A Time to Live, BBC Two review - an exquisite legacy

Imagine a doctor has just told you that you have only a year to live. What would you do? Learn to sky dive, spend every last penny you have, be brutally honest with anyone who has crossed you, or curl up in a ball and wait for the inevitable?

“This is a film about living,” her voiceover told us at the beginning of the hour-long documentary, and it turned out to be the case. One after another, the 12 participants – people in their 20s to 70s, who mostly had cancer diagnoses with projections of six weeks to a few years left – talked about filling what remained of their time. Some of them were a hoot – Lisa, who has breast cancer, when asked how she was using hers, joked: “Admiring my fantastic breasts made out of my tummy,” and Kevin said: “I wouldn't want to grow old and be a miserable old bugger. I don't have that problem now” – while Annabel immediately made a bucket list, top of which was leaving her husband of more than 20 years to go travelling.

Lest we think a terminal diagnosis is a barrel of laughs and we all go gentle into that good night, as the film progressed Bourne subtly introduced more notes of doubt, confusion and anger. Steve (pictured below), in his thirties, would be leaving two very young children behind, the cause of obvious pain and, distressingly to watch, enormous guilt for him.We also met people for whom a terminal diagnosis had given a deeper appreciation of life, or even helped them cope with the reality of their death. Nigel, meanwhile, had learned the real meaning of love after, in his words, making a mess of his life.

Bourne, who made The Age of Loneliness and Jig, played it straight. The characters talked directly to camera, with occasional off-camera questions from her, and while we saw some participants with family or friends, they did not contribute. There was much laughter, wry appreciation of life's ironies – “I'm probably much more healthy than I've ever been,” said Louise, who had become a teetotal vegan after her diagnosis – and a lot of simply-put newfound wisdom. “The gift of life is reinforced when you know it's finite,” said Kevin.

It struck me that all the participants were either comfortably off and/or living in beautiful surroundings – one acknowledged that she had “very good life insurance” to fund her unasked-for “early retirement” – and loving family and friends around them. I wonder if being terminally ill while living alone in poverty in a less supportive environment would make you more or less philosophical?

But maybe the participants were self-selecting; they really all did have something to add to the conversation and wanted to share it. There were tears (both participants' and most viewers', I would imagine) but this was an exquisite film that showed that even with death around the corner we can embrace life.

Bourne's last voiceover told us that she was deliberately not informing us which of the participants had died before the film was shown – the right decision, I believe. As she said, this was their legacy, and an affecting one too.

• 'I did not want to reveal at the end who was alive or dead': Sue Bourne introduces A Time to Live on theartsdesk
• Read more TV reviews on theartsdesk