Why we can't get enough of the dead (on TV that is)

“Celebrities have a posthumous career,” begins Ruth Penfold Mounce. “Michael Jackson’s earnings peaked after he died and pushed Elvis off the top slot - and he had been there a long time.”

Many of these celebrities are in fact brands, whose power to influence lives on long after their bodily demise. “They might be managed by their families or a business that can still use their image and they can still be successful,” says Ruth.

Being dead can be seriously good not just for celebrities, but for cities too. There is a whole industry built around the notion of “dead tourism”- and York thrives on it. Just think of York Dungeon - an attraction designed to entertain the public with grisly stories from the past. Clifford’s Tower is not just a magnificent historic monument but also the place where a bloody massacre of Jews took place. By the city walls near the railway station lie the cholera pits, a burial ground remembered today by a plaque commemorating the 185 victims who died in 1832.

“Anywhere you go with history, you will find death, suffering and pain,” says Ruth. “The ancientness of York means there is an awful lot of that.”

Visitors flock to the Castle Museum to see Dick Turpin’s cell while tour buses pass Turpin’s grave at St George’s Church graveyard.

It is here I meet Ruth to find out more about our fascination with the dead. She is a lecturer in the sociology department at the University of York, and one of the organisers of the academic conference, Death and Culture, to be held in the city in September.

One of its aims is to build up York’s reputation as the foremost place to study these areas in the UK.

Ruth says: “It is looking at how our culture approaches death. People often say that death is a taboo subject, one we don’t want to talk about. But we are so surrounded by it.” She talks about us getting our regular fix of the macabre through the TV shows we love to watch, from CSI to Silent Witness. “We see dead bodies by watching TV and films and from reading fiction, and we see people dying in horrific ways. But we are not that comfortable with it in reality. There is a security in exploring death through popular culture.”

What explains our blood-thirst for these crime dramas and thrillers?

“Death is a great equaliser, it is something we are all going to face,” says Ruth. Sometimes, it is a sheer taste for the macabre. “It’s something we should not be thinking about - and we are attracted to darkness.”

It’s this same instinct that draws people to the scenes and sites of misery. “When Madeleine McCann disappeared, bus loads of tourists came to see the church where the parents prayed and the hotel room which she was taken from,” begins Ruth. “They would have had a whole range of motives. Some would have been genuinely curious but there would have been elements of people wanting to fully understand why this atrocious thing had happened and going to the place where it happened makes it more real.”

Ruth is organising the conference alongside Julie Rugg, an expert in cemeteries, Phd student Jack Denham and Ben Poole of the Theatre, Film and TV department. One area of interest is how trends in popular culture - the TV, movies and books we consume - reflect what is going on in society. “Zombie movies tend to get more popular in times of austerity. When these films were popular before it was in the 1970s when we were having difficult economic times,” says Ruth.

And she has a view as well on the so called “celebrity curse of 2016” which has “claimed” the likes of David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Paul Daniels, Terry Wogan, Victoria Wood, and most recently Muhammad Ali.

She said: “It is not a celebrity curse! Some of our big celebrities became famous at a time when we only had four TV channels and they had very, very big audiences. It is now hard to get that level of fame from TV and I think those sort of celebrities are in decline. Perhaps we are grieving the loss of these icons now because we probably won’t see the likes of them again.”