Beyond This Life - Episode 1

Tim Gardam, Principal of St Anne's College, Oxford, confronts our response to death in 21st-century Britain. He reflects on how we deal with death as a society and considers the relationship between those who have gone and those who are left behind. Most people can remember their first funeral - everyone can remember the first time they saw someone who had died. But how we respond to death and our own mortality varies greatly in multicultural Britain? Two teenagers face the unexpected death of their schoolfriend and seek the comfort of an afterlife despite not believing in God. And a 70-year-old British Hindu takes his fight to have an open funeral pyre to the High Court, believing that, if he doesn't, his soul will haunt those left behind.