ON Boxing Day a headline in the Daily Mirror fatuously inquired: “Why are so many celebrities dying in 2016?” Not being able, of course, to answer its own leading question, it used the next sentence to offer a little justification for asking it in the first place: “George Michael and Rick Parfitt join long list of our best-loved stars.”

But how long is a long list? As a matter of fact celebrities, unless they have some collective genetic defect nobody has yet diagnosed, are dying at about the same rate as the rest of us, and the rest of us are actually dying at a slower rate than in the past because people are living longer – hence the growing number of oldies just sitting around waiting to snuff it.

Any answer to my question depends in turn on a second one: what is a celebrity? The Mirror’s story was based on a statistical sample of just 17, which even by the standards of the tabloid press is a trifle meagre. Perhaps the reporter had a terrible hangover from his Christmas parties and just wanted to get through his shift as quickly as possible.

I turned instead to what I hoped might be a more reliable source – a quality paper published in Glasgow, in fact not a million miles from where The National is published. This week, that quality paper has devoted generous space to the commemoration of, as I write, 128 people who have died in 2016. The total edges up from day-to-day as more celebrities rush to their graves before the end of what perhaps, after the bells on Saturday night, some bright sub-editor will dub the ‘Year of Death’.

But when I read down the list compiled by this quality paper, I found it not to be markedly superior to the tabloid’s. Of the 128, all but about 20 were showbiz – pop singers, actors, TV personalities, a “cult horror icon”, a female professional wrestler and then a certain number vaguely described as “entertainers”. There was one “who performed in scores of supporting, stage, film and television roles”, another who was “an original member of a seminal 1980s rock band”, a third who was “the archetypal modern celebrity known for who he was married to”. Truly these left their mark on our times.

I am getting on a bit myself, so the names include many contemporaries or near-contemporaries of mine (hard to restrain an inward smile at reading how they have passed on before me). But well over half of them I had never heard of. I may be fuddy-duddy now, but in my youth I was quite hip in my own little way. I had never heard of them because in those days we didn’t have celebrities, only well-known people who had done something worthwhile (or perhaps the opposite).

All those pop singers and actors were then probably doing not very much, as pop singers and actors tend not to do most of the time. No doings, no reports of doings: that was the rule of the press then. Only with hindsight are they all being declared celebrities, while the pointless banality of their lives is redefined as worth, well, celebration. I think this says more about the tawdry values of the 21st century than it says about them.

To explain what I mean, just let me pick out a few from that quality paper’s list who, it seems to me, would by contrast count as celebrities on any definition. They are not performers but creators.

There is Harper Lee, whose To Kill a Mockingbird is for many youngsters a wonderful introduction to serious literature. There is Nancy Reagan, foil to and support for one of the most successful US presidents. There is Sir Peter Maxwell-Davies, pioneering composer who found his spiritual home on Orkney. There is Johann Cruyff, chain-smoking exemplar of the Dutch style of total football. There is Zaha Hadid, who made architecture fluid rather than static, as we see from her Riverside Museum in Glasgow. There is Muhammad Ali, who turned from a boxer into a crusader. There is Fidel Castro, who only went to show – once again – that revolutions end in tyranny.

These will still be remembered in 10 years’ time, some perhaps in 100 years’ time. All the rest on the quality paper’s list will be forgotten before another Hogmanay arrives.

I sought to redress its poor taste in people by comparing its list with another to be found in these dog days between Christmas and New Year, when most of the media fill a newsless reality with retrospects. The list I chose was from CNN, a good contrast to the Glasgow quality paper because it is a US broadcaster, bland and banal indeed, but familiar because it is often the only English-language TV you can get in remote parts of the world. How would its definition of celebrity measure up?

It put the quality paper to shame. CNN had a somewhat excessive quotient of pop singers and actors, and, of course, its selection was overwhelmingly American. But it featured some names that might have rung a bell in Glasgow too – Edward Albee, author of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Michael Cimino, director of The Deer Hunter, the greatest and most harrowing Vietnam War film. Otherwise it was actually less parochial than the Scottish list. Even its pop singers included a Latin American idol, Juan Gabriel, and an African one, Papa Wemba.

It also included names that surely should have been on any conceivable list of the illustrious dead for 2016, Elie Wiesel, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the Holocaust, and Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose, a book that has not just 100 but 1000 years of life before it. In comparison, I give Glasgow big black marks for parochialism and banality.

Individuals fail and fall by the wayside, but a society, a nation, needs to press on. My wish for the end of 2016 would be that its many troubles and afflictions might generate an impulse to see things in a truer perspective than we have become used to seeing through the lens of celebrity. In Scotland especially, we require less triviality and more rigour in examining our problems, as well as more courage in facing them. That is the way through to the hope with which, apparently, our government wishes to imbue us. But I am not confident any of this is going to happen in 2017.