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 nebbishy 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 program, 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.