CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: Prue and her son don’t have the answer to life’s trickiest question

Prue And Danny’s Death Road Trip

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Funny Woman

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As if he was sticking a birthday candle into a suet pudding, Danny Kruger managed to garnish an unrelentingly morbid and depressing documentary with a single moment of levity.

‘She’s a national treasure, much loved,’ he said, of his mother Prue Leith. ‘I’m a Tory MP, less loved.’

Everything else in Prue And Danny’s Death Road Trip (Ch4) was relentlessly grim. Well-meaning but ill-conceived, this was a bizarrely flippant format for talking about a painfully serious subject.

Mother and son flew across the Atlantic before roving from Seattle to Georgia, and then to Vancouver in Canada, visiting places where medically aided suicide is legal. Kruger, who set up an all-party parliamentary group to oppose pressure for assisted dying in Britain, argued logically and methodically.

Prue And Danny’s Death Road Trip (Ch4) was relentlessly grim

He feared dreadful unintended consequences if doctors were able to end lives on request.

‘It has got to be about care, not killing,’ he insisted, warning of ‘a terrible dystopia of coercion’ and people wanting to end their lives because they are a burden.

‘I can’t imagine how we can design a law that is safe,’ he added.

Prue’s response was more emotional than analytical. She’d seen her older brother die in agony from a long illness, desperate to end his own life but unable to do so, while medics were powerless to give him the release he craved.

OVERCROWDING OF THE NIGHT:

Joining the panel of Tom Kerridge, Nisha Katona and Ed Gamble on Great British Menu (BBC2) was ex-Blue Peter star Gethin Jones.

SuperTed creator Mike Young looked in, too. I’ve heard of too many cooks.

Can you have too many cookery judges?

‘I would rather die like most dogs,’ said Prue, 82, fervently, ‘with a lethal injection, out in seconds.’ 

This one-off programme was unable to separate the logic from the emotion. Perhaps, with such a provocative topic, this could never be done. It certainly couldn’t be achieved in an hour of zigzagging around America.

As the father of a severely disabled child, I feel strongly that some doctors already put pressure on parents to abort unborn babies with suspected medical conditions.

The idea that this pressure might continue after the child is born, with the constant shadow of legalised euthanasia, is horrendous. But that’s my emotional response to the arguments.

No one interviewed on the show even considered children, though in Canada there was a suggestion that assisted dying might be appropriate for people with anorexia, an illness that frequently affects teenagers.

How can a law be framed that allows assisted dying but excludes the young? Should there be a cut-off point, at say 18 — and does that risk setting a target date for teenagers who are determined to die?

It’s easy to imagine, too, how attempts by teachers or parents to dissuade young people from assisted suicide could be decried as ‘conversion therapy’ and banned. None of this was addressed. Instead, the show got bogged down in asking which barbiturates were most lethally effective and painless — a side issue.

The slapstick of Funny Woman (Sky Max) made a welcome relief, as Gemma Arterton’s Blackpool beauty queen Barbara set about breaking into showbiz in Swinging London.

Gemma Arterton stars as Barbara Parker in Funny Woman (Sky Max) 

A punch-up in the dressing room of a Soho nightclub veered towards full Carry On farce, but mostly this series celebrates the laughter of telly’s early sitcom era.

References to Tony Hancock, the Goons, Eric Sykes and many others come almost too quickly to count.

Under dollops of prosthetic make-up, Rupert Everett is having a whale of a time as the seedy theatrical agent, Brian Debenham.

Kenneth Collard burst into the picture, playing a racist TV director. There’s no one better at playing appalling people, and he is making the most of it.

So too is Gemma. Waving a feather duster, she squawked, ‘Can I flick it on your knickknacks?’ Ooh madam!

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