Eamonn poin­ted me to press release on a rather jar­ring new TV chan­nel offer­ing in Ger­many. Etos TV Mourn­ing Chan­nel is a 24/7 ETOS TVbroad­cast of video obit­u­ar­ies, short videos of the deceased as well as doc­u­ment­ar­ies on cemeter­ies and on funeral prac­tise. My first reac­tion was one of amazement — one that a broad­caster would pro­pose such a chan­nel and two that any­one could be expec­ted to tune in. Although, not some­thing I would expect to find myself watch­ing, on reflec­tion, there is much more to this story.

The present­a­tion of the pro­posal is very respect­ful. The chan­nel is for com­mem­or­a­tion of lives, accom­plish­ments and con­tri­bu­tions. There is an appar­ent trend in Ger­many for anonym­ous burial and although the pro­du­cers admit the obvi­ous com­mer­cial motiv­a­tion, they sug­gest that this chan­nel can ful­fill a real social need. There is an avoid­ance of even talk­ing about death, clearly some­thing that the funeral industry has had to com­bat in many cultures.

The idea to com­bat a taboo by turn­ing it into spec­tacle seems rather teutonic to me. Rather a black and white bin­ary approach to things. What I am reminded of is that there are some huge cul­tural issues sur­round­ing death, passing and remem­brance. There’s a strange nego­ti­ation between those attempt­ing to quietly fade away and those that think it right and proper to ‘force’ passing into the pub­lic eye.

This is not an inex­pens­ive ser­vice. Simple place­ment of a pic­ture and text on the net­work is in the region of 2000 euro, with video present­a­tion for a higher fee. Non­ethe­less, this is prob­ably com­men­sur­ate with the mag­nitude of fees sur­round­ing the funer­eal panoply.

Non­ethe­less, this may well be a rather aca­demic approach to read too much into this. Maybe this is merely a pub­li­city ploy. But I return to one of my ori­ginal ques­tions: who would tune in and watch this? It’s one thing to want to read the obits to see if there are known names show­ing up, quite another to watch without the inten­tion of mak­ing con­nec­tions. Do people want to make con­nec­tions with people out­side of life? This is an inter­est­ing form of ‘enter­tain­ment.’ — but then there are stranger ones — the ambu­lance chas­ing cam­era­men of Japan leap to mind.

It will be intriguing to see how this chan­nel fares.