The Skull on the Desk

Derren Brown keeps a flayed skull on his desk, a plain reminder he looks at while he works, and this episode asks what it has actually taught him about dying. He doubts his own answer as much as anyone else's: Stoic techniques, he admits, sound dry and untested until the real moment arrives. Then he turns to Socrates, the philosopher held up for two thousand years as proof that a good mind can die calmly, and wonders how much of that calm belongs to Plato rather than to the man. Along the way, a joke from Woody Allen does more philosophical work than it should.