I wasn’t hugely familiar with Kevin Greening‘s work, but I heard him a few times on various stations and thought he was a better than average broadcaster with a decent sense of humour and the much-needed ability to reign in Zoe Ball (and drive the desk) when she first landed the Radio 1 breakfast show gig.
As with the Motherwell FC captain Phil O’Donnell, it’s obviously tragic when anyone so young dies so suddenly. Both deaths – one so horribly public, one absolutely private – remain unexplained, which inevitably piques journos’ prurient interest.
I hope I’m wrong and am unfairly slighting the Guardian, but it seems unnecessarily innuendous that the news of Greening’s death should be illustrated by that newspaper’s website with a years-old picture carrying the following caption:
DJ Kevin Greening enjoys a cocktail at the Detroit bar in London, as part of the Absolut Bar Stars event, organised by the Terrence Higgins Trust in 1999.
The BBC, the Independent and the Telegraph all managed to find photographs to illustrate their reports with photographs that do not carry with them a snide allusion to HIV/AIDS.
There is a line in John Woo’s “Broken Arrow” where the President’s deputy chief of staff says “I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that a nuclear weapon has been stolen or the fact that we have an expression for it.”
I don’t know what’s worse, cheap innuendo of this kind, or the fact that anyone in this day and age feels the need to tiptoe around the subject of AIDS anyway.