Ian von Memerty rekindles assisted dying conversation

1. A Sequins-Free Dawn Broadcast

Cape Town’s first light on a Tuesday now arrives with a new ritual: a twelve-minute video stripped of glamour, studio gloss or editing tricks. Ian von Memerty - once the tuxedoed ringmaster who kept Strictly Come Dancing’s celebrities smiling through their footwork fumbles - records himself alone, a thermos of rooibos at hand, a whiteboard behind him screaming “WHO OWNS MY EXIT?” The clip looks like a Zoom call your uncle forgot to end, yet 340 000 watches stack up before lunch, dwarfing the provincial health department’s most applauded PSA by twenty-fold.

Memerty calls the show “Dying For A Better Life,” a phrase that sounds oxymoronic until you realise the gamble he’s staging: can a nation famous for avoiding uncomfortable dinner topics turn a low-res livestream into a citizens’ parliament on the right to die? Episodes drop at sunrise, mimicking the crackly 5 a.m. community radio he grew up on. There are no jump-cuts, no B-roll of tearful families - just one artefact per chapter, lifted from his own cedar chest, converted into a springboard for national debate.

Episode one unwraps his late mother’s living will; episode two spreadsheets the monthly tariffs of frail-care warehouses; episode three fingers a brittle 1952 telegram that announced his grandfather’s collapse in the Karoo dusk. He dubs these props “anchor heirlooms” and invites viewers to counter-post their own: crutches, hospice wristbands, Sunday-best suits never worn again. Within weeks an impromptu museum blooms across Facebook and YouTube - pixelated shrines that prove data can smell of methylated spirits and dust just as strongly as grandma’s attic.

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2. Statute Books, Spreadsheets and the Price of Breath

South Africa’s law library is eerily quiet on how a lucid adult may legally pull the curtain closed. A 2015 high-court victory for Advocate Robin Stransham-Ford lasted only hours; the judge’s pen never dried before the cancer-stricken barrister exhaled his last, returning the legal landscape to a vacuum. Parliament, wary of theological landmines, left the 1977 Criminal Procedure Act and the 1998 National Health Act to do the heavy lifting - statutes drafted when modems screeched and life expectancy sat a decade lower.

Memerty, fit at 61, illustrates the trap with theatre-kid flair: he slips on a professorial jacket and scrolls through a kaleidoscopic Excel he calls “Decrepitude Forecast.” Rows forecast hearing aides, catheters, mattress rentals; columns tick upward with CPI-plus healthcare inflation that has beaten headline prices every year since 2011. The spreadsheet ends where most retirees’ savings end - month 44 of a frail-care invoice ranging between R18 000 and R32 000. “I refuse to turn my children into financial casualties of my heartbeat,” he declares, glasses lowered for maximum school-teacher effect.

Viewers answer with their own calculators. A Bloemfontein IT manager argues that section 12 of the Constitution - bodily integrity - already licenses a self-chosen exit, typing a 1 200-word brief faster than most people order takeaway. A palliative-care nurse from Mpumalanga fires back: undiagnosed depression is rife in elderly wards, making “consent” a fleeting phantom. Voice notes arrive from Botswana and Namibia, countries where suicide still carries jail time, reminding South Africans that whatever precedent they set will wash across regional borders faster than a Limpopo flash-flood.

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3. Underground Manuals, 3-D Capsules and the Profit Motive

Academics whisper that South Africa already hosts an informal courier service for terminally-ill exit plans. In Prince Albert a retired anaesthetist confesses - voice garbled to Mafia-documentary levels - that hollowed-out veterinary textbooks have smuggled dosing protocols to more than thirty farmers too distant from oncology wards. No docket has ever reached court; rural grief prefers soil to subpoenas. Memerty quotes Seneca through the distortion: “He who dies need not be sad; he who must watch - that is the real trial.”

Technology arrives faster than theology can update. An Israeli-founded Sandton start-up now ships a 3-D-printable nitrogen capsule labelled “agricultural equipment”; assembly takes sixty minutes and a hex key. Memerty’s crew films the unboxing in real time, the mirrored interior reflecting the host’s face like a macabre Wilde portrait. Parliament erupts; the EFF wants border-control heads, while the Health Minister admits his council has zero regulations for “non-pharmaceutical asphyxiation modules.” Somewhere a lawyer licks her chops.

Where bureaucracy stalls, the market leaps. A former actuary sells “exit insurance” that pays out only if you die by legal assisted-death beyond South Africa’s borders. Premiums climb after sixty; FNB Private Banking confesses it is drafting a clone for platinum clients. Memerty puts the actuary on camera; the man shrugs, “I traffic in probabilities, not metaphysics,” while sales triple beneath the video window. Critics call the product vulture capitalism; fans call it the difference between dignity and a rail-sided hospital bed.

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4. Forest Rituals, Classroom Votes and the Town-Hall Finale

Culture complicates codification. In Nqileni village the Xhosa concept of ukuzithoba - self-denial for communal harmony - renders open suicide talk taboo. Elderly locals recount ukuqhefa, a one-way forest walk with sour-milk laced by muthi, a custom never transcribed into English. Memerty asks if future law could embed such indigenous protocols - an elder council signing off beside psychiatrist and magistrate. The headman laughs, “Our statutes already exist; they just aren’t typed.”

Mental-health watchdogs warn that sensational framing risks copycat despair. SADAG staffs extra WhatsApp counsellors; chats mentioning “Ian von Memerty” jump 38 %. Yet the same episodes drag family dinner tables into conversations that hospice workers spent decades lobbying for. The host inserts trilingual bumpers: “Talking about dying is not the same as wanting to die,” voiced in isiXhosa, Afrikaans and Sesotho, a linguistic shield against accusations of elitist voyeurism.

Generational tides shift fastest. At a Constantia private school, Grade-11 debaters ask why the state shouldn’t subsidise pre-death counselling like ARVs. A seventeen-year-old coins “death inequality,” arguing that passport-class dictates exit-class. When the teacher polls willingness to witness a lawful assisted death as civic education, half the class volunteers, backpacks jangling like any other bell-interrupted day. Memerty captures the scene then hints at a final act: a free town-hall simulcast from the Fugard Theatre, entry granted only to those clutching their own completed advance directive - lawmakers, priests, prosecutors and teens alike. South Africa may enter the polls of 2024 still undecided, but its citizens will have traded whispered corridor fears for fibre-optic testimony, turning the national question from “How long must I live?” into “Who, finally, gets to decide when living itself is done with me?”

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