developed world, those who set off dangerous existential questioning are more often than not shunted into the shadows. Soup kitchens and care homes are hardly on most people's must-visit lists, never mind facilities and programmes for those with serious cognitive disorders.

We simply don't like to have the mirror held up too close to us, just in case we find our own reflection gazing back at us. Suffering and pain happen somewhere else to someone else - it couldn't happen to me, could it?

And that's precisely what's so darn refreshing about a series like Alan Ball's Six Feet Under (2001-2005), which sees the greatest of all taboos, human mortality, brought into sharp relief by way of the trials and travails of the family-run funeral home, Fisher and Sons.

If you've not seen the series then you may be interested to learn that it addresses just about every other hush-hush subject in the book, including homophobia, mental illness and sex addiction. In fact, the ever-present threat of death, made real by the everyday work of funeral

directors Nate and David Fisher, becomes almost commonplace as the story of the family Fisher slowly weaves its way through a host of unmentionables. And that, perhaps, is precisely what Ball wanted to do - make death what it is, a part of life and not some horror which so many of us ignore and avoid until it's far too late.

On a more socially critical note, when Ball developed the premise behind Six Feet Under he set out to lift the lid on the US funeral industry, which has steadily transformed the burial process into a sterilised, gift-wrapped affair in which embalming the body can offer a semblance of life to the ice-cold, rigid frame of a corpse. The point being, that even in facing death at such close quarters the living can still shield themselves by way of a bottle of top-quality embalming fluid and the very best in reconstructive surgery.