Death, now on a TV near you

[JawD 99]

The BBC is facing a new controversy over the way it handles death after it was revealed that the corporation is to screen a dying man’s last breath in a programme about the human body.

 

This comes little over a week after the broadcaster was accused of being a ‘cheerleader for assisted suicide’ for filming a man killing himself at a Dignitas clinic for a separate programme.

 

Yesterday it emerged that the second episode of a BBC1 science series called Inside the Human Body, to be broadcast next month, will show the moment an 84-year-old man called Gerald dies at home surrounded by his family.

 

The presenter: Michael Mosley said it was important not to 'shy away from talking about death and, when it's warranted, showing it'

 

Last night campaign groups said the BBC was ‘crossing the Rubicon’ by showing the scenes and expressed concern that it might be doing so to boost ratings.

 

Gerald was suffering from advanced cancer and died on January 1 this year.

 

While the programme, to be broadcast at 9pm on May 12, shows a death from natural causes as opposed to an assisted suicide there are still concerns about the ethics of the BBC screening such a moment.

 

The controversy follows the recent row about the documentary on assisted suicide fronted by Sir Terry Pratchett, which is due to be shown on BBC2 this summer

 

The novelist, who has Alzheimer’s, will be seen at the bedside of a 71-year-old motor neurone disease sufferer until he succumbs to the cocktail of drugs he has taken to end his life at the Swiss clinic. The programme, called Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die, will be the first time terrestrial television has shown a death by suicide.

 

While the science documentary next month does not involve suicide there are concerns that it is normalising real death on TV.

 

The makers of Inside the Human Body were put in touch with the cancer sufferer by a hospice in Pembury, Kent, which said it was ‘important that life-threatening illness and death is discussed and understood more in our society’.

 

When Gerald was approached last November he said he hoped it would help others.

 

Presenter Michael Mosley told Radio Times he knew there would be criticism but it was important not to ‘shy away from talking about death and, when it’s warranted, showing it’.

 

Dr Peter Saunders, campaign director of Care Not Killing, said: ‘Some aspects of life are so personal and private that even if individuals give their consent to be broadcast, we are wiser to keep them private.

 

‘I think we can deal sensitively and factually around conveying what happens around a death in order to alleviate the anxiety we have around the dying process without crossing this Rubicon.’

 

A BBC source said the footage was sensitively shot. It is thought the death scene lasts for less than five minutes and the voiceover carefully explains from a scientific perspective what is happening to Gerald’s body as he approaches death.

 

In 1998 there was controversy when a BBC1 series called The Human Body, presented by Lord Winston, broadcast the moment Herbie, a German man living in Ireland, succumbed to cancer.

 

A BBC spokesman said: ‘Death is an important part of the human experience, and showing Gerald’s death is integral to understanding what happens to the body when it is no longer able to function properly.

 

‘The BBC does not shy away from difficult subjects like this, but presents them in a sensitive and appropriate manner.’

 

So what do you think? Good TV? Just for ratings?

 

I find it a bit distasteful at first, but it will have the families approval and viewers have the option to watch or not. As for it being to boost viewing figures, isnt all TV?

[Kitman 2204]

Without seeing the programme, I'm not sure what this achieves other than providing titillation for viewers. There's few taboos left on TV and I'd have thought dying in peace and privacy should be one of them. It also sets a precedent for less responsible broadcasters to follow. So I think my gut reaction is against it.

[Christmas Tree 4466]

I can't really see why anyone would want to watch it. Will this be followed by someone narrating as another Human curls one out.....for science.

 

 

Bizarre

[Happy Face 29]

No-one complains when Commando is on.

[ChezGiven 0]

Seeing only titillation / viewing figures in the value of such a programme is narrow minded.

 

Its classic public service broadcasting.

[Monkeys Fist 41384]

I'd swear that the BBC did a documentary about Dignitas a few years back , which showed a British man's last moments.

 

I don't really see what the fuss is about. If it encourages more debate about assisted suicide then I'm all for it. Besides, the news is full of violent death shown at teatime ( eg.WTC footage) so a peaceful death depicted tastefully shouldn't really ruffle any feathers.

 

There's always the option not to watch it.

[JawD 99]

Thats the main thing, its your option to watch or not. Kinda why I dont get these people who complain? Turn the fucking thing over if you dont like it!

[Gejon 2]

Without seeing the programme, I'm not sure what this achieves other than providing titillation for viewers. There's few taboos left on TV and I'd have thought dying in peace and privacy should be one of them. It also sets a precedent for less responsible broadcasters to follow. So I think my gut reaction is against it.

 

 

I assume he wasn't forced in front of the cameras.

 

I don't think there should be a problem with this, death is a natural occurence so why should we be protected from it. Obviously ratings is always something they want but at least this will be educational.

[Happy Face 29]

Different type of thing, but Robert Fisk was saying recently there should be more some death on the news...

 

Let the images of war speak for themselves

 

I hate being called a war reporter. Firstly, because there is an unhappy flavour of the junkie about it. Secondly, because you cannot report a war without knowing the politics behind it.

 

Could Ed Murrow or Richard Dimbleby have covered the Second World War without understanding Chamberlain's policy of appeasement or Hitler's Anschluss? Could James Cameron – whose reporting on Korea was spectacular – have recorded the live test-firing of an atom bomb without knowledge of the Cold War?

