Stephen Fry's America - "The Body farm"

I find anything that Fry does very interesting. He's increasingly becoming a self parody of himself through the British public schoolboy charicaturization but I still find his style and rhetoric engaging.

The second instalment of his America series was aired on BBC last night so I tuned in. It's quite interesting; albeit a little hasty. I won't make further comment on the show itself - that's for you to watch, or not. The thing that prompted this entry was a visit Fry made to the Forensic Anthropological Facility in Knoxville, Tennessee where they undertake detailed studies of human decomposition for forensic enlightenment.

It was an incredible place doing incredible work. Incredible in the very true sense of the word. The program scraped the surface of discovering the work done there and moved on but my mind lingered. Basically, people volunteer their bodies for the study when they've passed away and the bodies are then orchestrated to decay in a particular setting - a car, a bin, in a pile of leaves, etc.

They opened the lid of a wheelie bin to reveal the [significantly] decomposed remains of a corpse after "a few months". I just couldn't get away from the connection between this person's life (the memories they'd have, the people they'd met, the things they'd seen and done etc) and what they had become now. I think it just screamed at me the stark and unerring distinction between life and death - like a light switch- either on or off.