Radio: If I should die

23 April 2026, The Tablet

The first tranche of Doing Death Differently spends most of its time in two highly disparate locations – a “death cafe” in West Sussex and a ferry on the Mersey.

 “The world of death is going through a revolution,” Matthew Bannister proclaims at the start of this five-part celebration of the Radio 4 obits programme’s twentieth anniversary (20-24 April). Bespoke funerals; AI-driven grief bots; death plans and burial gardens aren’t the half of it: there’s also a determination – expressed by nearly all of Bannister’s interviewees – to take the fear out of the prospect of dying in the hope that the present may be better lived.

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