What my uncle’s death taught me about life

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Documentary film-maker Simon Chambers was living in India when he started getting calls from his Uncle David begging him to come home. David, an actor and teacher in his 80’s wasn’t managing and he was lonely. When Simon returned to London his plan was to sort things out and go back to India, it didn’t work out like that and Simon was David’s family carer for the last 5 years of his life. Though he initially had no intention of making a film about his Uncle, Simon started filming him performing speeches from his beloved Shakespeare and then kept the camera rolling. His film ‘Much Ado About Dying’ is an intimate portrait of two men of different generations who weather many storms together with humour and a certain amount of bickering. Helmut Pöschel, a retired biology teacher, and Christian Schmelzer are on a mission, a quest, to save a dying practice: mite cheese production. Cheese made using… mites. At times controversial, it was once illegal to sell it, but luckily for them that has now changed. They and their 4 billion parasitical employees operate out of a farm in Germany. Another cross-generational team, father and daughter Peter and Lavinia Washington both spend their free time saving lives at sea as volunteers for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution off the Isle of Man in north-west England. (First broadcast in January 2020) Presenter Emily Webb Producers Erin Riley and Emily Webb (Photo: Simon Chambers and Uncle David. Credit: Simon Chambers)