Second Class Male/Time To Go

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"Second Class Male" and "Time To Go" were a series of 12 spoof newspaper columns by satirist Chris Morris (under the pseudonym Richard Geefe) that appeared in The Observer in 1999.

"Second Class Male" was a feature column written by a handsome though ineffectual sort who has a lack of luck in life. After the sixth article, the writer of the column decides that on a certain date he will commit suicide, and the rest of his columns, retitled "Time To Go", will be written about the state of mind of someone knowing they're going to die on a particular date. The last article, consisting of accounts by Geefe's dinner party guests on the night of his death, was published after Morris's authorship had been revealed.

The articles were presented as actual fact and not as a Chris Morris production, although the premise was very similar to a monologue from his Blue Jam radio programme, titled "Suicide Journalist" on the Blue Jam compilation CD. The last pseudonymous column included a man speared by frozen piss and a suicide by repeated jumps from a first floor window; both situations from earlier work by Morris.

The series attacked the self-importance of columnists such as William Leith who wrote about little more than rowing with their girlfriends, and then the fashion for columns about dying typified by John Diamond's writing.

According to the IMDB a 7 minute short film (titled "Second Class Male") based on the second column (in which Geefe gets locked out of his flat) was made in 2006.[1]

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Chris Morris
Radio Shows
No Known Cure | Chris Morris | Loose Ends | Up Yer News | The Chris Morris Christmas Show | On the Hour | Why Bother? | The Chris Morris Music Show | Blue Jam
Television Shows
The Day Today | Brass Eye | Jam / Jaaaaam | Brass Eye Special | Nathan Barley
Other Projects
Big Train | BESTBAR(NONE)[2] | Second Class Male/Time To Go | The Smokehammer[3] | Absolute Atrocity Special | Bushwhacked | My Wrongs 8245 - 8249 and 117 | The IT Crowd
Related articles
Charlie Brooker | Armando Iannucci | Peter Cook
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