From the start, everyone I knew felt uneasy at the very thought of Dick Sutherland’s last television project. Cleo Churchill urged me not to take part—the proposed documentary struck her as ghoulish in the extreme, pandering to the exhibitionist strains in Dick’s character. More tolerant of Dick, and admiring his courage, I had tried to sidestep his invitation for different reasons. In later years, countless similar programmes were to be shown on television, and the making of these films became part of the therapeutic process by which the dying prepared themselves for their deaths. But in 1979 the idea of an explicit filmed record of the last weeks running up to one’s death seemed virtually pornographic.

However, as I pointed out to Cleo, the film satisfied the logic of Dick’s life. He had felt fully alive only on television, and in a macabre way would be fully dead only if his last weeks, and even the moment of his death, took place under the camera lens. A BBC producer had already shown an interest in the project, and a format had been devised which would incorporate Dick’s film into a documentary series about the taboos surrounding this most unmentionable of topics.

“Taboos?” Cleo scoffed at the word, when we talked it over at her publisher’s office, careful to separate herself from me behind a barricade of wholesome children’s books. “He’s actually going to make a snuff movie. Jim, he’s staging a sex-death in which he’s raped out of existence by the whipped-up emotions of all those peak-time viewers. And you’re going to take part?”

“Cleo … that’s unfair. Think beyond the film. Aldous Huxley took LSD as he died—perhaps this is Dick’s way of coping with a challenge he can’t face. The film will probably never be shown, and I dare say he knows that.”

“But do you know it? Piffle!”

Three weeks earlier, after an exhausting struggle against his thyroid cancer, Dick had discharged himself from hospital. A makeup girl preparing us for a late-night discussion programme had first noticed the goitre. I remembered waiting to take Dick’s chair in front of the mirror, and how he sat surrounded by all the lights and cosmetic jars, his throat bobbing as the makeup girl pointed out his enlarged Adam’s apple. He caught my eye in the mirror, as if aware that a dimension had entered the script for which all his years in television had never prepared him.