A dead fat person is being cut up and broadcast on the internet as you read this. It is happening, apparently, as an exercise in public health education and not for the shock value of watching a mortician hold up an anonymous woman’s liver and describe its moral failings in the manner of an ancient Egyptian death god reduced to fodder for BBC Three.
The programme is billed as sensitive, and all about letting people know how dangerous it is to be fat, and not at all like a fairground freakshow. That’s why it’s called Obesity: The Post Mortem and why it’s being promoted with stills of the corpse, generously donated by an American woman who consented for her remains to be used for the purpose of medical science, although this show pushes the definition of public good into the grisly arena of entertainment.
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