Television

The South Bank Show: Gore Vidal (ITV1, Sunday 18 May, 10:45pm)
Melvyn Bragg interviews NSS honorary associate Gore Vidal. At 82 Gore Vidal is still one of the finest essayists on society, politics, sexual, historical and literary themes – a true literary radical and polymath.

Reverend Death (Channel 4, Monday 19 May, 10pm) Like previous documentaries from Jon Ronson, this is a rambling tale, played out against a backdrop of small-town America, which manages to be horrific and faintly absurd at the same time. It tells the story of George Exoo, a Unitarian pastor in West Virginia who operates on the fringes of the assisted dying movement. George reckons he has helped more than 100 people to kill themselves, and not just the terminally ill. But for George, death is “a great adventure” that we should look forward to and he is “midwife to the dying”. He even feels an affinity with Mother Teresa because, like her, he says he helps people nobody else will. Is George caring or predatory? Is what he does wrong? Ronson offers no clear answers but his quirky, creepy film drifts through the kind of murky moral waters that leave us plenty to ponder. (David Butcher, Radio Times)

Dispatches: In God’s Name (Channel 4, Monday 19 May, 8pm – repeated Wednesday at 9pm on More4 and 3.45am on Channel 4). They believe abortion and homosexuality should be illegal, and tried to enforce the law of blasphemy. But how much influence do the Christian fundamentalists have in today’s Britain? David Modell follows one of the leading hard-line Christian pressure groups as they attempt to win converts and convince MPs to pass laws based on biblical doctrine.