Richard Wilson, the actor, recently did a nice series called Britain's Best Drives, pottering gently and good-humouredly about the country, sometimes raising an eyebrow. Here, in Richard Wilson: Two Feet in the Grave (BBC1), he's doing pretty much the same thing with death. Why have we never learned to talk about it, he wants to know, when it's the only certainty in life?
So he revisits the village where Victor Meldrew met his end, and where, within a couple of days, there was a roadside shrine to a grumpy sitcom character (some people are quite strange). He goes behind the scenes at a crematorium, looks through a spyhole at a chap being turned to ash. Actually, not ash initially – what comes out is clearly human, with bits of bone and skull. This is then put in to a "cremulator", like a tumbledrier containing heavy ceramic balls to pound it into something that looks like cat litter. Maybe some people use it as cat litter, instead of the more traditional approaches, such as putting it on the mantelpiece, turning it into fireworks, or mixing it with cocaine and snorting it. Or dumping it in Jane Austen's garden, which is what many people seem to do – far too many, says the gardener, who's getting fed up with stealth-scattering; she just clears it up and puts it in the compost. Austen died just up the road from Victor Meldrew, interestingly.
Richard gets fitted for a coffin – an £80 chipboard one, rather than one of the amazing creations some people go for: railway carriages, ballet shoes, canal boats, one in the shape of a hold-all (was that person a life-long luggage enthusiast?). He is invited to the funeral of a man called Dennis, a full-on traffic-stopping affair. And he visits a man named Andy, whose funeral is just up the road from now. Andy's a musician, so he'll probably have something more interesting than the usual stuff that's played: Sinatra's My Way, or I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston. For Richard's visit to Andy, we get some nice Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here.
Over in Salisbury, at an embalming college, a lady is to be pumped full of pink fluid. You have to match it to their skin colour, says Danielle, the embalming apprentice. Sort of inner makeup, says Richard. It gives her – the dead lady – the chance to look the way she would have wanted to look for her family, says Sheila, the principal. People don't look well when they have died, she adds. But at least they look dead. I don't want any pink fluid inside me when I've gone to the great gig in the sky. Richard agrees, though he doesn't admit it until he's left the embalmers. "A dead body is not necessarily all that frightening," he says. "It has a sort of stillness and beauty of its own." Quite.
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