Given television’s appetite for fatality, we should be used to death. But usually it’s in the form of a fictional narrative device or a fleetingly distressing moment in a news bulletin. Rarely do we confront the often drawn-out process of dying itself. In How to Have a Good Death (BBC Two), Esther Rantzen wanted to tackle this “last taboo” through interviews with health professionals, the experiences of the terminally ill and the findings of a new survey.

So baleful statistics kept flashing up. While we would like to die at home surrounded by friends and family, 58 per cent of us will do so in hospital. This might suggest having the advantages of a professionally managed exit, yet tales of loved ones suffering severe or overwhelming pain revealed that doctors are apparently as unable to stare death in the face as ourselves.

Would 71 per cent of us (as the survey revealed) want doctors to be able to prescribe lethal medication if our palliative care was more effective? It’s still a Cinderella specialism within the NHS. As one consultant remarked: “Some think we’re a bunch of tree-hugging hippies who chuck morphine at people, others recognise that there’s more to us.” So although the ability to ease pain is the best yet, it isn’t applied as often as it should be. Also highlighted were such bizarre discrepancies as the palliative care available for cancer patients and the lack of support for those dying from old age or heart disease. The enlightened approach of the hospice movement is limited to 3,000 beds in the whole country, and even then they tend to be in prosperous communities where raising charitable funds is easier.

This was all grimly edifying but the programme made for bizarre viewing. Consumer-sounding statistics (“97 per cent hospice death satisfaction”) nestled with excruciatingly personal scenes in which final days were contemplated. Rantzen was an objective reporter one moment, a fiercely empathising interviewer the next, then on the verge of tears as she was asked about her husband’s final moments in hospital. Just as you were about to contemplate your own mortality with yet more clouds scudding over blue skies like some funeral-home screensaver, you were on an emotional rollercoaster involving someone else’s impending death.

An episode of The Simpsons came to mind in which Homer had 24 hours to live after eating poisoned sushi. Dr Hibbert explained the five stages of death: denial, anger, fear, bargaining and, finally, acceptance. Typically, the jovial doctor forgot pain. However, he gave Homer a helpful leaflet entitled So You’re Going to Die.

Rantzen’s programme ended up being like a heartfelt, polemical pamphlet arguing for better palliative care and the need to prepare for our own deaths. It was like watching John Pilger presenting an edition of Watchdog about the Grim Reaper. But I’m not sure what impact it will have. Laurie Taylor delivered a similarly themed Dispatches for Channel 4 last year and I don’t remember that programme igniting a national debate. But, combined with Channel 4’s old people season this week, it might encourage us to face a subject that we would prefer to ignore until it’s too late.

More missions to explain were recalled with affection in the Time Shift documentary Pay Attention Britain! (BBC Four) to mark 60 years of public information films produced by the Central Office of Information. These have ranged from encouraging women to go back to the factories after the war for some “light repetitive work”, and explaining the phenomenon of the London bus to those arriving from the colonies, to the efficacy of drawing the curtains after a nuclear attack. A Donald Pleasence-voiced Death hunting for drowned children in mill ponds and deep water still haunts my nightmares. Curiously, I’d forgotten that the 1970s drink- driving campaigns, in which the boyfriend was always left alive to feel guilty for killing his girlfriend, were such miniature horror movies.

It was interesting to see how these films shifted from state hand-holding propaganda to issues of practical living in which the house was portrayed as a multiple death-trap, and how rudimentary animation gave way to the harsh reality of Alvin Stardust’s sideburns. It was also good to be reminded that today’s adverts for the Armed Forces — the ones that look like computer games — come from the same government department that brought us Tufty and the Highway Code. Even as a kid, I wondered whether a squirrel was a suitable choice for instructing the nation’s youth about road safety, given the number of squashed furry animals I’d walk past every day.

I realise now that I was already contemplating death but somehow, over the years, I blotted out such mortal thoughts.

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