Last night I, like many others I presume, sat down and watched Terry Pratchett: Choosing To Die, an emotional documentary that showed the author, who is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, exploring the subject of assisted death, which he supports. This involved going to Switzerland – the act is legal there whilst it currently isn’t in the UK – where he followed two people who chose to end their life there. The last ten minutes showed a man drinking a lethal fluid before subsequently falling asleep and then eventually was pronounced dead.
It was a startling, powerful and thought-provoking documentary. I feel very much when these things are televised that one has to absorb what they’ve just seen. I would certainly need the time to consider and conclude what my feelings are on assisted death/euthanasia after seeing that program because it raises many important points.
Sadly, the BBC had other ideas. Right after it ended, a special edition of Newsnight started up, presenting…well, I’ll let the Radio Times explain:
In a follow-up to the documentary shown at 9pm, Jeremy Paxman talks to Sir Terry Pratchett, while a panel of guests debates the controversial issues surrounding assisted death. Can a satisfactory legal framework ever be devised to enable the terminally ill to take their own lives?
I have no problem with the idea of a debate on the issue and I appreciate that a level of sensitivity towards the issue was shown but this particular broadcast really angered me for two principal reasons.
Firstly, the timing of it is really ill-judged and it leads on to a much broader point about the state of news, specially television news, in the technology/24-hour age. We now live in a world where it is impossible to witness something and then be allowed to have some time to make our own judgements. Instead, what we’ve now succumbed to is watching people talk about thing they’ve just seen unfold on the TV and making snap judgements that are meant to be final. Inevitably these discussions can help influence what we think to the point where any opinion we have thereafter is not truly our own opinion.
A snap judgement on an issue as complex as this is impossible, so why hold this now? Why not wait a week or two or maybe even longer for all the fuss to die down? The counter-argument is that it’s topical. This is true but it’s not the be all and end of it.
Secondly, it trivialised the debate to almost excruciatingly painful levels. Three people who supported assisted death were pretty much pitted against three people against it, therefore pretty much allowing argumentative and overly-passionate discussion to unfold. How is this productive? If anything it is counter-productive and has the potential to encourage discourse of a dubious and questionable nature. A week ago, Graham Linehan refused to get sucked into an ‘artificial argument’ about films being brought to the theatre. You can read his piece on The Guardian’s site but this quote is key:
The style of debate practised by the Today programme poisons discourse in this country. It is an arena where there are no positions possible except for diametrically opposed ones, where nuance is not permitted and where politicians are forced into defensive positions of utter banality. None of it is any good for the national conversation.
Whilst watching the debate, I felt that there seemed to be no middle ground being offered up; it was incredibly stilted. The reason why, in my mind, was because it was set up to be that way. It also didn’t help that, when you take away the pre-recorded segments that were introduced throughout, they only have twenty minutes to discuss everything, which is utter nonsense.
Incidentally, after I tweeted about my disappointment with Newsnight, I got a response from their own Twitter account basically asking why. I hope that this goes some way towards answering that but I also have queries of my own. Why are debates like the one you aired last night set up in a way that feels constructed more to get people riled up as opposed to actually producing a discussion that is sensible? Why did you decide to have this debate immediately after the documentary aired? I’d be really interested in what they have to say for themselves and, in a dream world, would hope to have a discussion with someone of appropriate power. I love journalism and I love current affairs but this didn’t it any justice whatsoever.
Disclaimer: Just to clarify, before someone thinks otherwise, I am not criticising the documentary itself. It was extraordinary television that will no doubt be one of the year’s most memorable piece of documentary-making.
