Grumpy Oldie Man
God save us from the plague of ‘low-cost’ funeral adverts
Forgive the cloying, pious Thought For The Day tone. As a secular Jew addressing matters which are plainly none of his beeswax, I know not what I write.
But at this time of year, brethren, with the festival of Easter so fresh in the memory, I find myself reflecting upon this.
Had Jesus been exposed to the torrent of ‘low-cost’ funeral plan advertisements plaguing our TV screens, he would have volunteered for the crucifixion to remove any possibility that Pilate might let him go and enable him to live long enough to fall into the target 50-plus age range.
In no way do I wish to trivialise the self-sacrifice. Dying in excruciation for humanity’s redemption cannot be much fun.
Yet suffering takes many forms, and one is the ruination of a pleasantly cretinous half-hour in front of Are You Being Served? by five such commercials in the middle.
One moment, you’re grinning inanely as Mr Humphries declares himself to be free, or Mrs Slocombe mines the deepest shaft of searing originality by reference to stroking her pussy. The next, the avalanche begins, with the first of several consecutive inquiries as to whether you’ve considered how to spare loved ones the crippling cost of your internment.
It isn’t the unceasing reminder of mortality that distresses. I haven’t needed that since a water-swelling (oedema, to fellow hypochondriacs) on the right ankle convinced me I was in the final stages of congestive heart failure at the age of 21.
It took a year to summon the courage to consult a GP. After a thorough examination, she said she did want to refer me, albeit to a psychiatrist rather than a cardiologist. The oedema had vanished by the following morning.
No self-respecting Jew expects other than to ‘pass’, as we are now pleased to euphemise it, at any and every moment. One essential distinction is that where the goy reacts to the bleakest prognosis with a tortured ‘Why me?’, the Jew mutters, ‘So who else?’
Rather than constant flouting of death as a consumer choice, it is their incessancy and the quality of the art that offends.
On cable channels popular with the venerable – the kind that shows repeats of
Last of the Summer Wine (‘gentle comedy’, as the Radio Times styles it, gentle translating here to ‘not’) – they are relentless. They come at you with the remorselessness of Ray Winstone inviting you to bet responsibly on sports networks.
Every one of them, however alluring the £8-a-month deal and reliable the clock radio signing-up bribe, is an affront to the sensibilities.
From brief acquaintance, Michael Parkinson is just the kind of charming guy with whom you’d be thrilled to spend an evening down the boozer, wittering about old Ashes series and listening to cosily familiar anecdotes about Muhammad Ali and Emu.
But my father, a man of exquisite judgment, has turned against him for fronting one such advert, and was never all that about Good Old Parky’s fellow funereal front man Alan Titchmarsh in the first place.
And the ads featuring that antiquated brace of housewives’ choices are the best of them. The others feature performers hired in bulk from the talent agency World’s Worst Actors R Us. Not one of them would have got away with playing an extra at the rear of the biblical host in The Ten Commandments.
Whether assuring a daughter she needn’t worry about the cost when they go, or telling a friend that the old fella may have worn vulgar swimming trunks but let it never be said that he didn’t take care of his burial fee, they recite their lines with the relaxed naturalness of the haemorrhoids martyr hearing Dr Edward Scissorhands snap on the latex glove.
It is well known that funeral costs have soared dramatically in recent years, as the commercials like to reiterate, and for no apparent reason beyond profiteering. This industry seems to be what is known in Ecclesiastes as a right old racket.
So curiously ignored is the opportunity for undercutting that when I become lifetime dictator, an early edict will mandate an investigation into the funeral business and cut costs to an absolute minimum.
Regardless of that, the only sensible response from poor sods being harangued 40 or 50 times a day is, ‘Not my problem, mate. If anyone wants to pay over the odds for a casket, I hope they spend the Argos gift voucher wisely. But one of the few compensations about being deceased is not having to worry about bills.’
At this time of year, we have just celebrated not only Easter, but also the Passover, when the Lord Creator needed ten plagues to cajole the Egyptians into freeing His people from the House of Bondage.
If He’d had the wit (and, being omniscient, He has no excuse) to strap Pharaoh to an armchair in front of UK Gold, He’d have broken him in two hours without bothering with the hail, boils, locusts and the other seven.