Want to live longer? A minute with scatty Miriam seems like a lifetime

Miriam’s Dead Good Adventure ★★☆☆☆ Britain’s Viking Graveyard ★★★★☆

Good grief, but Miriam Margolyes might want learn a little sensitivity. The actress who burped and parped her way through The real Marigold Hotel visited her parents’ grave at the beginning of her examination of taboos around old age, Miriam’s Dead Good Adventure (BBC2).

She wanted to observe the Jewish custom of laying stones on the grave, but she had brought only one pebble. So she swiped a second from another plot.

Her excuse, she claimed, was that she’d known the dead man, wilfred — ‘and if he minds there’s nothing he can do about it’.

Later, she travelled to a Christian community in California with a high quota of centenarians. one sweet chap in a gym admitted to being 94. ‘The heavens have been good to me,’ he said.

‘S***-a-brick,’ retorted Miriam, 77. The old boy couldn’t disguise a wince of disgust.

She has this effect on most people, which is probably why none of her interviews is very long. Her subjects can’t wait to escape.

The philosopher-scientist aubrey de Grey, who has sunk his family’s multi-million-pound fortune into finding an antidote for death, sat down with Miriam beside a hotel pool, surrounded by pink plastic flamingoes.

For a moment, this looked like a

promising bit of television. But within a couple of minutes, Mim had told aubrey sarcastically that his aspirations would look good on his tombstone.

That would be a horrid thing to say to anyone, let alone a man striving to help people live longer. He stood up and left, politely.

If she’d shown an intelligent interest in anything other than his long beard, she might have got some thought-provoking footage.

Last time I saw aubrey on TV, a few years ago, he declared death to be ‘ridiculous’ and casually revealed that he drank up to eight pints of beer a day . . . starting after breakfast. If I did that, I might not live forever, but I’d definitely forget how old I was.

However, Miriam is not without self-awareness. She admitted, as she stomped around an old folks’ home, that she would be, ‘the worst bloody person to look after — demanding, bad-tempered, faultfinding, a nightmare’.

Then she began preaching to us about the importance of finding joy in the people around us. So when the residents kindly asked her to join in a game, did she moan? of course she did: ‘actually I really hate this!’

The Norsemen who raided and pillaged across half of Britain in the ninth century couldn’t have comprehended our modern obsession with living longer. For them, a brave death was the noblest ambition, as we discovered in Britain’s Viking Graveyard (C4).

a mass grave of 264 Viking warriors, about a fifth of them women, was discovered in a vicarage garden in derbyshire during the Seventies, and archaeologists have been fascinated by it ever since.

This update revealed that the prime plot was reserved for a chieftain named olaf, hacked to death during a battle in Scotland. Before his enemies rammed a spear through his eye socket, he received an axe to the groin.

To repair his mutilated body, his soldiers placed a boar’s tusk between his legs. well, olaf didn’t want to be turning up at Valhalla without his bits.

This documentary was full of surprising snippets. did you know that if you eat lots of fish, your bones will seem hundreds of years old, from an archaeologist’s viewpoint?

It’s something to do with carbon content. Now there’s a quick trick for instant longevity: haddock suppers.