Beyond This Life - Episode 2

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? Tim finds that having a keepsake of your loved one goes far beyond a lock of hair. He attends the National Funeral Exhibition and encounters an industry where physical immortality is now marketed as a desirable commodity to those who have lost their belief in life after death but who are terrified of oblivion. Human ashes are made into paperweights and an umbilical cord is made into a diamond.