[Right_to_die] Sunday Times critique of tv program "Reverend Death"

[World right-to-die news (nonprofit)]

 From The Sunday Times in London, May 25, 2008


  Reverend Death

AA Gill

What’s the worst thing that could happen? Well, you could be in such 
pain, so lonely, hopeless and depressed, that you wanted to kill 
yourself. Worse than that, you could be pained, lonely, hopeless, 
suicidal, etc, and then Jon Ronson turns up. As you miserably 
contemplate the ruins of your hopeless existence, Ronson fidgets in the 
corner and asks plaintively: “What do I think about what you think?”

Ronson comes from the Louis Theroux school of two-faced-nerd presenting 
– harmless, hopeless little men with cameras who befriend the patently 
bonkers, weird, sad, deluded and deranged on screen, then royally stuff 
them in the editing suite. Ronson’s preferred interviewing technique is 
to roll over and make himself the victim, lying in front of some raving 
American. They’re generally American because Americans are easier to 
laugh at and suspend identification with. He is that playground 
bottom-feeder, the bullied with a symbiotic and goading relationship 
with the bullies. And I, for one, am happy to accommodate him. His 
insipid snuffling after marginal people is not investigative or 
authoritative, it’s simply freak-baiting, though I must grudgingly admit 
that his most recent series, on military extrasensory experiments, was 
diverting. His latest offering, *Reverend Death* (Monday, C4), is 
happily back to his default setting of inveigling himself into sad lives.

This time, it was a Unitarian minister – American, of course – who helps 
people to kill themselves. They didn’t have to be terminally ill, or 
even in pain. They didn’t have to be old, or even unhappy. They might 
just have mentioned in passing that life was getting on top of them, and 
the vicar would be round like human

Rentokil, with gas, pills, poison, possibly an asp or two and a CD of 
Buddhist chanting. This should have been an alternately touching and 
terrifying documentary about ethics, unhappiness, medical sensibility 
and the hereafter. Instead, we got a pitch for an Ealing comedy. Almost 
every character could have been played by Alec Guinness, except for 
Ronson himself – that would have to be Charles Hawtrey.

There was a point when Ronson accused the death-promoting vicar of being 
too fond of hanging around death, then let slip that he’d been filming 
this programme for four years. That must have been a year ago. Five 
years of a life devoted to traipsing around after a delusional, sad 
pastor who likes to help old ladies off themselves. I’m sorry, but who’s 
enjoying being around death too much? For all Ronson’s wheedling and 
insinuating, what we were shown looked like a film student’s rough cut 
of something he’d knocked up in the holidays.