Grayson Perry: Rites of Passage
CHANNEL 4, 10.00PM
Artist and occasional anthropologist Grayson Perry turns his focus to the big questions of life and death for this new series – and if you can get through the opening episode on death without sobbing then you’re a stronger, far less sentimental person than I am. Using a similar format to his previous Channel 4 series such as All Man and Divided Britain, Perry visits two British families dealing with death and creates a work of art reflecting what he uncovers. This time, those works have a personal intent, operating as a kind of memento mori.
There’s a further element too as Perry travels to Indonesia to explore the way in which the Toraja culture says goodbye to the departed and to contrast it with our own more stilted relationship to death. The documentary’s real power, however, comes from the two main stories: in Middlesbrough he meets mother Alison Seddon, whose grief over the death of her 17-year-old son Jordan is a raw, almost tangible thing, while in Hounslow, the indomitable Roch Maher, who has motor neurone disease, decides that the time has come to die as he has lived his life fully with laughter and warmth.