Teen Undertaker, Friday 7.30pm, Channel 4

Posted by Stewart Turner

Teen Undertakers (c) Channel 4

“I was morbid as a child,” admitted 19-year-old undertaker Paul Gillett at the start of last night’s Cutting Edge documentary. “If I saw a dead bird in the street, I wouldn’t play with it, but I’d go and have a look.”

You can’t say the signs weren’t there early on, and sure enough, these days Paul makes his cash by shaving the faces and brushing the hair of dead bodies down at the local undertakers. It’s a creepy job, but someone’s got to do it, and luckily Paul loves it – so much so that he’s just started dating a fellow teen undertaker. During arm-in-arm strolls in the park the pair of them discuss messy sessions with the coroners and the best way to keep corpses’ eyelids open. What could be more romantic?

Norwich 18-year-old Laura is an even more unlikely undertaker. She was bitten by the funeral bug after doing a week’s work experience when she was just 14, and has been enthusiastically marketing death ever since. Her employers have even got a stand at the Royal Norfolk Show. “You could have a skip, you could have a sports bag,” she trilled to some potential customers, listing the wide range of novelty coffins on offer. You can even have a casket emblazoned with the badge of Norwich City football club if you really want to punish yourself in the afterlife.

Most moving of all were the final scenes of Paul dressing up his very own Uncle Dudley ready for burial, and Laura revealing that she once had to bury a school friend. This was a film riddled with the depressingly fleeting nature of life – engaging, moving and funny at the same time. For all their quirks, both undertakers shared wisdom beyond their years, and an acute awareness that life is precious, and needs to be grabbed with both hands.

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