And this is your life after death

Douglas Adams, of The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame, has been chairing an amiable series on Radio 4 about the electronic future and how e-mail and e-living and e-publishing and e-recording are going to take over everything, if they havn't already...

Douglas Adams, of The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame, has been chairing an amiable series on Radio 4 about the electronic future and how e-mail and e-living and e-publishing and e-recording are going to take over everything, if they havn't already...

I realise looking back that I could have been up there with him now if only I had listened to him earlier. Nearly 20 years ago I found myself sitting at a table in Chez Victor off Shaftesbury Avenue having lunch with Douglas Adams and Stephen Pile. Douglas was waxing lyrical about getting all his correspondence on e-mail. Stephen and I glanced at each other, baffled. Neither of us had the faintest idea what e-mail even was. And neither of us looked as if we wanted to know. We must have looked like a couple of small dinosaurs being given an introduction to the concept of Darwinian evolution and deciding snootily not to get involved... If only I had taken up the challenge then and there, I could now be the head of a bankrupt dot.com company.

Anyway, Douglas has been chairing this amiable series on the e-future, and one of the things he said on the radio was that when a new technique comes along, it doesn't necessarily outmode the previous technique. Previous techniques merely settle down in another channel. When printing came along, the stonemason didn't disappear. We still need him to put the wording on our graves. We wouldn't want a flickering TV screen on our headstone, would we?

I haven't seen Stephen Pile for quite a while, but it so happened I was at another restaurant the other day (The Glass Boat, Bristol, excellent) sitting next to another writer, Morag Joss, who turned out to have listened to the same Douglas Adams programme and to have had the same reaction as I did: Oh, but it's a great idea to have a TV screen on your headstone! Forget stonemasons when you feel like dying - get in a TV artist! We both were breathtaken, in fact, by the way in which Douglas had dismissed the one really good idea he had had.

Of course, Douglas is a town boy and sees things like a town boy. He thinks that a stonemason is just someone who carves letters on headstones. If you live down here in the West Country, you realise that stonemasons are still people who build with stone, and repair stone buildings - after all, in the village where I live there is still a fully working stone quarry. But maybe it's because Morag and I don't see masons being put out of a job by flickering TV screens that we liked the idea of having a screen in our headstone.

What the screen would show is another problem. We didn't get much time to discuss it because the waiter arrived with pad and pencil at the ready (not an electronic note-taker, by the way, Douglas), but I seem to remember that while I simply visualised a perpetual 10-minute video showing highlights from one's life, over and over again, Morag favoured a pay-per-view system.

That does make sense. If you come to someone's grave bearing flowers, you don't want to arrive halfway through the video of their life and have to wait till it starts again. If you visit the grave regularly, you don't want to see the life story ever again. But if there was a pay-per-view facility or slot machine, most people would be happy to slip in a quid to get someone's edited highlights.

It would make a fascinating day at the graveyard, slipping from grave to grave, from stranger to stranger, seeing their tiny bio-videos, as I am sure they will be called. Home videos, and holiday films, are always tedious because they are long and unedited, but your last home video of all time would be a much snappier and better crafted affair. Having to get the best of your life into 10 minutes would concentrate the mind, and there might even be annual festivals for the best bio-video of the year - The Bio-Video Baftas, perhaps...

A reader writes: Dear Mr Kington, Yes, but what happens when these graveside TV facilities break down? How easy will it be getting an engineer out to mend a posthumous TV display? It's hard enough getting a repairman round to your house - how many TV engineers will want to turn up at the cemetery?

Miles Kington writes: All this will be taken care of by the new company I am forming - E-Obits, or Over My Dead Body Inc. Watch this space.