‘I’m fighting for the right to live’: Liz Carr on acting, friendship and her campaign against assisted dying

‘The attitudes, environment and systems around you are usually more disabling than your condition’ … Liz Carr in her documentary about assisted dying. Photograph: Lindsay Elliot/BBC/Burning Bright Productions

It’s a tense time for Liz Carr. “You should be in our house at the moment!” she says. Better Off Dead?, her documentary on assisted dying, is soon to air on BBC One. She is making the case against. “You’re probably thinking that, looking like me, I’d be campaigning for the choice to ask a doctor to put me out of my misery,” she deadpans near the start of the film.

Carr has wanted to make this programme for years. In 2011, after the documentary Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die featured the assisted death of a 71-year-old man with motor neurone disease, she wrote to the BBC to say that it was its duty to present the alternative view.