Norway: TV show asks celebrities to plan own funerals By News from Elsewhere...

...media reports from around the world, found by BBC Monitoring Published duration 24 April 2014

image copyright NRK image caption Presenter Namra Saleem visits celebrities with a coffin on top of her car

Norwegian celebrities are being asked to plan their own funerals and decorate their own coffins in a new TV programme that aims to talk about death.

In the first episode of The Coffin, which was shown on Monday by Norway's public broadcaster NRK, Norwegian rock singer Bjarne Brondbo was asked to decorate his own coffin. He did it by drawing a portrait of himself on the coffin, which he also autographed. "I could do it blind-folded," Brondbo says.

The programme's producer, Nils Gelting Andresen, says the series is a "feel-good show about death", and his mission is to break the taboo surrounding mortality while letting the public get to know celebrities better.

"We have been asking questions that people usually do not have to answer," Andresen says on the NRK website . "Guests talk about things that are a little more serious and existential than usual."

NRK recently made international headlines by broadcasting more than 7 hours of footage from a train journey from Bergen to Oslo - which proved hugely popular with viewers in Norway.

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