In his most accomplished novel, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, David Compton, who has died aged 93, anticipated the impact of reality television on the lives of its subjects. The book was published under the name of DG Compton in 1974, at least two decades before the fad for fly-on-the-wall documentaries revealed the ghoulish public curiosity in personal traumas.
Compton’s story describes a programme about a woman with a terminal illness. The book was later filmed by Bertrand Tavernier as Death Watch (La Mort en Direct, 1980), in which Romy Schneider played the dying woman, and Harvey Keitel the TV journalist whose eyes have been replaced by tiny cameras and who covertly and intimately records her last days.
