Nola Leach, chief executive of CARE, calls for BBC to show other side of the assisted suicide argument:

"I rather thought that we had moved on from the days when people gathered in crowds to watch other people die. That the BBC should facilitate this is deeply disturbing."

"Following hard on the heels of Margo MacDonald, the Scottish MSP, who had a Private Members Bill to legalise assisted suicide and was given her own Panorama Programme to provide a treatment of the subject that was inevitably sympathetic to her own perspective, one wonders whether the BBC has any interest in treating this subject impartially?

"This is compounded by the fact that, rather than fronting the programme with someone neutral, the task has been given to a well-known assisted suicide campaigner. When will they create a programme fronted by someone who is against assisted suicide about the story of someone terminally ill who chooses not to take their life?
"Motor neurone disease, which Peter Smedley was diagnosed as having two years ago, is an absolutely horrible condition and so one can understand why assisted suicide has an appeal.

"Rather than responding with this individualist 'solution', however, we must value human life as God-given and confront the condition as a real society, as a community, through proper palliative care with real sensitivity to the needs of those around us."