A film by Don Haworth
More than 600,000 people in Britain die every year and the cost of funerals and commemoration amounts to about £55 million a year. Cremation, slow to gain in favour when its Victorian pioneers first lit the torch, has in the last twenty years rapidly established itself as the most popular means of disposal. It is one of the processes by which the rituals of death are diminished and the fact outwardly softened. This apparently is what we want.
The film is a report about what we get and how we behave. It mirrors our present uncertainty, the quite understandable contradiction by which most of us choose a Christian funeral service while at the same time doubting the essential Christian promise of everlasting life.
Commentary spoken by Derek Hart