<p>I was wondering if anybody knew of a method to configure apache to fall back to returning a static HTML page, should it (Apache) be able to determine that PHP has died?  This would provide the developer with a elegant solution to displaying an error page and not (worst case scenario) the source code of the PHP page that should have been executed.</p>

<p>Thanks.</p>

I would assume that this typically results in a 500 error, and you can configure apaches 500 handler to show a static page:
ErrorDocument 500 /500error.html
You can also read about error handlers on
apaches documentation site