WHEN my daughter at the age of 24, and while staying with us on Skye, made the decision to end her life – she was suffering from anorexia and other problems – by chance I found her tucked away in her bedroom one afternoon. Surrounded by pill packets and some alcohol she had left a note saying that she was sorry but she could not cope with life any longer. She wanted peace. In great distress I summoned help and she was taken away to hospital where resuscitation processes were set up and her deep unconsciousness abated. When I saw her later that day she was horrified and bewildered that she was still alive and would have to go on suffering. I felt as if I had committed an awful crime by preventing her desired death.
RICHARD BULLICK: Bringing back memories of a golden age
newrydemocrat.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from newrydemocrat.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
No risks, no fun and cancel culture: why we ll never see another Murray Walker
telegraph.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from telegraph.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
113 shares
It was an age before a multiplicity of channels blurred things, a time when the splendid instrument of the voice itself was a central part of the job in a way it is not quite today.
Like O’Sullevan and the others, Walker could convey drama by lowering his register, for all his high-octane excitement and the odd malapropism that were part of his legend. His autobiography, ‘Unless I Am Very Much Mistaken,’ sold like hot cakes.
When he was being treated for cancer which turned out to be not as serious as he feared nearly a decade ago he told me: ‘I have had a bloody marvellous life doing what I wanted to do travelling the world with fast-moving, high-stepping, ambitious, capable people.’
Murray Walker with James Hunt in 1983
Credit: GETTY IMAGES
It is hard to imagine that the late hell-raiser James Hunt is currently surrounded by too many cherubim or seraphim, but whatever the afterlife looks like for Formula 1 legends, he has been joined in the great Grand Prix commentary box in the sky by his long-term broadcast partner Murray Walker, who died this weekend aged 97.
Hunt retired from driving Formula 1 in the 1979 season and roared into the broadcast studio to join Walker: together they formed one of TV s great duos. The partnership ended too soon, with Hunt s untimely death in 1993, aged just 45. Walker himself still had many more laps to go after that, but like the loss of Peter Alliss in December, his passing is a sadness to all of us for whom the sport and the man had been interlinked for as long as we can remember.