 

I always say that reporters should be neutral and unbiased on the side of those who suffer. If you were covering the 18th-century slave trade, you would not give equal space to the slave-ship captain. At the liberation of an extermination camp, you do not give equal time to the SS. When the Palestinian Islamic Jihad blew up a pizzeria full of Israeli children in Jerusalem in 2001, I did not give equal space to the Islamic Jihad spokesman. At the Sabra and Chatila massacre in Beirut in 1982, I did not give equal time to the Israeli army who watched the killings and whose Lebanese allies committed the atrocity.

 

But television has different priorities. "Al Jazeera English" – as opposed to the Arabic version – manages to get it about right. Yes, I occasionally make an appearance on Al Jazeera and its reporters are good friends of mine. But it does say who the bad guys are; it does speak out, and it puts the usually pusillanimous BBC to shame. What I am most struck by, however, is the quality of the reporting. Not the actual words. But the pictures.

 

In Tunisia and in Bahrain, I often shared a car with James Bays of Al Jazeera (and yes, he is a mate of mine, and yes, I was travelling at his expense, of course!), but I was fascinated by the way he would step aside from the camera with the words "I'll just let you see the scene here for a moment", and then he would disappear and let us watch the tens of thousands of Egyptian refugees on the Tunisian border or the tens of thousands of Shia demonstrators with their Bahraini flags on the Pearl roundabout (the "pearl" having now been destroyed by the king like a ritual book-burning). The pictures spoke instead of words. The reporter took a back seat (watch the BBC's boys and girls, for ever gesticulating with their silly hands, for the opposite) and the picture told the story.

 

Bays himself is now covering the rebel advance and constant retreat from western Libya – more retreating, I suspect, than Generals Wavell and Klopper (yes, James, look him up) – did in the Libyan desert in the 1940s, but again, he steps aside from the picture and lets us watch the chaos of panic and fear on the road from Ajdabiya. "I'll just let you see this with your own eyes," he says. And by God, he does. I'm not sure this is how war should be reported. Can you report on the 1945 fall of Berlin without General Zhukov? Or June of 1940 without Churchill? But at least we are left to make up our own minds.

 

When Dimbleby reported on the Hamburg firestorm – "All I can see before me is a great white basin of light in the sky", still haunts me – we needed his words. Just as we needed Ed Murrow's comment that he would move his cable "just a bit" to allow Londoners to flock for cover outside St Martin-in-the-Fields during the Blitz. But there is something indelibly moving about a straight camera report without a reporter. Eurovision often does this – "without words", it calls the tapes – and I wonder if it does not presage a new kind of journalism.

 

John Simpson tried to do this on the BBC before the fall of Kabul in 2001, but he used a different method. He allowed viewers to see his second camera crew. They became part of the dispatches as he moved from scene to scene, and slowly we got used to the idea that there was a four-man crew with him, to the point that they became natural participants in the story, as obvious as the reporter himself. I'm all for this. The idea that we still have to do "noddies" – where the reporter, long after an interview, nods meaningfully in front of the camera as if he were still listening to his long-departed interviewee – is ridiculous. And to go back for a moment, please, please, will television reporters STOP playing with their hands as if they are some Shakespearean extra, trying to explain themselves in front of bored theatre audiences.

 

Bays still uses his hands a bit – I noticed that I did on Al Jazeera the other day – but more often than not, it's to invite the audience to look at something he has seen. I once wrote that you cannot describe a massacre in print without using the language of a medical report, and I fear that television (even Al Jazeera) does not yet give us the full horror of atrocities. The claim that the dead cannot be shown – when we journos have to see them in all their horror – always seems to me dissembling. If governments go to war (how many saw pictures of the Libyan dead after coalition raids this week? Answer: zero), then we should be allowed the see the true face of war.

 

For the moment, however, watch Al Jazeera, have a look at my good friend James Bays – and pray that he doesn't have to retreat any more. Also, after this column, that he still lets me travel in his crews' cars.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/comme...es-2260019.html

[Rob W 0]

built my hopes up - thought it might be Leazes Last Stand against the Moslem Hordes

[Kitman 2204]

Personally I don't think it's providing a public service to show a real person at the moment of their death. I just don't see how it's educational or enlightening to show it, this is (was) a real person not an exhibit. For the same reason I'm against showing the autopsy of a real person, however interesting or educational that might be to viewers. I guess I dislike the idea of someone tuning in to watch someone else dying, whilst munching crisps in their easy chair, however well intentioned the programme.

 

Nor do I think it's a matter of simply turning over if you don't like it. I think the man should be left to die in privacy, with his family, without a camera there and a bunch of BBC technicians to record the moment. Where you draw the line on what you show is a difficult issue but this feels wrong to me.

 

I'll admit I haven't thought it through, no doubt the man and his family were happy with it, it's an important area of human experience, and I'm against censorship generally. Just my gut reaction is against it. Then again, I admit I've got a pretty dim view of the media and their vulture mentality.

[Happy Face 29]

I have no clue what the problem is with it. Can't imagine anyone's reason for objecting.

[Toonraider 0]

I see enough death in my job and recently with people close to me, so I shan't be tuning in