It has been such a dire year that we may as well stick with the dark theme and ask have more celebrities died this year than normal years?
We lost some great singers such as David Bowie, Prince and George Michael. Leonard Cohen died also.
The two that stung me the most was Alan Rickman and Gene Wilder but we lost some big names such as Paul Daniels, Terry Wogan, Harper Lee, Glenn Frey, Victoria Woods, Andrew Sachs, Jimmy Young, Fidel Castro, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Rick Parfitt and Carrie Fisher.
The obvious person to ask would be the BBC's Obituaries Editor, Nick Serpell, who counted the number of BBC obituaries that ran across radio, TV and online since 2012 and found that twice as many notable people had died in 2016 compared to the same period in 2015, and five times as many as in 2012.
There is the tricky question of who even counts as a celebrity or even 'notable' 2016 seemed to be dangerous and fateful for the famous.
In 2012 there was 16 obituaries, 2013 saw 24, 2014 there was 29 obituaries, in 2015, it rose 32 and for 2016 and for 2016 it stood at 50 with the most deadly time to be famous over the Christmas period when eight more 'notable' people died within a two-week period.
So as a person who deals in the consequences of a famous death, why does he think more famous people died this year?
He thinks that the increase is because we're now half a century on from the flourishing of both TV and pop culture in the 1960s, which massively expanded the overall pool of public figures and depressingly, he thinks the trend will continue into 2017.
Seems we will have to get used to hearing more obituaries of the famous.
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