Review: Choice of tea or coffee in brightly coloured cups, then a brave man makes his final exit

Published on Tuesday 14 June 2011 16:14

Well, the teacups are nice. A bit too nice, in fact - zingy yellows and shrieking oranges - but you can understand why Ludwig Minelli, the founder of Dignitas, chose them. They're for the last cuppa you'll enjoy, just before the glass of poison. The beds are similarly rainbow-hued and on the walls, you've got a choice of landscapes. Minelli has done his best to make his blue house of assisted death in an industrial estate near Zurich as comfortable as possible.

Why am I talking about the furnishings? Well, it's easier than talking about the deaths. I didn't know where to look, and neither did Terry Pratchett, standing a respectful distance from Peter Smedley and his wife Christine, while a Swiss woman - not a doctor, but someone who presumably thought she'd be good at this, and she seemed to be - kept asking the motor neurone disease sufferer if he was sure he wanted to die. Just out of shot was the writer's faithful assistant Rob, much troubled by the whole process, who'd earlier quoted the programme's most eye-catching statistic: 21 per cent of Dignitas' business comes not from people with progressive or terminal illnesses but those suffering from a "weariness of life".

The cost of a short stay is 10,000 and, for obvious reasons, you pay in advance. Pratchett asked good questions, such as, with the house having room for two patients, did they ever bump into each other on the patio? Not often, said Minelli, unsurprisingly lugubrious, who joked about how his 50 tea varieties made him a "tea-ologist". Passing on all of them, Peter opted for coffee. "In the grand design, I've very little choice," he said, not wanting to be a burden. Pratchett called him "the bravest man I've ever met". And that's what he was.