Nothing pleases me more than to bring up the subject of death at a dinner party.
I like to tell a joke by Bob Monkhouse that goes: ''Death is a terrible thing - the trouble is, the next day you're so bloody stiff!''
Some, of course, find death depressing, or even refuse to entertain its possibility.
In Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life, ethologist, evolutionary biologist, writer, emeritus fellow of New College, former University of Oxford professor for public understanding of science, documentary maker, atheist, and botherer of the religious Richard Dawkins notes Aldous Huxley's view on the matter.
Huxley noted the majority of human beings behave as though death were no more than an unfounded rumour.
But what happens, Dawkins asks, when you realise the rumour is true?
Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life runs over three consecutive nights on BBC Knowledge on Sky, beginning on June 3.
In the series, Dawkins explores how life might look without religion - without the religious ritual and ceremony that surrounds life's beginning and end, its reproduction and its search for meaning.
The episode on death (I'm not completely sure which runs first) delves into some confronting territory.
Dawkins meets Richard Chell, who has motor neurone disease and just months to live.
His comfort lies in his religious faith and views on life after death, but Dawkins asks what, if anything, can take God's place in the face of death?
What can science and reason tell us?
How does someone like me, who has no religion, face death?
He visits the banks of the Ganges, where one million Hindus bring 40,000 corpses to be cremated.
Dogs bare their teeth as they scrap over the burnt human remains, and a bloated corpse that somehow missed the pyre floats down the river.
He visits a hospice for babies, and speaks to the parents of a daughter born with no kidneys: she lived for 30 minutes; long enough to put her in a christening outfit and baptise her.
The parents found out early on through an ultrasound what would happen.
''Did it occur to you the total sum of suffering would be much less if you drew a line under it then?'' he asks them.
''There's hope in everything and God can do great things,'' they respond.
Dawkins considers where what he describes as ''illogical thoughts'' first developed.
The show fascinates, horrifies, and confronts, but is worth watching if a view of the final destination is becoming clear through the mist of the everyday.
Look forward to the episode on sex - but make quite sure you are ready to have your closely held feelings on romance torn from your grip.
