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

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.