him for defamation and send him bankrupt.

There are some sick puppies out there.

Anyway, Hinch is still alive and still kicking. I still don’t know how or where this all started. Maybe, as I said, it was wishful thinking.

Thursday, October 27, 2005

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2005