Presenter John Humphrys’ exploration of modern attitudes to death is somewhat soulless, says Peter Mullen.

CHEER up! Here comes a book about death and dying written by the BBC Today presenter John Humphrys, with contributions from the medical doctor and bereavement counsellor Dr Sarah Jarvis.

There are many good things in it.

Humphrys’ account of his very mixed feelings about his father are honest and moving. The section on euthanasia shows that this subject is not as straightforward as sometimes portrayed by either the mercy-killers or its pro-life opponents. And there are even a few jokes of which my favourite is the tale of the very old French woman, Jeanne Calmant, who was asked if she ever worried about looking old and she replied: “No, I’ve only ever had one wrinkle, and I’m sitting on it!”

But there are some odd pieces of misinformation. It is claimed for example that “...a century ago the average life expectancy was 45 for men and 49 for women.” This is misleading for it suggests that most people in the early 20th Century were popping off in early middle age. They were not.

The figure for poor life expectancy was skewed by the numbers who died in infancy. If you got past the age of three, you had a good chance of living to be 70 – the three score years and ten which might be expected even in biblical times.

Describing contemporary improvements in living conditions, Humphrys criticises “...anyone who paints a rosecoloured view of the Fifties could not have lived through those years of numbing austerity”. Baloney! I grew up in the Fifties and in a back-to-back house in a Leeds slum. The sense among working people was of progressive prosperity. This was the decade when households began to acquire washing machines, vacuum cleaners, fridges, and even that mixed blessing, television. It was the Forties which were austere.

By the end of the Fifties, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan confidently led his party into an election campaign on the famous slogan: “You’ve never had it so good.”

And then there is the astonishing claim that “...one in three of today’s primary school children will live to be 100.” I don’t believe it. How does that statistic square with the other prediction that millions of children will die young because they are so fat?

The main fault of this book, though – what made me finish it in a mood of heavy disappointment – is that it is so mechanistic, so concerned with nuts and bolts that it ends up being rather soulless. I was not looking for an explicit religious dimension: though, actually, there is an implicit anti-religious dimension in the book’s omission of reference to the spiritual aspects of death. Humphrys doesn’t do God. Fair enough.

But whatever else death is, it is a great mystery and in order to discuss it adequately you have to understand the queasiness which the prospect of death still produces in us, despite the undoubted progress of medical science and the improvements in care for the dying, especially in the matter of pain relief. Despite all these improvements, we still feel uncomfortable about death.

It is Shakespeare’s question: “To die, to sleep. No more. Perchance to dream? For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.”

It’s a pity this deep thought did not give Humphrys pause. You don’t have to be morbid about death to understand the queasiness which it produces.

Tom Stoppard satirises this existential dread amusingly in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead when he asks us whether we’d like to wake up in a box – and, if so, whether we’d prefer to be alive in the box or dead in it.

Really Woody Allen sums up our feelings when he says: “I don’t mind dying: I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Exactly! Shakespeare, Stoppard and Allen refresh parts which Humphrys doesn’t reach.