Charlie Brooker's screen burn

This week, Charlie's been pondering his own mortality, watching Bravo's 1,000 Ways To Die
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Programme Title: 1000 Ways To Die
Bravo's 1,000 Ways To Die: our money's on "alone, in front of rubbish telly"

Death is inescapable! I don't want to put a dampener on your Saturday or anything, but DEATH is INESCAPABLE. All death. Even yours. No matter how wildly you swerve to avoid it, your life will inevitably culminate in your death. Most of the time, it's advisable not to dwell on your own mortality. It can stop you getting chores done. Why bother loading the dishwasher when we'll all be dead in 80 years anyway? Why not club the dishwasher with your fists and face instead? And then sit on the kitchen floor pulling faces at the skirting board until night falls and you're still there and the skirting board's still there and hey ho what's the point anyway ha ha ha.

This is precisely the sort of grim thought process television was designed to help you forestall. Generally speaking, TV is a glittery distraction: a shiny coin twinkling at a magpie. "Forget about death," it whispers. "It'll never happen to you," it coos. "Ooh, look at Sophie Dahl's kitchen," it murmurs. And you're too mesmerised to even nod.

But sometimes the siren song falters and death seeps through. Take Antiques Roadshow. That's full of death. I'm not just talking about the heirlooms, those dusty mementos of long-dead generations (although, to be honest, they are pretty morbid: the experts might as well be unearthing skulls). I'm talking about the people in the background. Look at them next time you get a chance: the backshot lurkers. Standing around, staring. Wordless. Scarcely moving. Occasionally craning their necks a bit, but on the whole just staring. Every time I tune in I imagine I'm dying on a pavement and they're the passersby, looking at me. Watching me die. Enjoying it.

Maybe that's just me. A more overtly gothic show is 1,000 Ways To Die (Sun, 10pm, Bravo), which consists of comic reconstructions of actual deaths from around the world. These are wacky deaths, ironic deaths, funny deaths. The sort of deaths that earn you a Darwin award, a sidebar mention in Nuts magazine or, it turns out, a full three-minute segment on 1,000 Ways to Die.

Thus we're presented with a man who ignites a fart, killing a friend with the subsequent fireball; a man smothered to death by the breasts of his overweight lover; and a man who has the head of his penis bitten off by a raccoon, then bleeds to death in a forest. The whole thing is delivered with a leering smirk: a grimly dramatic voiceover recounts the details of each demise (lingering on as many salacious details as possible), while stooges reenact events as clumsily as possible. It's like an episode of 999 directed by a nihilistic 14-year-old with a weak sense of humour.

But while it's easy to see why the deaths listed above might raise an idiotic laugh – hell, half of the victims probably uttered a weak chuckle as the black veil descended – the show occasionally dwells on a death that just seems, well, a bit nasty. The story of an escaping prisoner who got stuck in a tunnel and was eaten alive by rats, for instance, just depressed me. Especially when they ran a CGI reconstruction showing precisely what was occurring at a biological level when one of the rodents chewed through his eyeball and into his brain while he was still alive.

Still, at least that had a certain grisly appeal. A section focusing on the death of a violinist who slipped on high heels and sustained a fatal head injury was more troubling, since it apparently only warranted inclusion because she'd been wearing lingerie at the time, thereby freeing the programme-makers to use a scantily clad model in the reconstruction, which played like an uncomfortable cross between Benny Hill and snuff.

Call me a puss, but that's a bit strong for my blood. Worse still, it wasn't entertaining enough to distract me from the inescapable void, so I sat there contemplating my own fleeting existence, wondering why I waste what time I have sitting through precisely this kind of stuff. And I don't think that's what the makers had in mind …

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