Review
Miriam’s Dead Good Adventure, episode 1, review: a funny and thought-provoking look at how to become immortal
Miriam’s Dead Good Adventure (BBC Two) sent the taboo-busting, 77-year-old actress Miriam Margolyes on a transatlantic mission to confront her fear of ageing. It began with the perfect opening line. “We’re all going to die,” she said… “or are we?”
As this suggested, in the course of her odyssey she would meet some people who believe that death is not inevitable (“I will invite you to my 500th birthday if you’re still here,” said one). This was the most Louis Theroux-like section of the documentary, but it was also the most fascinating. “Death is horrible. Who wants it?” said one speaker at an immortality convention. Margolyes found her lust for life intoxicating.
Margolyes’s journey took her from her parents’ graves in Oxford to a cemetery for the homeless and destitute in Arizona, where a rainbow shone above the horizon as she visited, and Margolyes cried. She was the perfect person to take this subject on. Margolyes is frank to the point of shocking about any subject you care to name, from sex to anti-Semitism, and here she was prepared to look death in the face and speak her mind, without losing her compassion or sense of humour. “That was a load of b-------,” she said after watching a “transhumanist” show off the sort of robot that might one day become a vessel for human consciousness.
A community of 9,000 Seventh-day Adventists in the town of Loma Linda, California, are 10 times more likely to live to 100 than most Americans. They have a vegetarian diet, exercise regularly and think about their bodies as a “temple of God”. Trust Margolyes, though. She found them evangelical in a way that “makes you want to stamp on them sometimes”.
“Chances are I’ll end my days in a place like this,” she said as she moved into a care home for patients with dementia-related illnesses, for a short stay. (Margolyes’s mother suffered from dementia and died at 69.) “I would be the worst bloody person to have to look after,” she observed. “Demanding, bad-tempered, fault finding… a nightmare!”
She would as well, but she’d be bloody hilarious with it. This documentary on the gloomiest of subjects was an unexpected treat: thought-provoking, funny and wise.