TV REVIEW:ION MONDAY night TV viewers saw a man take his own life. A British businessman, Peter Smedley, was handed a lethal dose of barbiturates by a woman he had met less than an hour before. He calmly drank it, and after a few minutes, including an agonising moment when he cried out for water, he died.
His wife of 40 years sat on the sofa beside him, stroking his hand, while a man knelt at her feet, filming the event on a small camera, and the writer Terry Pratchett looked on from across the room. It was profoundly sad and genuinely shocking.
Smedley, a wealthy 71-year-old with the progressive and deadly neurological condition motor neuron disease, had decided that while he was still able he would to go to Dignitas, in Switzerland, and end his life.
Pratchett had come across him while making Choosing to Die(BBC1, Monday), his docuquest to discover if it is "possible to arrange for yourself the death that you want". Diagnosed with Alzheimer's three years ago, Pratchett has made his position on the matter clear: he's a campaigner for assisted suicide. Rather than examining the deep moral quagmire this presents for society, the documentary was ultimately more about Pratchett's personal search for a way out of his illness, examining the mechanics of the process of assisted suicide and calling for the law in the UK to be changed.
In the stark way a well-made documentary can, it showed the reality of going to Dignitas, a phrase that has become shorthand for assisted suicide. Although assisted suicide is legal in some European countries for citizens of those countries, Switzerland is unusual in that it permits foreigners to travel to Zurich to take their lives, facilitated by the non-profit organisation Dignitas. It costs €10,000.
Smedley was first assessed by a doctor in his hotel room; then he and his wife travelled to the outskirts of Zurich to a modern blue house that looked like a factory, where two Dignitas volunteers they’d never met before facilitated the timetabled death.
“People come in live and leave dead,” said Pratchett, whose tone throughout was inquisitive and pragmatic. Although he could understand Smedley’s decision, he struggled with Andrew Colgan’s choice. The 42-year-old with multiple sclerosis, who seemed disturbingly well, explained opting for Dignitas by saying that his quality of life was becoming unbearable. He had attempted suicide and failed and was afraid his illness would progress to the point that he wouldn’t be able to travel – so he took the decision sooner, in Pratchett’s opinion, than he needed to. It was a tragedy, according to Pratchett: not the choice to die but the timing.
There were glimpses of the alternatives for people with terminal illnesses. Pratchett’s wife, who did not take part in the documentary, has expressed a wish to care for him through his Alzheimer’s until the end. The writer also visited Mick, a cabby with motor neuron disease now living in a hospice, where he maintains a positive outlook.
Back in the anonymous Dignitas building the facilitator asked several times, “Are you sure you want to die today,” to which Smedley, a polite, stiff-upper-lip type, answered every time with an even-toned, totally rational, “Yes.”
It’s the first time an assisted suicide has been shown on terrestrial TV, and it’s bound to become a landmark documentary, cut up and used by campaigners on both sides of the debate, although I think the pro side will find more ammunition in it. The anti side could pick out the footage of Smedley’s wife and Colgan’s mother both trying their hardest to be brave and supportive and facing the journey home from Switzerland alone. Or of Pratchett’s young assistant, whose face was a mix of upset and confusion at the events unfolding in front of him.
Ultimately viewers who don’t know quite what to think will find it difficult to get the picture of Peter Smedley’s last moments out of their heads.
IRISH PAINTERS DON'Tget much TV time, and certainly it's a risk filming them creating a piece of work because of the dreaded watching-paint-dry effect. In Arts Lives: Naked(RTÉ1, Tuesday), the director Gerry Hoban got around the problem. The programme engagingly explored an aspect of visual art by picking a classical theme, the nude, and matching three well-known artists – Una Sealy, Nick Miller and Sahoko Blake – with three sitters, the art critic and Irish Timescontributor Gemma Tipton, the Irish Timescolumnist John Waters and the Olympic swimmer Melanie Nocher.
It was a clever approach, allowing the models to explore their feelings about being painted without the armour that clothes provide and to show how the artists, each with a very different style, work.
For the artists, this is a job, one about which they feel passionately and think deeply, and are uniquely skilled at, but a job nevertheless. The filming process added another layer, as Sealy explained: “It’s one thing in a studio with one artist, or even in life-class situation. It’s not so much the crew in the room; it’s also the thought that this is for a television audience.”
Perhaps unexpectedly it was the male sitter for the male artist who was the most self-conscious about his body and how the artist might interpret him. Waters posed with a strategically placed bunch of daffodils (they wilted early on) – “It’s coy, but it’s not coy,” he argued unconvincingly – and there was talk about his body hair and pecs. He was also the one who seemed least pleased with his portrait, staring at it for a long time before passing positive judgment. Although maybe Miller didn’t quite sell it when he said Waters “looked like a man come in from a long journey from some cave or somewhere . . . with a bunch of flowers”.
For her piece Nocher marvelled at how the artist had captured the strength and definition of her muscles, while the process appeared to have helped Tipton look at herself in a new way, and she loved Sealy’s finished painting.
A DIFFERENT TAKEon the whose-body-is-it-anyway? question was found in a surprising undercurrent in The Walton Sextuplets(UTV, Monday), a nostalgic documentary about the world's first female surviving sextuplets. Born in Liverpool in 1983, they were such a curiosity that they were the subject of nine documentaries between their birth and when they turned 18, making them (with the possible exception of the royals) the most filmed family on British TV. Then they retired from the limelight, because one of them simply didn't want to do it any more. Now 27, she said she hated the presence of cameras at events that are usually family only: milestone birthdays, first days of school and all the rest. She had, she said, no choice until she was 18 but adulthood gave her the power to make her private life private and to say no.
Get stuck into. . .
U2 are Friday’s headline act as Glastonbury 2011 (BBC2, BBC3 and BBC4) begins, with coverage throughout the weekend.
