Stacey Dooley: Inside The Undertaker’s review – What a shame that prudish Stacey shunned this TV taboo, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS

Stacey Dooley: Inside the Funeral Homes (BBC1)

Judgement:

Hullraisers (K4)

Judgement:

You can’t take it with you. But you can do the next best thing: buy a gold-plated coffin, the Cadillac of coffins, for £42,499.

Stacey Dooley was exploring a coffin workshop on Inside The Undertakers (BBC1). Her eye was drawn to the purple ‘full glitter’ laminate and rainbow lining, making an awakening transition into the Next Life.

But she doubted going too bling, and rightly so. The gold sarcophagus fell out of fashion with Ramesses II and the ancient Egyptians. It attracts grave robbers.

Stacey was on tour with 80-year-old Pat planning her own funeral. Pat was more interested in the wicker coffins. They offered a double advantage: cheap and biodegradable. That’s all fine, but I don’t want to leave this world in a picnic basket, like a round of ham sandwiches.

The ultimate budget option was a cardboard box. Stacey knocked one over and for a moment I thought a paper Dracula was going to slide out. ‘Cardboard?’ she asked incredulously. ‘What if it rains?’

Good point. I’ve never been to a funeral when it wasn’t raining. The saleswoman suggested taking umbrellas, but then you take a risk. What if the thing got soggy and crumpled – or worse, the bottom fell out?

Vintage night technology

Although the story of the media romance between two Australian TV presenters is a bit plodding, the 1987-era props in The Newsreader (BBC2) are special: floppy disk computers, videocassettes and mobile phones as wind blocks. It’s retro-tastic

It was the only moment in this one-off documentary where Stacey seemed confidently in control. Most of the time she looked like she was about to run screaming from the camera.

We have seen her confront neo-Nazis without hesitation and report from war zones. But real corpses were more than she could handle. She admitted as much in the beginning, and this was meant to be a transformative experience for her. But after visiting crematoria, mortuaries and gravestone factories, she left as squeamish as she arrived.

Her usual talent for empathetic questions failed her. One guy, a porter appropriately named Paul, took her to pick up cadavers from the hospital. It could be an emotional affair, he said. The first time he saw a body, it “moved.”

Stacey turned pale. “Wotcha you mean, the body moved?”

Paul clarified: the corpse lay motionless, but the experience moved him.

Later, she watched in amazement as a mortician named Olivia showed her the process of preserving a body. Olivia was 22 and had been doing the job for six years. Stacey could barely speak, so she couldn’t ask the obvious question: How does a 16-year-old end up doing a job like that?

Leah Brotherhead (pictured) and Sinead Matthews play bickering sisters Toni and Paula in Hullraisers (Ch4)

It’s hard to imagine her careers advisor suggesting it: ‘Olivia, you can stay and do A-levels, or there’s a funeral home down the road with a vacancy for an embalmer. Do you like the smell of formaldehyde?’

Television rarely addresses the subject of death, which is silly because most other TV taboos are long gone. Good documentaries, such as the one put together by ‘Bowel Babe’ Dame Deborah James during her fatal illness, are rare. That makes it all the more frustrating that Stacey avoided her topic here.

Some jokes in there Hullraisers (K4) rose from the dead and would have been better off staying buried.

Leah Brotherhead and Sinead Matthews play bickering sisters Toni and Paula, who constantly whine about misogyny and gender inequality while leaving childcare to their husbands.

Their best friend Rana (Taj Atwal) is a policewoman whose solution to sexism on the force involves setting up a male colleague as a stripper for her mother’s menopausal peers. “You can leave your hat on,” they shouted.

It all feels like a 1970s sitcom with the roles reversed: Terry and June for millennials – desperately modern and deeply outdated.