Timely documentaries exploring assisted dying

Today Kim Leadbeater MBE, Labour MP for Spen Valley, will formally introduce a Private Member’s Bill on Choice at the End of Life to the House of Commons. Parliamentary debates will follow and over the next few months assisted dying and the ethics of whether or not one should have the right to choose death over suffering will dominate the public discourse. Rarely does politics feel so visceral. 

Assisted dying is a hugely emotive and divisive subject and one which has featured prominently in our award entries over the last couple of years. 

Among the best of those was last year’s TV/Video award winner. A Time to Die (True Vision for ITV) is a powerful documentary which focuses on the stories of five people who want the right to die and how their situation affects their loved ones. The film’s producer, Jon Blair, said “There were times making this film when I said to my wife ‘I get up in the morning and go to work to weep’.” Our judges thought it was a remarkable film – deeply intimate, non-judgmental, and compassionate.  

Prue Leith and her politician son Danny Kruger famously disagree on the subject of assisted dying. In the jollier but no less cogently explored programme Prue and Danny’s Death Road Trip (Love Productions for Channel 4) the two visit US and Canada, where legislation exists to support assisted dying, to see if meeting some of those immediately affected would resolve their differences. It didn’t. But it did engage a large audience in a thoughtful debate.  

Too recent to qualify for last year’s Awards is the BBC’s Better Off Dead? fronted by the actress and disability rights activist Liz Carr. She believes that legislation of the sort being proposed would put the lives of disabled people at risk. Recently she screened her film in front of the US Congress.   

Whether you already have a position or not, whether you’re a politician who will get to vote on the issue or not, each of these films is worthwhile watching and may well inform what you think.