This camp, light and touching documentary meets the founder of Butterflies Rising Funeral Care – a glamorous funeral director who talks to the bodies and pays tribute to her mum by drinking Strongbow at her grave

When it comes to funerals, we tend to cling to the solemn and the tasteful. We hate to think about death, so we cordon it off from all recognisable signs of life – particularly warmth and comedy. Enter Butterflies Rising Funeral Care, the subject of new Channel 4 documentary The Fabulous Funeral Parlour, which is shaking things up.

Our introduction to this funeral home, founded by Liverpudlian Hayley McCaughran, is seeing a casket with a gold plaque that reads “FUCK OFF”. McCaughran tells us that when making nameplates they always ask families whether the deceased had a favourite saying: “We don’t do it a traditional way.”

Telling us the story of the funeral home itself, and following a few families’ experiences, The Fabulous Funeral Parlour tries to make us feel something new about the most universal experience there is. And it succeeds – there are numerous moments when I think: “How did they come up with that?” or laugh guiltily, wondering if something is inappropriate.