Top forensic pathologist digs deep into our fascination with death

He returns to the road with Dr Richard Shepherd – Unnatural Causes with dates including Eastbourne’s Congress Theatre (Nov 1), Winchester’s Theatre Royal (Nov 2) and Crawley’s Hawth (Nov 4)

During his career Richard has performed more than 23,000 autopsies and proved himself to be a detective in his own right, solving the mysteries of countless sudden and unexplained deaths. It's hardly surprising then that audiences flocked to his tour last year: “It was the first time I'd done in anything like it. I had never even done amdram.

"I'd never had a yearning to be a thespian and the last time I was on stage I was lying in a coffin in a medical school review pretending to be Dracula! But maybe the tour helped me come to terms with the slightly extrovert element in my personality. It could have been an absolute disaster but I hope that people really enjoyed it and I hope that they came away with a better understanding of the multifaceted role that I have in terms of the audience that I work with, the relatives and the police and the nurses and the courts and so on.”

It all reflects inevitably our deep and enduring fascination with death: “It was fascinating to see the public response (to the Queen's death), the perfectly natural death of an elderly lady that was peaceful and who was, we assume, living quite happily until the last few hours.

"But we are fascinated and we're certainly fascinated by the random lightning-strike deaths where something just goes badly wrong with someone's body when they're young and fit and healthy. We’re also fascinated when somebody else does something that causes the death of another human being. That’s the taboo, isn't it, the crossing the line and you wonder if it's the crossing the line that's more fascinating than the death itself in that case.”

There's an element of ‘There but for the grace of God’, Richard believes: “There is that feeling that it will never happen to me. Will it? It won't happen to me. Am I sure? But there is just a slim chance that it might. We know it is going to happen to someone somewhere, and the rest of us get the frisson because it wasn't us and yet it could have been. That's the strange thing. That's the fascination.”

The point is there is innate brutality and innate violence: “It is part of the human make-up. Society tries to keep it under control.”

There is also the randomness. Someone might throw a punch, kill someone and get 14 years for manslaughter on the same night in the same city that 30 other people throw punches most of which don't land and the rest hardly do any damage at all.

“You just think how can you work that out and that is the randomness of life. And so it seems that a significant proportion of the population are totally fascinated by life and death particularly when the death is traumatic. And perhaps the fascination is that my job is to be even more destructive to the body in order to address what happened and to understand what happened and then go home for tea with the family.”

Almost inevitably there came a point when the build-up of what he had been doing over the years became destructive and damaging to Richard.

“But in retrospect I am very pleased that I had that episode that I did because it really, really made me think about the things that I had done in my career, how I could justify what I've done and the realisation that I had done what I have done with love and respect for my fellow humans.

"There was a significant period of introspection but I can now get into bed and go to sleep and I don't dream. Or I know that I do dream but I don't remember what I dream!”

Tickets from the venues.