No room to bury-all

Britain is in the midst of a serious corpse crisis!

According to this week's Economist, a great many of our cemeteries are officially full-up. Part of the problem is that, because "local authorities are not obliged to provide burial space, nobody knows how many cemeteries Britain has, opened or closed". Apparently, undertakers are having to travel further afield to bury their customers, and local authorities charge them up to four times more for burying non-residents. The average burial now costs a staggering £3,307. Cremation, which actually disposes of 72% of Britons, is cheaper, but not enough people want it. Since almost 3/4 of the population is opting for cremation and there is still a struggle for burial space, I guess it is a pretty serious problem.

Maybe we can take a car pooling or illegal immigrants approach and get more people squashed in together; 36-feet under! To popularise the idea, we can run adverts encouraging grieving relatives to partner up their beloved dead. I see a nice range of glossy full-page bleeds reading: "Go on. Like they're even going to know." To avoid the (forever unrealised) unpleasantness of being buried in beside a rubbish family, we can encourage 'arranged burials' where the families spend years taking tea together and analysing each other's business and bank accounts.

To cap it all, there could be a radio jingle to the theme from Rawhide: "Pile 'em up, stick 'em down, squish 'em in, nice and tight, leave 'em low, gotta go, spend the cash that's my right. Squish 'em in - bon-a-fide (jazz hands finish).

Alternative suggestions welcomed.