If Philip Seymour Hoffman wasn’t happy, what hope is there for us?

Celebrity deaths have no decorum. From Elvis on his toilet to Whitney face down in her bathtub, their last moments sit alongside their songs, or films, or their drunken stumbles out of nightclubs. Kurt Cobain, my teenage idol, had been dead from a shotgun blast to the mouth for — what? Days? Hours, even? — before the newspapers started running photographs of his Converse-clad feet visible through the doorway of the shed in which he died. Fans would pass them around. Weird, really. If a favourite uncle dies in his bed, you don’t go asking your cousin for a Polaroid, do you?

Within a day of the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman this week, you could see a photograph of his bodybag leaving his New York apartment block, and read about him being found on a bathroom floor, syringe still in his arm. The Daily Mail had a supposedly tragic photograph of him asleep on an aeroplane a few days earlier (because only tragic junkies sleep on aeroplanes) and told us how his children had been playing at a playground nearby.