The Last Taboo?

For years it was thought that the television advertising of female sanitary wear was the last television taboo, appropriate really given that the word taboo is from the Polynesian tupua which translates roughly as menstruation. However in the nineties Courtney Cox appeared on television in an advert for tampax and that was that. Now we have adverts for sex aids, condoms, panty liners, haemorrhoid cream, fem fresh sprays, nose hair removers and in the last week I've seen two adverts that mention the removal of pubic hair.

There is however one product you don't see advertised on television - undertakers. There have been adverts for undertakers, the first ran on 8 November 1993 during an episode of You Take The High Road but a Scottish soap shown in the middle of the afternoon when the audience is either the unemployed, the unemployable or the retired is more likely to frighten some of its potential audience than inform them.

So why don't we see the Co-op funeral service or its equivalent advertising on prime time television? People die everyday. Is the thought of death and its aftermath more worrying than removing nose hairs? We still have Songs Of Praise and Sunday Worship which are both about celebrating birth, life and death. We have soap operas which must, by law it seems, feature at least one major character death per year but still no sign of a man in a black coat standing in front of a hearse advertising the trip of a lifetime or should that be the trip of a deathtime?