Life, music and laughter on Saturday Live

Editor's Note: Saturday Live is Radio 4's Saturday morning magazine show featuring extraordinary stories and remarkable people. You can listen to the show here. In this blog post presenter Sian Williams looks ahead to this week's show - CM

I sat in an office on a snowy London street this week, casually discussing my own death.

 My husband did too and a very nice man took notes. We’ve delayed making our wills for years. When the moment came to get on with it, it provoked unlikely conversations. What’s the likelihood of us all, including the children, going at once? Which of our seven siblings would make the best guardians for our offspring if we both died together? And the most ridiculous argument we’ve had in a long while – who should go first?

You’ve got to laugh. Something about the proximity of death makes us want to make light of it. I had the funniest, most intense conversations with my Mum, in her final few days in a hospice.

Our guest on Saturday Live this week is comedian Sean Hughes, who stormed the Edinburgh Festival with a stand-up routine about his father’s death. A dead dad as comedy, is not exactly the easiest sell, but the routine was so successful, it’s having a London run in a couple of weeks.

A pallative nurse joins us on the programme too, to tell us why the end of life can be the best of it. And a one hundred year old lady tells me why she enjoys life. JP talks to people in Portsmouth, John McCarthy enjoys a Brazilian nose-flute and filmmaker and chef, Tamasin Day-Lewis, brings us her Inheritance Tracks.

Life, music and laughter on Saturday Live, hope you can join us, at nine.

Sian Williams presents Saturday Live.

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