At the 2024 SBS Upfront showcase this week, it was no surprise to hear veteran Australian television broadcaster and national treasure Ray Martin is back on the network with a new documentary series next year.

It’s not a day-time talk show interviewing Tom Cruise or Robert Redford, not hosting a revamped current affairs gig, nor is it getting his portrait painted by Ahn Do or hanging with Julia Zemiro.

It’s not even driving around Australia, exploring this great southern land.

This time it’s personal.

“Um … I have an announcement to make … we are all going to die,” the 78-year-old says, stating the obvious in a three-minute package by Australia’s most diverse free-to-air broadcaster.

While he doesn’t plan on falling off the perch anytime soon, and, by all accounts, has not faced major health battles, he’s planning his own funeral.

And he’s going to explore how we all want to be buried – above ground, below, scattered, vertical.

“Death is one of the certainties of life, it transcends age, culture and religion. Yet, even today, it’s one of the last taboos in society,” says SBS’s commissioning editor Bethan Arwel-Lewis.

“As a network with a strong track record of making content that’s provocative with a purpose, this is a perfect subject for us to tackle.

“And if there’s one man that can get the nation talking, thinking and even laughing about death, that’s Ray Martin.”

Indeed he is.

This is the man who famously interviewed Lindy Chamberlain in the 1980s, every prime minister since Sir Robert Menzies and has pulled apart studio fights on daytime television. Now the five-time Gold Logie winner is going to interview people at funeral homes, cemeteries and crematoriums.

He’ll meet grave diggers, cryogenecists and burial technicians.

‘They call me the undertaker’

Martin, who has been married for 50 years to Dianne has two children and was recently photographed with his dog and two ‘beautiful grandchildren”.

“I love storytelling, and I’ve been fortunate enough to make a living out of it. My favourite part is when I get to tell stories about our island home,” he said in an Instagram post last year.

In the SBS clip, the former high profile 60 Minutes investigative journalist stands before a big, burly man with a beard and asks him what he does.

“What’s your job here? What do you do?”

“They call me … the undertaker,” smiles the big guy.

SBS says this three-part series (no broadcast date has yet been confirmed) is “a poignant, revealing and, at times, humorous quest”.

“It … will see Ray challenge his own expectations while going down the rabbit hole into some unusual emerging practices such as cryonics, upright burial and body composting.

He will “uncover” how Australia is choosing to say goodbye to our dead and will “discover the trends, cultural rituals, methods and emerging tech around the way we lay ourselves to rest as we shake hands with death”.

‘Death and taxes’

Martin repeats the oft-used phase that “death and taxes are the only two certainties in life” in the trailer, but then pauses.

“Taxes certainly are … but death?

“Maybe not.”

Which suggests that cryonics could be on his agenda. This the practice of preserving – freezing – the body to reawaken in the future.

“Several facilities in the US and abroad maintain morbid warehouse morgues full of frozen human heads and bodies, waiting for the future,” writes science website BigThink.

“They are part of a story that is ghoulish, darkly humorous, and yet endearingly sincere. For a small group of fervent futurists, it is their lottery ticket to immortality.

What are the chances that these bodies will be reanimated, author Tom Hartsfield asked.

“Cryonics — attempting to cryopreserve the human body — is widely considered a pseudoscience … [and] humans are particularly difficult to preserve because of the delicate structure in (most of) our heads.”

Produced by BBC Studios for SBS, Ray Martin: The Last Goodbye, will deliver an insight into what draws people to choose how they are buried.

“This is a fascinating exploration of Australians’ relationship with death, there are so many different ways that we choose to farewell life, from the deeply spiritual to the wholly pragmatic.

“This series gives an insight into what draws people to those choices,” says BBC Studios Productions Australia creative director, Kylie Washington.

This is the second original series from BBC Studios Productions Australia for SBS following the earlier commission of The Matchmakers which will also air in 2024.