Spectator competition winners: verse obituaries for Harper Lee, Val Doonican and Alan Rickman

The latest competition called for a verse obituary of a well-known person who has died in the past year. There’s certainly no shortage of candidates. Whether more famous people than usual are dying or whether it just seems that way I don’t know, but hardly a day goes by without one of the stars of light entertainment who provided the cultural backdrop to my formative years — Ronnie Corbett, Victoria Wood, Paul Daniels, Anne Kirkbride, Terry Wogan, Cilla Black, Keith Harris — checking into the horizontal Hilton. Alanna Blake and Max Ross were clever and touching on Ronnie Corbett; Chris O’Carroll, Martin Parker, D.A. Prince and Brian Murdoch also deserve honourable mentions. The entries printed below net their authors £25 apiece and Max Gutmann pockets the bonus fiver.

Max Gutmann Ms Harper Lee, a scribe of note, as her first published novel wrote To Kill a Mocking Bird — a pip. Her follow-up was nearly zip.

A public life was troublesome.