TVScope/3 Minute Wonder; Last Orders. Channel Four,Thursday, 7.55pm: While Woody Allen quipped: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying," death is inevitable, both for him and us all.
In Irish culture what happens after death has to date been fairly predictable - the church rituals, the dark clothes, the wooden box, the six feet under.
In Last Orders, the final of a four-part series of three-minute short films examining alternative funeral rites, we were reminded that our way is not the only way.
A group of Hindus living in the UK demonstrated their desire to be cremated on an open air funeral pyre. Cremations are central to the Hindu faith, with their belief that the last desire of the soul is to leave the body, and without cremation a soul will hang around unable to go.
However, as open air cremation is not allowed in Britain, they had to resort to delicately wrapping a dead sheep in a white shroud and burning it on an open air wood pile to graphically demonstrate cremation in practice.
Four hours later, we were shown how the sheep had reduced to one hundredth of its original size and we were assured that it would be completely gone in a further two hours.
While the purpose of this dramatic short film was to persuade viewers to sign a petition to lobby for open air cremations to be legalised in the UK, it was also a timely reminder for us of the reality of cultured diversity as we move rapidly towards becoming a multi-racial society.
We can only imagine the distress that we would feel if we were prevented from burying our dead with all of the accompanying rituals which enable us to deal with death in a meaningful way.
Yet as views of death and dying change, more and more of us, even within our current mainstream Christian culture, are thinking outside of that box, six feet under in the clay. An alternative burial search on Google produced 525,000 sites, which demonstrates that it is not just those with religious beliefs who feel strongly about how they take their leave from this world.
In the other three short films in the Last Orders series, a gardener dreamed of being composted, a woman turned her daughter into a diamond and canal enthusiasts offered narrow boat themed funerals.
These three so-called alternative funerals demonstrated more the human need to have a say in how our lives should be commemorated rather than the deeply held religious beliefs of the fourth film. The desire for alternative funerals can be seen as a reaction to the increasing disconnection and distancing from the reality of death in urban areas as evidenced in the proliferation of funeral homes.
This disconnection has not yet filtered through to many parts of rural Ireland where the dead continue to be waked in the family home in the traditional way.
However, even here in Ireland people are beginning to consider the effect their remains will have on the environment.
The gardener in the series, who dreamt of becoming compost, would have no difficulty achieving this here with the growth of the Green Burial Movement. This can involve biodegradable coffins and graves marked by trees rather than tombstones, and woodland rather than graveyards.
So while Plato may state that "must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death", the Last Orders series suggest through alternative burials we can at least have a say in how that final swallowing happens.
Olive Travers is a senior clinical pyschologist and head of the COSC service.