Is BBC Going Too Far By Planning To Broadcast Intimate Scenes Of A Businessman Who Asked To Be Killed? Read…

A man lies on a bed in a drab, non-descript room. He is
dressed smartly, as if for an occasion, in a blue and pink checked shirt and
grey trousers. Shiny silver cufflinks are fastened at his wrists and his shoes
are neatly tied.

Around his bed stand loved ones, their eyes ringed red and
their heads bowed in sadness. A blonde woman, crying softly, holds his right
hand.

Slowly but surely, with shaking fingers, he opens a small
yellow valve on a tube that is attached via a needle to his left arm. He lies
back on the bed, breathes heavily and shuts his eyes for the last time.

Four minutes later, Simon Binner, 57, a brilliant
businessman with a loving wife and family from Purley, Surrey, was dead, killed
by a lethal dose of anaesthetic which he administered in a Swiss suicide clinic
600 miles from home.

His final, precious moments, on the morning of October 19
last year, were shared only with those he cared for the most in the world: his
wife, Debbie, sister Elizabeth and three of his closest friends.

Simon was so ashamed of what motor neurone disease — the
debilitating condition with which he had been diagnosed in January — had done
to him that he wouldn’t even let his mother, Jean, or his stepdaughters, Hannah
and Zoe, be present.

But tonight this most intimate of scenes will be broadcast
to an entire nation, when it forms the final part of a controversial BBC Two
documentary, How to Die: Simon’s Choice.

The programme follows Simon and his family for the ten
months preceding his suicide at the Eternal Spirit Foundation in Basel,
Switzerland.

Viewers will listen in on the challenging and emotional
conversations he and his wife Debbie had with Swiss clinic head Dr Erika
Preisig, who tells him dying ‘can be like a ceremony’.

They are given a detailed description of the medication used
to kill Simon, which is 30 times the dosage used to sedate patients in serious
operations. They will hear Debbie, in the months leading up to his death,
racked with grief, begging her husband to stay and battling to stop him from
taking his own life.

Then, in a shocking television first, viewers will follow
Simon into the Swiss clinic where he has arranged to die, see him administering
the drugs that will end his life — and finally watch him take his last,
devastating breath.

The next scene, apparently filmed minutes later, shows a
wooden coffin having its lid fitted on the bed where Simon was lying, and his
body being carried out of the room.

The ethically-contentious and emotionally-charged nature of
the scenes shown in the documentary has, quite understandably, raised major
concerns.

It is the first time footage from inside this Swiss
assisted-suicide clinic — the second biggest after Dignitas — will be shown on
British television, and many will find it not only difficult but too
distressing to watch.

Critics say the decision to screen the moment of Simon’s
death is particularly alarming, as it risks encouraging others to take their
own lives by ‘normalising’ assisted suicide, which remains illegal under UK
law.

All of which begs the question: has the BBC gone too far?